cience" or "philosophy" of which
Paul was so anxious that the disciples should beware, was the same which
was afterwards so well known by the designation of _Gnosticism_. The
second century was the period of its most vigorous development, and it
then, for a time, almost engrossed the attention of the Church; but it
was already beginning to exert a pernicious influence, and it is
therefore noticed by the vigilant apostle. Whilst it acknowledged, to a
certain extent, the authority of the Christian revelation, it also
borrowed largely from Platonism; and, in a spirit of accommodation to
the system of the Athenian sage, it rejected some of the leading
doctrines of the gospel. Plato never seems to have entertained the
sublime conception of the creation of all things out of nothing by the
word of the Most High. He held that matter is essentially evil, and that
it existed from eternity. [202:4] The false teachers who disturbed the
Church in the apostolic age adopted both these views; and the errors
which they propagated and of which the New Testament takes notice,
flowed from their unsound philosophy by direct and necessary
consequence. As a right understanding of certain passages of Scripture
depends on an acquaintance with their system, it may here be expedient
to advert somewhat more particularly to a few of its peculiar features.

The Gnostics alleged that the present world owes neither its origin nor
its arrangement to the Supreme God. They maintained that its constituent
parts have been always in existence; and that, as the great Father of
Lights would have been contaminated by contact with corrupt matter, the
visible frame of things was fashioned, without His knowledge, by an
inferior Intelligence. These principles obviously derogated from the
glory of Jehovah. By ascribing to matter an independent and eternal
existence, they impugned the doctrine of God's Omnipotent Sovereignty;
and by representing it as regulated without His sanction by a spiritual
agent of a lower rank, they denied His Universal Providence. The
apostle, therefore, felt it necessary to enter his protest against all
such cosmogonies. He declared that Jehovah alone, as Father, Son, and
Holy Ghost, existed from eternity; and that all things spiritual and
material arose out of nothing in obedience to the word of the second
person of the Godhead. "By Him," says he, "were all things _created_,
that are in heaven and that are in earth, _visible and invisible_