prominent aspect which it wears in the Apostolic writings; whether from the absence of the fuel which had once been furnished to its energies by the personal presence and activity of its great opponent, or, as is more probable, from its absorption into the new forms in which it henceforward clothed itself.

of the heresies

II. SECOND PERIOD. The later Epistles of St. Paul, and the
General Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude.

The heresies of the second act of the conflict with Judaism on which we now enter are, as is natural, more difficult to reconstruct than in those of the first; the unity of the contest is lost by its ceasing to centre round St. Paul; the individual traits which were brought out by his personal conflict with his opponents are necessarily lost in the more general character of the Epistles from which we must now derive our information; the simple element of a Judaizing Christianity, intelligible to any ordinary reader of the Old and New Testament, now becomes complicated by a vast variety of mixed influences, only to be understood fully through their connexion with causes extraneous to both Jew and Christian. It will still however be possible by confining ourselves to the Apostolical writings, and to the historical rather than the prophetic representations which they furnish, to give so far as can be done within a short compass a general view of this new development of evil.

Revolu- Its object and principles were in most respects wholly tionary character different from those which we have first discussed. The great aim of the Judaizers hitherto had been to restrain, so to speak, the energies of Christians within Jewish limits, chiefly on purely fanatical grounds, as has been before stated, partly also with something of the worldly prudence which formed at least one element in the speech of the

of this period.

chief priests, "lest the Romans should come and take away "their place and nation'." Then, as on that more awful occasion, they thought "it expedient that one man should "die and the whole nation perish not,” (John xi. 49;) they joined their unbelieving countrymen, in fear of the odium which they might incur from the extravagances of a rising sect which threatened to "turn the world upside down, " and to do contrary to the decrees of Cæsar." (Acts xvii. 6, 7.) But when in proportion to the diffusion of Christianity and the recognition of its universal character, any such attempt became more and more hopeless, it is perfectly conceivable that the very same party should suddenly shift its ground, and that, instead of endeavouring to check the new religion, they should see that it was possible to use it as an engine for effecting their own purposes. The very fact however of this change of position at once introduced elements which were either wholly new, or which having been before subordinate, now rose to the surface of the movement. Christianity was now about to share the common lot of every great moral change which has ever taken place in human society, by containing amongst its advocates men who are morally the extreme opposites of each other, some being the really best and noblest of their kind, and others the vilest. "Perfect as it was in itself," (it will be perceived that this description is taken from the work m in which this fact has been most fully set forth,) "perfect as it was in itself, its nominal adherents often "took part with it for its negative side, not for its positive, advocating it so far as it destroyed what was already in "existence, but having no sympathy with that better state "of things which it proposed to set up in the room of the "old. Accordingly when the Church began to shew its "wide range of action and its singular efficacy, all who

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1 John xi. 48.

m Arnold's Fragment on the Church, p. 85.

Greatness

of the danger.

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'longed to see the existing system overthrown, rallied "themselves round its assailant. Here they thought was "a power which they could use for the accomplishment of "their purpose; when this should first have cleared the

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ground of the thickets which encumbered it, it would be "for them to sow in the vacant soil their own favourite "seed. Let any one who knows what the Roman empire

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was in the first century of the Christian era imagine to "himself the monstrous forms of opinion and practice "which such a state of society so diseased could not fail "to engender. All varieties of ancient and foreign super"stition existed together with the worst extremity of unprincipled scepticism, while, in practice, the unquelled “barbarism of the ruder provinces, and the selfish cruelty "fostered by long and bloody civil wars, had provided a “fearful mass of the fiercer passions, and the unrestrained "dissoluteness of a thoroughly corrupt society was a source

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no less abundant of every thing most shameless in sen"suality. These seemingly incongruous evils, superstition "and scepticism, ferocity and sensual profligacy, when "from any particular circumstances they turned against "the monster society which had bred them, sheltered "themselves under the name of Christianity," and became the heresies of the second period of the apostolic age.

