PAGANISM SURVIVING
IN CHRISTIANITY

BY
ABRAM HERBERT LEWIS, D.D.

AUTHOR OF “BIBLICAL TEACHINGS CONCERNING THE SABBATH AND THE SUNDAY,”
“A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE SABBATH AND THE SUNDAY IN THE
CHRISTIAN CHURCH,” “A CRITICAL HISTORY OF SUNDAY
LEGISLATION FROM 321 TO 1888, A.D.,” ETC.

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET

LONDON
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND

The Knickerbocker Press

1892

COPYRIGHT, 1892

BY
ABRAM HERBERT LEWIS

Electrotyped, Printed, and Bound by
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
G. P. Putnam’s Sons

TO

GEORGE H. BABCOCK

CO-WORKER IN HISTORIC RESEARCH AND FRIEND
THROUGH MANY YEARS, THIS VOLUME
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

The Author

PREFACE.

He who judges the first century by the nineteenth will fall into countless errors. He who thinks that the Christianity of the fourth century was identical with that of the New-Testament period, will go widely astray. He who does not look carefully into the history of religions before the time of Christ, and into the pagan influences which surrounded infant Christianity, cannot understand its subsequent history. He who cannot rise above denominational limitations and credal restrictions cannot become a successful student of early Church history, nor of present tendencies, nor of future developments. History is a series of results, not a medley of happenings. It is the story of the struggle between right and wrong; the record of God’s dealing with men. The “historic argument” is invaluable, because history preserves God’s verdicts concerning human choices and actions. Events and epochs, transitions and culminations, are the organized causes and effects which create the never-ceasing movement, and the organic unity called history. Hence we learn that ideas and principles, like apples, have their time for development and ripening; that the stains of sin, the weakness of error, and the influence of truth commingle and perdure through the centuries; that good and evil, sin and righteousness, persist, or are eliminated, in proportion as men heed God’s voice, and listen to His verdicts.

The scientific study of history reveals the norm by which ideas, creeds, movements, and methods are to be tested. Such a standard, when contrasted with the speculations of philosophy, is granite, compared with sand. God’s universal law, enunciated by Christ, is: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

The efforts of partisans to manipulate early history in the interest of special views and narrow conceptions, have been a fruitful source of error. Equally dangerous has been the assumption that the Christianity of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries was identical with that of the New Testament, or was a fair representative of it. The constant development of new facts shows that at the point where the average student takes up the history of Western Christianity, it was already fundamentally corrupted by pagan theories and practices. Its unfolding, from that time to the present, must be studied in the light of this fact. The rise, development, present status, and future history of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, cannot be justly considered, apart from this fact. The fundamental principles, and the underlying philosophy of these divisions of Christendom originated in the paganizing of early Christianity. This fact makes the re-study of the beginnings of Christianity of supreme importance. The pagan systems which ante-dated Christ, exercised a controlling influence on the development of the first five centuries of Western Christianity, and hence, of all subsequent times. This field has been too nearly “an unknown land,” to the average student, and therefore correct answers have been wanting to many questions which arise, when we leave Semitic soil, and consider Christianity in its relation to Greek and Roman thought. “Early Christianity” cannot be understood except in the light of these powerful, pre-Christian currents of influence; and present history cannot be separated from them.

This book presents a suggestive rather than an exhaustive treatment of these influences, and of their effect on historic Christianity. The author has aimed to make a volume which busy men may read, rather than one whose bulk would relegate it to the comparative silence of library shelves. The following pages treat four practical points in Christianity, without attempting to enter the field of speculative theology, leaving that to a future time, or to the pen of another—viz.: The influence of pagan thought upon the Bible, and its interpretation; upon the organized Church, through the pagan water-worship cult; upon the practices and spiritual life of the Church by substituting pagan holidayism for Christian Sabbathism, through the sun-worship cult; and upon the spiritual life and subsequent character of the Church, by the union of Church and State, and the subjugation of Christianity to the civil power, according to the pagan model. Facts do not cease to be facts, though denied and ignored. They do not withdraw from the field of history, though men grow restive under their condemnation. I have dealt mainly with facts, giving but brief space to “conclusions.” I have written for those who are thoughtful and earnest; who are anxious to know what the past has been, that they may the better understand the duties of the present and the unfolding issues of the future. Such will not read the following pages with languid interest nor careless eyes.

The issues involved are larger than denominational lines, or the boundaries of creeds. They are of special interest to Protestants, since they involve not only the reasons for the revolt against Roman Catholicism, but the future relations of these divisions of Christendom, to each other, and to the Bible. The supreme source of authority in religion is directly at issue in the questions here treated. That is a definite and living question which cannot be waived aside. At this threshold, the author extends the welcome which each searcher after facts and fundamental truths gives to fellow investigators.

