The

answer

to these

in the

and St. Jude.

λov,) an expression not elsewhere explained, but, so far as we can build upon it, apparently pointing to the machinations of some such rival sect, as the Judaizers. (Comp. Phil. i. 15.) Melito expressly says that Nero and Domitian were prejudiced against the Christians "by certain enchanters," (ὑπὸ βασκάνων τινῶν ἀνθρώπων,) a phrase which exactly coincides with the sorcerers and followers of Balaam in the

passages before us. In the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, one of the very Churches where these Judaizers existed in the greatest force, it is said that the Jews no less than the heathens joined in the shout which went up on the appearance of the aged martyr, "This is the teacher of all Asia, the overthrower of "our gods, who has perverted so many from sacrifice and "from adoration of our gods;" and that they howled with savage joy around the funeral pile whose materials they had themselves eagerly collected.

Such being the form and origin of these heresies, it remains to ask from what quarters and by whose means Judaizers they were met and destroyed? No doubt St. Paul's General Epistles contained in themselves the antidote not only to Epistles of St. Peter Jewish Pharisaism, but also to this Jewish libertinism, which in some sense was the abuse of his own teaching. But it is not after the manner of the Scriptures that one Apostle or Prophet should exhibit the whole cycle of truth; it would not have been according to the analogy of faith, that St. Paul should have been the Apostle especially brought forward to correct himself. It was now that the intervention of St. Peter, of which a description has been attempted in the second Sermon, would naturally be expected. Vestiges may well have been preserved in this later stage of Judaism either of the ancient hostility to St. Paul, or of the hopes that Peter was to place himself at the head of that great party which had once, and perhaps still called itself after his name, and turned as of old to the example

of the brethren of the Lord and of Cephas; and to repress these would have been a fitting call for the exercise of the authority of St. Peter and St. Jude. Here too was the true place for the intervention of the ethical character which belongs more or less (with the exception of that of St. John) to all the General Epistles, or in other words, the writings which bear the names of the purely Jewish Apostles; and what the moral teaching of St. James (as will afterwards appear) was to the barren belief of the Palestine Church, that the moral teaching of St. Peter and St. Jude might well be to the licentious fanaticism of these later Judaizers. Whilst on the one hand the style and language of the First Epistle of St. Peter, and the express assertion of the Second, must have indicated then, as it has been a decisive proof ever since, that before the close of the Sacred Canon the traces of the dispute at Antioch had been virtually effaced, so the three Epistles together must have borne testimony then, and are a valuable testimony now, to the irreconcileable difference which existed between real Apostolical Christianity and that counterfeit representation of it which for a time deceived the world by its rival pretensions. External resemblances are to an outward observer so much more palpable than inward differences, that Tacitus may well have confounded together the abominable superstition and the Divine instruction, which both presented themselves to him under the common name of a new religion, even as Aristophanes had long before assailed as belonging to the same school the basest of sophists and the greatest of philosophers. But as even in the case of Grecian history the judgment of posterity has set aside the Athenian verdict upon Socrates, much more have these Epistles determined for ever the true relations once so grievously misunderstood between the Apostles and their opponents, and the mistake of a part for the whole which, as we see from Tacitus, was

In the Аросаlypse.

natural in the reign of Nero, we learn from the Epistles of the younger Pliny to have become impossible in the reign of Trajan. The viper which had come out of the heat and fastened itself on the apostolic age was shaken off into the fire; the wild anarchy which then succeeded in identifying itself with Christianity has been rarely confounded with it since; and if the lessons of acquiescence in existing authorities which this spirit called forth from the Apostles in the first century were in the next pushed to excess by Ignatius and his followers, if in later ages they have been used as pretexts for undue servility, yet if rightly understood, and taken in conjunction with the other parts of the New Testament, they may be well regarded as monuments of the possibility of reform without revolution, of introducing the greatest moral and spiritual changes without loosing the social and political bonds which hold mankind together.

