s of the new faith. Even after this heresy
was introduced, we find no traces of it in the works of the Apostolical
Fathers, till nearly a century and a half from the birth of
Christ,--except in a very few writings, so uncertain in their date, so
wild and allegorical in their composition, and so evidently and
extensively interpolated, as to be of little or no authority. We refer
to the works commonly ascribed to Barnabus, Hermas, and Ignatius. The
only genuine epistle of Clemens Romanus which has come down to us,
neither advocates, countenances, nor alludes to any such doctrine.

Even the philosophizing Christians of the first century, against whom
the Apostles wrote, went no further than to suppose the Christ to be a
superior intelligence, inhabiting a mortal form, or assuming the
appearance of one: Cerinthus maintaining that Jesus was a man born of
Joseph and Mary, and that at his baptism the Christ descended upon him;
while Marcion held that the Son of God took the exterior form of a man,
and appeared as a man; and without being born, or gradually growing up
to the full stature of a man, he showed himself at once in Galilee as a
man grown. It was not till Justin Martyr, himself a philosopher, wrote
an apology for Christianity to a philosophical Roman emperor (A. D.
140), that any distinct mention appears to have been made of the
doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. It is not surprising that--feeling
how great a reproach the death of the cross must be in the eyes of the
potentate whom he wished to conciliate, and finding his mode of
exposition prepared by the Gnostic Christians, and by the application
made by the learned Philo of the Platonic doctrine of the
Logos,--Justin Martyr should have been tempted to recommend his new
theology by introducing an admixture of that philosophy which has
proved, according to the warnings of the Apostle, a 'vain deceit.' Such
we have no hesitation in calling it. A doctrine of this nature cannot be
in part true, but liable to mistake: it must be absolutely true or
absolutely false. We hold it to be the latter; because it was not made a
subject of distinct revelation by Christ, a primary article of belief by
the Apostles, or even a matter of distinct mention for a century and a
half from the birth of Christ.

All that, from the study of the records of Revelation, we hold to be the
primary and essential doctrines of Christianity, stand forth
conspicuously in the teachings, are confirmed