Abram Herbert Lewis.

Room 100, Bible House,
New York City, May, 1892.

CONTENTS.

PAGANISM IN CHRISTIANITY.

CHAPTER I.
REMAINS OF PAGANISM IN CHRISTIANITY.

Preliminary Survey—An Imaginary Past—Issue between Protestantism and Romanism—General Testimony Relative to Pagan Elements in Christianity, from Dyer, Lord, Tiele, Baronius, Polydore Virgil, Fauchet, Mussard, De Choul, Wiseman, Middleton, Max Müller, Priestley, Thebaud, Hardwick, Maitland, Seymore, Renan, Killen, Farrar, Merivale, Westropp and Wake, and Lechler.

A preliminary survey is the more necessary lest the general reader fail to grant the facts of history a competent hearing and a just consideration. Unconsciously men think of the earliest Christianity as being like that which they profess. They measure the early centuries by their own. Their Church, its doctrines, forms, creeds and customs, stands as the representative of all Christianity. It seems like a “rude awakening” to ask men to believe that there is a “pagan residuum” in their faith, or in the customs of their fathers. The average Christian must pass through a broadening process, before he can justly consider such a question. Unhappily, there are too many who are unwilling to undergo such an enlargement of their religious and historical horizon as will make them competent to consider those facts which every earnest student of history must face. But the Christian who believes in the immortality of truth, and in the certainty of its triumph, will welcome all facts, even though they may modify the creed he has hitherto accepted.

A writer in the Edinburgh Review and Critical Journal, commenting on the revised volumes of Bishop Lightfoot on Ignatius and Polycarp, speaking of the tendency to judge the early centuries by our own, thus vitiating our conclusions, says:

“The danger of such inquiries lies in the difficulty of resisting the temptation to frame pictures of an imaginary past; and the passion for transferring to the past the peculiarities of later times may be best corrected by keeping in view the total unlikeness of the first, second, or third centuries to anything which now exists in any part of the world.”

Protestants in the United States are poorly prepared to consider so great a question as that which this book passes under review, because they have not carefully considered the facts touching their relations to Roman Catholicism. The Anglo-Romish controversy, in England, in the earlier part of the present century made the question of paganism in Christianity prominent for a time. But the discussion was so strongly partisan and controversial that it could not produce the best results. Truth was much obscured by the determined effort of Protestant writers to show that the pagan residuum was all in the Catholic Church; whereas the facts show that there could have been no Roman Catholic Church had not paganism first prepared the way for its development by corrupting the earliest Christianity. The facts show, with equal vividness, that Protestantism has retained much of paganism, by inheritance. Protestantism, theoretically, means the entire elimination of the pagan residuum; practically, that work is but fairly begun. It must be pushed, or the inevitable backward drift, the historical “undertow” will re-Romanize the Protestant movement. The expectations and purposes of Roman Catholicism all point towards such a result.

This chapter will make a general survey of the field, as it is seen by men of different schools, that the reader may be the better prepared for a more specific treatment of the subject.

Dyer says:

“The first Roman converts to Christianity appear to have had very inadequate ideas of the sublime purity of the gospel, and to have entertained a strange medley of pagan idolatry and Christian truth. The emperor Alexander Severus, who had imbibed from his mother, Mammæa, a singular regard for the Christian religion, is said to have placed in his domestic chapel the images of Abraham, of Orpheus, of Apollonius, and of Christ, as the four chief sages who had instructed mankind in the methods of adoring the Supreme Deity. Constantine himself, the first Christian emperor, was deeply imbued with the superstitions of paganism; he had been Pontifex Maximus, and it was only a little while before his death that he was formally received by baptism into the Christian Church. He was particularly devoted to Apollo, and he attempted to conciliate his pagan and his Christian subjects by the respect which he appeared to entertain for both. An edict enjoining the solemn observance of Sunday was balanced in the same year[1] by another directing that when the palace or any other public building should be struck by lightning, the haruspices should be regularly consulted.”[2]

In a similar strain Professor Lord speaks yet more strongly:

