uinary list of
murders, of executions, and of massacres, which stain almost every page
of the Jewish annals, they acknowledged that the barbarians of Palestine
had exercised as much compassion towards their idolatrous enemies, as
they had ever shown to their friends or countrymen. Passing from the
sectaries of the law to the law itself, they asserted that it was
impossible that a religion which consisted only of bloody sacrifices and
trifling ceremonies, and whose rewards as well as punishments were all
of a carnal and temporal nature, could inspire the love of virtue, or
restrain the impetuosity of passion. The Mosaic account of the creation
and fall of man was treated with profane derision by the Gnostics, who
would not listen with patience to the repose of the Deity after six
days' labor, to the rib of Adam, the garden of Eden, the trees of life
and of knowledge, the speaking serpent, the forbidden fruit, and the
condemnation pronounced against human kind for the venial offence of
their first progenitors. The God of Israel was impiously represented by
the Gnostics as a being liable to passion and to error, capricious
in his favor, implacable in his resentment, meanly jealous of his
superstitious worship, and confining his partial providence to a single
people, and to this transitory life. In such a character they could
discover none of the features of the wise and omnipotent Father of the
universe. They allowed that the religion of the Jews was somewhat less
criminal than the idolatry of the Gentiles; but it was their fundamental
doctrine, that the Christ whom they adored as the first and brightest
emanation of the Deity appeared upon earth to rescue mankind from their
various errors, and to reveal a new system of truth and perfection.
The most learned of the fathers, by a very singular condescension, have
imprudently admitted the sophistry of the Gnostics. * Acknowledging that
the literal sense is repugnant to every principle of faith as well as
reason, they deem themselves secure and invulnerable behind the ample
veil of allegory, which they carefully spread over every tender part of
the Mosaic dispensation.

It has been remarked with more ingenuity than truth, that the virgin
purity of the church was never violated by schism or heresy before the
reign of Trajan or Hadrian, about one hundred years after the death
of Christ. We may observe with much more propriety, that, during that
period, the disciples of the Mess