purpose to enter upon any detailed statement of its principles, and we must confine ourselves to such particulars only as are necessary to an understanding of the question before us.
As we have already frequently had occasion to mention, there were two broad parties in the primitive Church, and the very existence of Christianity was in one sense endangered by the national exclusiveness of the people amongst whom it originated. The one party considered Christianity a mere continuation of the Law, and dwarfed it into an Isrealitish institution, a narrow sect of Judaism; the other represented the glad tidings as the introduction of a new system applicable to all and supplanting the Mosaic dispensation of the Law by a universal dispensation of grace. These two parties were popularly represented in the early Church by the Apostles Peter and Paul, and their antagonism is faintly revealed in the Epistle to the Galatians. Marcion, a gentile Christian, appreciating the true character of the new religion and its elevated spirituality, and profoundly impressed by the comparatively degraded and anthropomorphic features of Judaism, drew a very sharp line of demarcation between them, and represented Christianity as an entirely new and separate system abrogating the old and having absolutely no connection with it. Jesus was not to him the Messiah of the Jews, the son of David come permanently to establish the Law and the Prophets, but a divine being sent to reveal to man a wholly new spiritual religion, and a hitherto unknown God of goodness and grace. The Creator [———],
the God of the Old Testament, was different from the God of grace who had sent Jesus to reveal the Truth, to bring reconciliation and salvation to all, and to abrogate the Jewish God of the World and of the Law, who was opposed to the God and Father of Jesus Christ as Matter is to Spirit, impurity to purity. Christianity was in distinct antagonism to Judaism, the Spiritual God of heaven, whose goodness and love were for the Universe, to the God of the World, whose chosen and peculiar people were the Jews, the Gospel of Grace to the dispensation of the Old Testament. Christianity, therefore, must be kept pure from the Judaistic elements humanly thrust into it, which were so essentially opposed to its whole spirit.
Marcion wrote a work called "Antitheses" [———], in which he contrasted the old system with the new, the God of the one with the God of the other, the Law with the Gospel, and in this he maintained opinions which anticipated many held in our own time. Tertullian attacks this work in the first three books of his treatise against Marcion, and he enters upon the discussion of its details with true theological vigour: "Now, then, ye hounds, yelping at the God of truth, whom the Apostle casts out,(1) to all your questions! These are the bones of contention which ye gnaw!"(2) The poverty of the "Great African's" arguments keeps pace with his abuse. Marcion objected: If the God of the Old Testament be good, prescient of the future, and able to avert evil, why did he allow man, made in his own image, to be deceived
by the devil, and to fall from obedience of the Law into sin and death?(1) How came the devil, the origin of lying and deceit, to be made at all?(2) After the fall, God became a judge both severe and cruel; woman is at once condemned to bring forth in sorrow and to serve her husband, changed from a help into a slave; the earth is cursed which before was blessed, and man is doomed to labour and to death.(3) The law was one of retaliation and not of justice,—lex talionis—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe.(4) And it was not consistent, for in contravention of the Decalogue, God is made to instigate the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians, and fraudulently rob them of their gold and silver;(5) to incite them to work on the Sabbath by ordering them to carry the ark for eight days round Jericho;(6) to break the second commandment by making and setting up the brazen serpent and the golden cherubim.(7) Then God is inconstant, electing men, as Saul and Solomon, whom he subsequently rejects;(8) repenting that he had set up Saul, and that he had doomed the Ninevites,(9) and so on. God calls out: Adam, where art thou? inquires whether he had eaten the forbidden fruit; asks of Cain where his brother was, as if he had not yet heard the blood of Abel crying from the ground, and did not already know all these things.(10) Anticipating the results of modem criticism, Marcion denies the applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies. The Emmanuel of
Isaiah (vii. 14, cf. viii. 4) is not Christ;(1) the "Virgin" his mother is simply a "young woman" according to Jewish phraseology;(2) and the sufferings of the Servant of God (Isaiah lii. 13—liii. 9) are not predictions of the death of Jesus.(3) There is a complete severance between the Law and the Gospel, and the God of the latter is the Antithesis of that of the former.(4) "The one was perfect, pure, beneficent, passionless; the other, though not unjust by nature, infected by matter,—subject to all the passions of man,—cruel, changeable; the New Testament, especially as remodelled by Marcion,(5) was holy, wise, amiable; the Old Testament, the Law, barbarous, inhuman, contradictory, and detestable."(6)
Marcion ardently maintained the doctrine of the impurity of matter, and he carried it to its logical conclusion, both in speculation and practice. He, therefore, asserting the incredibility of an incarnate God, denied the corporeal reality of the flesh of Christ. His body was a mere semblance and not of human substance, was not born of a human mother, and the divine nature was not degraded by contact with the flesh.(7) Marcion finds in Paul the purest promulgator of the truth as he understands it, and emboldened by the Epistle to the Galatians, in which that Apostle rebukes even Apostles for "not walking uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel," he accuses the other Apostles of having depraved the pure form of the Gospel doctrines delivered to them by