“But the church was not only impregnated with the errors of pagan philosophy, but it adopted many of the ceremonials of Oriental worship, which were both minute and magnificent. If anything marked the primitive church it was the simplicity of worship, and the absence of ceremonies and festivals and gorgeous rites. The churches became in the fourth century as imposing as the old temples of idolatry. The festivals became authoritative; at first they were few in number and voluntary. It was supposed that when Christianity superseded Judaism, the obligation to observe the ceremonies of the Mosaic law was abrogated. Neither the apostles nor evangelists imposed the yoke of servitude, but left Easter and every other feast to be honored by the gratitude of the recipients of grace. The change in opinion, in the fourth century, called out the severe animadversion of the historian Socrates, but it was useless to stem the current of the age. Festivals became frequent and imposing. The people clung to them because they obtained a cessation from labor, and obtained excitement. The ancient rubrics mention only those of the Passion, of Easter, of Whitsuntide, Christmas, and the descent of the Holy Spirit. But there followed the celebration of the death of Stephen, the memorial of St. John, the commemoration of the slaughter of the Innocents, the feasts of Epiphany, the feast of Purification, and others, until the Catholic Church had some celebration for some saint and martyr for every day in the year. They contributed to create a craving for outward religion, which appealed to the sense and the sensibilities rather than the heart. They led to innumerable quarrels and controversies about unimportant points, especially in relation to the celebration of Easter. They produced a delusive persuasion respecting pilgrimages, the sign of the cross, and the sanctifying effects of the sacraments. Veneration for martyrs ripened into the introduction of images—a future source of popular idolatry. Christianity was emblazoned in pompous ceremonies. The veneration of saints approximated to their deification, and superstition exalted the mother of our Lord into an object of absolute worship. Communion tables became imposing altars typical of Jewish sacrifices, and the relics of martyrs were preserved as sacred amulets....

“When Christianity itself was in such need of reform, when Christians could scarcely be distinguished from pagans in love of display, and in egotistical ends, how could it reform the world? When it was a pageant, a ritualism, an arm of the state, a vain philosophy, a superstition, a formula, how could it save if ever so dominant? The corruptions of the Church in the fourth century are as well authenticated as the purity and moral elevation of Christianity in the second century. Isaac Taylor has presented a most mournful view of the state of Christian society when the religion of the cross had become the religion of the state, and the corruptions kept pace with the outward triumph of the faith, especially when the pagans had yielded to the supremacy of the cross.”[3]

Many of the corrupting elements which entered into early Christianity came from the Orient, by way of Greece and Rome. Tiele speaks of the influx of these in the following words:

“The Greek deities were followed by the Asiatic, such as the Great Mother of the gods, whose image, consisting of an unhewn stone, was brought at the expense of the state from Pessinus to Rome. On the whole, it was not the best and loftiest features of the foreign religions that were adopted, but rather their low and sensual elements, and these too in their most corrupt form. An accidental accusation brought to light in the year 186 B.C. a secret worship of Bacchus which was accompanied by all kinds of abominations, and had already made its way among thousands....

“The eyes of the multitude were always turned toward the East, from which deliverance was expected to come forth, and secret rites brought from there to Rome were sure of a number of devotees. But they were only bastard children, or at any rate the late misshapen offspring of the lofty religions which once flourished in the East, an un-Persian Mithra worship, an un-Egyptian Serapis worship, an Isis worship which only flattered the senses and was eagerly pursued by the fine ladies, to say nothing of more loathsome practices. And yet even these aberrations were the expression of a real and deep-seated need of the human mind, which could find no satisfaction in the state religion. Men longed for a God whom they could worship, heart and soul, and with this God they longed to be reconciled. Their own deities they had outgrown, and they listened eagerly therefore to the priests of Serapis and of Mithra, who each proclaimed their God as the sole-existing, the almighty, and the all-good, and they felt especially attracted by the earnestness and strictness of the latter cultus. And in order to be secure of the eradication of all guilt, men lay down in a pit where the blood of the sacrificial animal flowed all over them, in the conviction that they would then arise entirely new-born.”[4]

Many Roman Catholic writers, with an honesty which all classes might well emulate, openly recognize the paganizing of the Church, which took place before the organization of the papacy.

Baronius says:

“It was permitted the Church to transfer to pious uses those ceremonies which the pagans had wickedly applied in a superstitious worship, after having purified them by consecration; so that, to the greater contumely of the devil, all might honor Christ with those rites which he intended for his own worship. Thus the pagan festivals, laden with superstition, were changed into the praiseworthy festivals of the martyrs; and the idolatrous temples were changed to sacred churches, as Theodoret shows.”[5]

Polydore Virgil says:

“The Church has borrowed many customs from the religion of the Romans and other pagans, but it has meliorated them and applied them to a better use.”[6]

Fauchet says:

“The bishops of this kingdom employ all means to gain men to Christ, converting to their use some pagan ceremonies, as well as they did the stones of their temples to the building of churches.”[7]

Pierre Mussard says:

