ring to
extinguish the new religion; the definite statements of a mind that
investigated its claims and rejected it. Most of the objections of Celsus
are sophistical; a few are admitted difficulties; but the philosophical
class of them will be seen to be the corollary from his general principle
before explained.

A century intervenes before we meet with the next literary assailant,
Porphyry. In the interval the new reactionary philosophy has fully taken
root, and the fresh attack accordingly bears the impress of the new
system.

The chief objections made in the intervening period, as we collect them
from the apologies, were such as belongs fitly to a transitional time,
when Christianity was exciting attention but was not understood;(195) and
are chiefly the result of the second of the tendencies before named, viz.,
either of popular prejudice, or of the political alarm in reference to the
social disorganization likely to arise out of a large defection from the
religion of the empire, which expressed itself in overt acts of
persecution on the part of the state. (15) Both equally lie beyond our
field of investigation; the one because it does not belong to the
examination of Christianity made by intelligent thought; the other because
it is the struggle of deeds, not of ideas, which only have an interest for
us, if, as in Julian's case hereafter, the acts were dictated by the
deliberate advice of persons who had attentively examined Christianity.

The apprehensions of prejudice gradually subsided, and objections began to
be based on grounds less absurd in character. The political opposition
also was henceforth founded on a more subtle policy, and on an
appreciation of the nature of Christianity. Soon after the middle of the
third century we meet with the next attack of a purely literary kind,
viz., by Porphyry, the most distinguished opponent that Christianity has
yet encountered.(196) The pupil of Longinus, perhaps of Origen,(197) and
the biographer and interpreter of Plotinus, he is best known for his
logical writings, and for the development of the theory of predication in
his introduction to the Categories, which formed the text on which hung
the mediaeval speculations of scholasticism.(198) His Syrian origin and
oriental culture perhaps prepared him for a fusion of East and West, and
for admitting a deeper admixture of mysticism into the Neo-Platonic
philosophy, of which he was a disciple. The points of his approxima