Lastly, as the authority of these two Jewish Apostles was thus employed in strangling in its cradle this monstrous birth of Jewish and Gentile evil, so that of the only one who remained (for the work of James the Just was as will be seen confined to a narrower sphere) was no less providentially employed in exhibiting in the Apocalypse the only aspect of it which was capable of a Christian expression. Reserving entirely the question of the interpretation of its details, it is sufficient to observe here that what the Gospel and Epistles of St. John have often been remarked to be in relation to the third stage of the primitive heresies, that the Apocalypse is to the second. It meets them not by direct opposition, but by adopting and redeeming all that was capable of a higher meaning in their thoughts and phraseology. If there be a worse than the Roman Babylon to be destroyed, if there be a holier than the Jewish Jerusalem to be reverenced, if there be a reign of Christ

greater than the Judaizing millennium to be hoped for, they are to be sought for in the true antithesis to the

b

Apocalypse of Cerinthus, in the "Book of the Revela"tion of St. John the Divine."

III. THIRD PERIOD.-The Gospel and Epistles of St. John.

The juxtaposition of these two names brings us to the Errors opposed by closing period at once of the bright and of the dark sides St. John. of the apostolical age. It is a remarkable proof of the indiscriminate transference of our own notions to that time, that most readers of ecclesiastical history if asked what was the most controversial period of the first century, would fix upon that which seems in fact to have been the least controversial of all. It is precisely because the energy of the primitive antagonism to apostolical truth was gradually dwindling away into the ordinary operations of error, such as have provoked the controversies of later ages, that we therefore insensibly come to regard the writings of St. John as more polemical than those of St. James, St. Paul, or St. Peter. But the apostolical controversies were not like ours, they were carried on not against "flesh and "blood," not against the mere outward figure of mortality in which evil may chance to clothe itself, but "against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the dark

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ness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places," against the real principles of moral evil which lay at the root of the whole matter, and which shewed themselves in their naked undisguised depravity of avowed hostility to goodness, and avowed love of wickedness. And if therefore in St. John's writings, the vehemence of St. Paul, and the severity of St. James, has disappeared, it is not merely because the fire of the Son of Thunder has been superseded by the peaceful temperament of the b See Eus. H. E. iii. 28, vii. 25; Epiph. Hær. 51. 3.

Chiefly
Jewish.

Apostle of Love, but because St. James and St. Paul and St. Peter had thoroughly done their work, because the evils with which he had to contend, however malignant in spirit, were at least less rampant and less powerful in form, because it was only a solitary Diotrephes here and there, and not whole masses of Christian communities who "received him not."

This would be our natural impression if we derived our impression from the general tone of St. John's writings, not as illustrated by later theologians, but as compared with those which proceed directly or indirectly from his brother Apostles. Yet some form of rivalry, some hostile principles of evil we do seem to encounter even here, and these, with the assistance of tradition, which, as shall elsewhere be shewn, is here more important than usual in filling up the gap of apostolical history, it now remains to endeavour to reproduce.

Doubtless in the speculations concerning the nature of Christ which seemed to be glanced at in the Gospel and Epistles of St. John, (John i. 1—14; 1 John i. 1; ii. 13; iv. 2,) there seem to be traces of an opposition to the first indications of those Gnostic errors, which as belonging to a later age, and to another sphere than that with which we are now concerned, it is not my intention here to notice. But the Gnostic sects, properly so called, had not yet come into existence, their first founder Basilides did not appear till A.D. 120, long after the Apostle was laid in his grave. So far as the principles opposed by St. John had assumed any outward and definite shape at all, it is still the same ancient enemy that we have tracked throughout, it is still not Gnosticism but Judaism, or, if we will have the word, it is not yet the Gnostic pure, but the Gnostic grafted on a Jewish soil.

c 3 John 9.

d That even the later Gnosticism was in its origin Jewish appears from