“William de Choul,[8] counsellor to the king and bailiff of the mountains, composed, an age ago, a treatise of the religion of the ancient Romans, wherein he shows an entire conformity between old Rome and new. On the point of religion he closes with these words[9]: ‘If we consider carefully,’ says he, ‘we shall see that many institutions in our religion have been borrowed and transferred from Egyptian and Pagan ceremonies, such as tunics and surplices, priestly ornaments for the head, bowing at the altar, the solemnity at mass, music in churches, prayers, supplications, processions, litanies, and many other things. These our priests make use of in our mysteries, and refer them to one only God, Jesus Christ, which the ignorance of the heathen, their false religion, and foolish presumption perverted to their false gods, and to dead men deified.’”[10]

During the Tractarian controversy in England, John Poynder wrote Popery in Alliance with Heathenism, to show that Roman Catholicism is essentially pagan. Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, then a professor in the University at Rome, replied under the title: Letters to John Poynder, Esq., upon his Work Entitled “Popery in Alliance with Heathenism,” London, 1836.

In Letter Second, Wiseman says:

“I will, for a moment, grant you the full extent of your assumptions and premises; I will concede that all the facts you have brought forward are true, and all the parallels you have established between our rites and those of paganism, correct; and I will join issue with you on your conclusions, trying them by clearly applicable tests.... The first person who argued as you have done was Julian the Apostate, who said that the Christians had borrowed their religion from the heathens. This proves at once that even then the resemblance existed, of which you complain as idolatrous. So that it is not the offspring of modern corruption, but an inheritance of the ancient church. It proves that the alliance between Christianity and heathenism existed three hundred years after Christ, and that consequently so far popery and ancient Christianity are identical. The Manichees also are accused by St. Augustine, writing against Faustus, of having made the same charge.”

Dr. Wiseman enumerates many items of resemblance which Poynder does not, and retorts by showing that the English Church yet retains the paganism which it inherited from papacy. He emphasizes the pagan characteristics which appear in the building, adornment, and services of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, claiming that if a Roman pagan were to be resurrected and brought to St. Paul’s he would recognize the likeness to his ancient faith on every hand. Dr. Wiseman’s testimony is of great value, since, as a defender of Romanism, he also defends the policy which corrupted early Christianity in the West, by conforming it to the popular paganism in order to secure a nominal conversion of the pagans.

Conyers Middleton, whose Letter from Rome forms one of the standard authorities concerning the paganism of the early Church, says:

“Aringhus, in his account of Subterraneous Rome, acknowledges this conformity between the pagan and popish rites, and defends the admission of the ceremonies of heathenism into the service of the Church, by the authority of their wisest popes and governors, who found it necessary, he says, in the conversion of the Gentiles, to dissemble and wink at many things, and yield to the times; and not to use force against customs which the people were so obstinately fond of; nor to think of extirpating at once everything that had the appearance of profane; but to supersede in some measure the obligation of the sacred laws, till these converts, convinced by degrees, and informed of the whole truth by the suggestions of the Holy Spirit, should be content to submit in earnest to the yoke of Christ.”[11]

Further important testimony is found in the following. Writing of the first three centuries after Christ, Max Müller says:

“That age was characterized far more than all before it, by a spirit of religious syncretism, an eager thirst for compromise. To mould together thoughts which differed fundamentally, to grasp, if possible, the common elements pervading all the multifarious religions of the world, was deemed the proper business of philosophy, both in the East and West. It was a period, one has lately said, of mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, Babylonia and Greece, were sitting together and gossiping like crazy old women, chattering with toothless gums and silly brains about the dreams and joys of their youth, yet unable to recall one single thought or feeling with that vigor which once gave it light and truth.

“It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mithra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity of the Teutonic nations.”[12]

Dr. Joseph Priestley says:

“The causes of the corruptions were almost wholly contained in the established opinions of the heathen world, and especially the philosophical part of it; so that when those heathens embraced Christianity, they mixed their former tenets and prejudices with it.... The abuse of the positive institutions of Christianity, monstrous as they were, naturally arose from the opinions of the purifying and sanctifying virtue of rites and ceremonies, which was the very basis of all the worship of the heathens.”[13]

Thebaud says:

“Therefore this same ‘high civilization,’ as it is called, in the midst of which Christianity was preached, was a real danger to the inward life of the new disciple of Christ.

“How could it be otherwise, when it is a fact, now known to all, that, even at the beginning of the fifth century, Rome was almost entirely pagan, at least outwardly and among her highest classes; so that the poet Claudian, in addressing Honorius at the beginning of his sixth consulship, pointed out to him the site of the Capitol, still crowned with the temple of Jove, surrounded by numerous pagan edifices, supporting in air an army of gods; and all around, temples, chapels, statues without number; in fact, the whole Roman and Greek mythology, standing in the city of the catacombs and of the pope.