The vastness and reality of the danger which this crisis threatened not only to the purity, but (humanly speaking) to the very existence of the Christian Church, is evident both from heathen authors and from the apostolical writings themselves. Far and near, the front rank of the Christian society, as it moved forward in its aggression on the heathen world, was pre-occupied by these dreadful shapes of error and wickedness, which alone attracted the attention of the superficial observer,—and which rendered the Christian name a byeword amongst its enemies for licentiousness and fanaticism, prevented the wisest and best of Roman

historians from seeing anything in the Christianity of the age of Nero, except a "hateful superstition," known" only by the "shameful and abominable crimes" of those who professed it. One point alone these heresies shared in common with the Church, and that was the intenseand the Scriptures justify us in adding the preternatural energy of its operations. Even the Apostles themselves seem to have gazed with awe on the portentous forms, half human half diabolical, which confronted them either close at hand or in immediate prospect.

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The

working of Satan with all power and signs and lying "wonders," (2 Thess. ii. 9;)

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the "seducing spirits and
speak lies and hypocrisy,

teachings of demons, who "and have their consciences seared with a hot iron," (2 Tim. iii. 1;) the "synagogue of Satan," (Rev. ii. 9, 13;) "the false prophet," (Rev. xvi. 13; xvii. 13;) the "antichrists," (1 John ii. 18;) the "spirits that were to be "tried whether they were of God," (1 John iv. 1—3;) the sorceries of Balaam, of Egypt, of Jezebel, (2 Pet. ii. 15; Jude 11; Rev. ii. 14; 2 Tim. iii. 8, 9; Rev. ii. 20;) such are the figures under which the Apostolical writings express their sense of the danger which impended over them. In endeavouring to exhibit its workings in detail, two Its form, points emerge which will give some assistance in guiding us through the mazes of a labyrinth from the nature of the case so wrapt in obscurity and uncertainty. In the first place, it would seem that Judaism still succeeded in making itself the rallying point of the movement. It was no longer the informing soul and spirit, but it was still the framework, the instrument, the handle, to which the floating elements of evil, however loosely and remotely, continued to fasten themselves. It was no longer the stiff Pharisaical Judaism

n Tac. Ann. xv. 44. Comp. Iren. adv. Hær. i. 25. 3.

• The English version is ambiguous. All the participles in 1 Tim. iv. 2, 3, relate not to τινες but δαιμόνων.

Jewish.

Its chief seat, Ephe

the Asiatic

which had opposed St. Paul,-that, so far as the Church was concerned, had retired into the background, and St. Paul is therefore no longer the all-absorbing figure of the plot;— but we shall see, as we trace it in detail, that it still wore the Jewish physiognomy, still pandered to Jewish prejudices, still fostered the wilder and more remote extravagances of Jewish superstition.

Secondly, what is lost in unity of person is in some sus and measure compensated by the greater unity of place. The Churches, previous movements of the Judaizers had been discernible in every part of the empire from Palestine to Italy; the present, so far as we shall be able to follow them in the apostolical writings, however widely they may have extended, and however great their influence may have been at times in Rome itself, yet generally speaking had their head quarters in that part of Asia Minor on which the earlier Judaism had produced the least effect, the province of Proconsular Asia, the Christian communities which lay in the plain formed by the vales of the Mæander and Cayster. If the metropolis of the earlier opponents of Christianity had been, as in some sense it must have been of the later also, the holy city of Jerusalem, so the metropolis of the mixed Judaism of this second period was Ephesus. In that great emporium of Asia Minor, uniting, as has been truly said, more than any other city in the world, the manners of the east and west,—with its mingled population of Greeks and Asiatics, with its schools of magic, and its magnificent temple, whose sacred image blended the name of the Grecian Diana with the symbolic form of the old eastern nature-worship,—with its large population of legalized Jewish settlers who had furnished there as elsewhere the nucleus of the Christian Church; there more than in any other place it was natural that the strange forms of eastern and western superstition P See Milman's Hist. of Christianity, ii. 24. 203.