altogether. Doubt there
expires, because speculation ceases and Christian thought becomes fixed;
nor will it be necessary in future to recur to the history of the eastern
church.

In this survey we have tried to understand the objections alleged by
unbelievers during the first four centuries, successively changing in
character, from the calumnies of ignorance in the second century, to the
statements of intelligent disbelief in the third and fourth, until they
finally subside in the fifth into the murmuring of popular superstition;
and have endeavoured to give their natural as well as literary history, by
exhibiting them as corollaries from the various views concerning religion
enumerated at the commencement of the lecture. The blind prejudices of the
uneducated populace, and the attachment, merely political, to heathen
creeds, manifested themselves in deeds rather than words; but each of the
other lines of thought there indicated gave expression in literature to
its opinion concerning Christianity; the flippant impiety of Epicureanism
in Lucian, the debased form then prevalent of Platonism in Celsus, the
subtle and mystic philosophy of the neo-Platonists in Porphyry, the
oriental Theosophy in Hierocles, the romantic attachment to the old pagan
literature in Julian.

If these causes be still further classified for comparison with the
enumeration of intellectual causes stated in the previous lecture, we find
only the adumbration of some of the forms there named. The attack from
physical science, so prevalent since the era of modern discovery, is
barely discernible in the passing remarks on the Mosaic cosmogony in
Celsus and Julian.(246) The attack from criticism is seen in a trifling
form in Celsus; in a superior manner in the perception which Porphyry
exhibits of the literary characteristics of the Old Testament, and Julian
of the New. The chief ground of the attack was derived from metaphysical
science, which acted not so much in its modern form of a subjective
inquiry into the tests of truth, as in the shape of rival doctrines
concerning the highest problems of life and being, which preoccupied the
mind against Christianity. If the eclectic attempts to adjust such
speculations to Christianity which marked the progress of Gnosticism could
have been embraced in our inquiry, the force of this class of causes would
have been made still more apparent.

The obvious insufficiency however of this analysis to afford an entir