Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/123

OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 101 enemies. Articulate sounds vibrated on the eai's of the disciples ; but the image which was impressed on their optic nerve eluded the more stubborn evidence of the touch, and they enjoyed the spiritual, not the corporeal, presence of the Son of God. The rage of the Jews was idly wasted against an impassive phantom ; and the mystic scenes of the passion and death, the resurrection and ascension of Christ, were represented on the theatre of Jerusalem for the benefit of mankind. If it were urged that such ideal mimicry, such incessant deception, was unworthy of the God of truth, the Docetes agreed with too many of their orthodox brethren in the justification of pious falsehood. In the system of the Gnostics, the Jehovah of Israel, the creator of this lower world, was a rebellious, or at least an ignorant, spirit. The Son of God descended upon earth to abolish his tem})le and his law ; and, for the accomplishment of this salutary end, he dexterously transferred to his own ])erson the hope and prediction of a temporal Messiah. One of the most subtle disputants of the Manichiean school Hi» incoi- has pressed the danger and indecency of supposing that the body God of the Christians, in the state of an human fijetus, emerged at the end of nine months from a female womb. The pious horror of his antagonists provoked them to disclaim all sensual circumstances of conception and delivery ; to maintain that the divinity passed through Mary like a sun-beam through a plate of glass ; and to assert that the seal of her virginity remained unbroken even at the moment when she became the mother of Christ. But the rashness of these concessions has encouraged a milder sentiment of those of the Docetes, who taught, not that Christ was a phantom, but that he was clothed with an impassible and incoi-ruj)tible body. Such, indeed, in the more orthodox system, he has acquired since his resurrection, and such he must have always possessed, if it were capable of per- vading, without resistance or injury, the density of intermediate matter. Devoid of its most essential properties, it might be exempt from the attributes and infirmities of the flesh. A foetus that could increase from an invisible ])oint to its full maturity, a child that could attain the stature of perfect manhood, without deriving any nourishment from the ordinary sources, might con- tinue to exist without repairing a daily waste by a daily supply of external matter. Jesus might share the repasts of his dis- ciples without being subject to the calls of thirst or hunger ; and his virgin purity was never sullied by the involuntary stains of sensual concupiscence. Of a body thus singularly constituted,