tion to
Christianity are the result of those elements in which heathen philosophy
most nearly approached to Christian truth, the development of which was
stimulated in minds essentially anti-christian by the effort to find a
rival to it. Admirably prepared by his serious and spiritual tone to
embrace Christianity, he nevertheless lived a disciple of paganism. His
feelings rather than his reason led him to defend national creeds. His
philosophy and the Christian, which seemed to be aspirations after the
same end, being designed to elevate the spirit above the world of sense,
were really radically opposed. Understanding therefore the power of the
Christian religion, he felt the necessity for supplanting it; and hoped to
do so by spiritualizing the old creeds, which he harmonized with
philosophy by means of regarding them as symbolic.(199)

His opposition to Christianity was not however based wholly on a prejudice
of feeling. He was a man cultivated in all the learning of his age, and of
a more generous temper than Celsus, and seems to have exercised much
critical sagacity in the investigation of the claims of Christianity.
About the year 270, while in retirement in Sicily, he wrote a book against
the Christians.(200) This work having been destroyed, we are left to
gather its contents and the opinions of its authors from a few criticisms
in Eusebius and Jerome. The entire work consisted of fifteen books; and
concerning only five of these is information afforded by them. Their
remarks lead us to conjecture that it was an assault on Christianity in
many relations. The books however of which we know the purpose, seem to
have been critical rather than philosophical, directed against the grounds
of the religion rather than its character; being in fact an assault on the
Bible. The existence of such a line of argument, of which a trace was
already observable in Celsus, is explained by the circumstance that the
faith of Christendom was already fixed on the authority of the sacred
books. The church had always acknowledged the authority of the Jewish
scriptures; and by the middle or close of the second century at the
latest, it had come to acknowledge explicitly the co-ordinate authority of
a body of Christian literature, historic, and epistolary.(201) Hence, when
once the idea of a rule of faith had grown common, the investigation of
the contents of the scriptures became necessary on the part of heathen
opponents. The growingly crit