Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/122

100 THE DECLINE AND FALL and ungrateful soil of Judea, were transplanted, in full nnaturity, to the happier elimes of the Gentiles ; and the strangers of Rome or Asia, who never beheld the manhood, were the more readily disposed to embrace the divinity, of Christ. The poly- theist and the philosopher, the Greek and the barbarian, were alike accustomed to conceive a long succession, an infinite chain of angels, or daemons, or deities, or aeons, or emanations, issuing from the throne of light. Nor could it seem strange or in- credible that the first of these aeons, the Logos, or Word of God, of the same substance with the Father, should descend upon earth to deliver the human race from vice and error and to con- duct them in the paths of life and immortality. But the pre- vailing doctrine of the eternity and inherent pravity of matter infectetl the primitive churches of the East. Many among the Cientile proselytes refused to believe that a celestial spirit, an undivided ))ortion of the first essence, had been personally united with a mass of impure and contaminated flesh ; and, in their zeal for the divinity, they j)iously abjured the humanity, of Christ. Wliile his blood was still recent on Mount Calvary,^ the Docetes, a numerous and learned sect of Asiatics, invented the phanta.slic system, which was afterwards propagated by the Marcionites, the Manicha^ans, and the various names of the Gnostic heresy.ii They denied the truth and authenticity of the gos])els, as far as they relate the conception of Mary, the birth of Christ, and the thirty yeai's that preceded the exercise of his ministry. He first appeared on the banks of the Jordan in the form of perfect manhood ; but it was a form only, and not a substance : an human figure created by the hand of Omnij)otence to imitate the faculties and actions of a man and to impose a perpetual illusion on the senses of his friends and ^" Apostolis ndhuc in saeculo superstitibus, apud Judaeam Christi sanguine recente, Phantasma domini corpus asserebatur. Hieronyni. advers. Lucifer, c. 8. The epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnseans, and even the gospel according to St. John, are levelled against the growing error of the Docetes, who had obtained too much credit in the world (i John iv. i, 5). 11 About the year 200 of the Christian asra, Irenceus and Hippolytus refuted the thirty-two sects, rr)? i|/eu6u)iii|Uou •yi'^J"'"^?' which had multiplied to fourscore in the time of Epiphanius (Phot. Biblioth. cod. c.x.v., cxxi., cxxii.). The five books of Ircnasus exist only in barbarous Latin ; but the original might perhaps be found in some monastery of Greece. [Fragments of the origmal are preserved in Hippolytus, Eusebius, ik.c. ; and possibly the whole text existed in the sixteenth century (Zahn, Zeitsch. f. Kirchengeschichte, ii. , 288, 1878). The short work of Hippolytus {avvTayp-a Trpbs airaaas ras oipecreis) referred tO by PllOtius (cod. CXXi. ) is lost ; but of a larger treatise entitled xraTa Traa.: i- oipeVcwi' eAf/x"? (^^so known as Aa^vpirSo?) bks. iv.-x. were discovered on Mount Alhos in 1842, and bk. i. is the well-known Fhilosophuwena which used to be atti ibuted to Origeii.]