“The public calendars, preserved to this day, continued to note the pagan festivals, side by side with the feasts of the Saviour and his apostles. Within the city and beyond, throughout Italy and the most remote provinces, idols and their altars were still surrounded by the thronging populace, prostrate at their feet.”[14]

Hardwick describes the tendency to reproduce pagan theories and customs in the early Church as follows:

“Or take again the swarm of heresies that soon invaded almost every province of the early Church. Abandoning, as they did, the more essential of the supernatural truths of revelation, they were virtually and in effect revivals of paganism, and family likenesses may accordingly be traced among the older speculations current in the schools of heathen philosophy. In discussing, for example, the nature of the divine Son-ship, Sabellius and his party taught a doctrine very similar to that already noticed in the Trimurrti of India; while Docetism, starting from a notion that the spiritual and the material cannot permanently co-exist, had merely reproduced the Hindu doctrine of Avataras. The inward correspondence in the texture of ideas had issued in a similar deprivation of revealed truth. Or if, penetrating below the surface, we investigate the elementary thoughts and feelings that hereafter found utterance in monastic institutions of the Church, we find that on one side those ideas are alien from the spirit of primitive Christianity, and on the other that they had long been familiar in the East, before they were appropriated or unconsciously reproduced among one class of Christians in Syria and Egypt. India was the real birthplace of monasticism, its cradle being in the haunts of earnest yogins, and self-torturing devotees, who were convinced that evil is inherent not in man only, but in all the various forms of matter, and accordingly withdrew as far as possible from contact with the outer world. At first, indeed, the Christian hermit, like the earliest of his Hindu prototypes, had dwelt alone on the outskirts of his native town, supporting himself by manual labor, and devoting all the surplus of his earnings to religious purposes.

“But during the fourth century of the present era many such hermits began to flock together in the forest, or the wilderness, where regular confraternities were organized upon a model more or less derived from the Egyptian Therapeutæ, and the old Essenes of Palestine; the members in their dress and habits most of all resembling those of the religious orders who still swarm in Thibet and Ceylon.”[15]

Maitland bears important testimony touching many points in which Christianity was paganized. He sums up the general results in the following concerning the worship of martyrs:

“The degrees of worship and adoration, since defined with fatal precision by the Romish Church, were not then fixed; and the heathen, even less willing than the Christian laity to enter into refinements on the subject, saw no distinction between one form and another. The consequences were disastrous in the extreme; the charge of idolatry, mutually urged by the contending parties, lost the force, or rather was effectively employed by the pagans, after it had become powerless in Christian hands. Thus it was that, although the pure doctrines of our faith speedily displaced the profligate polytheism of the empire, the after conflict was long doubtful, being maintained by a religion enfeebled by admixture with foreign elements, against one that had profited by adversity, and had not scrupled to borrow largely from its rival. We read in fable of the struggle between the man and the serpent, in which at length the combatants become transformed into the shapes of each other. In the last contest between paganism and Christianity we find the sophist contending for the unity of God, and accusing the Christian of undisguised polytheism; and on the other side the Christian insisting on the tutelary powers of glorified mortals, and the omniscience of departed spirits.”[16]

Similar testimony is borne by Seymore, who says:

“The apostasy of the Church of Rome will be more apparent when we reflect that the character of the mediation which Romanism ascribes to its saints is precisely the same as that which heathenism ascribes to its demi-gods. It was believed among the heathen that when a man became illustrious for his deeds, his conquests, his inventions, or aught else that distinguished him as a benefactor of mankind, he could be canonized and enrolled among inferior deities. He thus became a mediator whose sympathies with his fellow-men on the one hand, and whose merits with the gods on the other fitted him for the mediatorial office of bearing the prayers and wants of mortals to the presence of the gods. The heathen philosophers, Hesiod, Plato, and Apuleius, all thus speak of those persons. The last named philosopher says: ‘They are intermediate intelligences, by whom our prayers and wants pass unto the gods. They are mediators between the inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of heaven, carrying thither our prayers, and drawing down their blessings. They bear back and forwards prayers for us, and supplies for them; or they are those that explain between both parties, and who carry our adorations.’ This was the creed of heathenism, and in nothing but the name does it differ from the corresponding creed of Romanism. When the Church of Rome finds members of her communion whom she regards as signally pious, or illustrious for supposed miraculous powers, she holds that they be canonized and enrolled among her saints; that they can mediate between God and man; that they have sufficient favor or influence with God to obtain compliance with our prayers, and therefore they are fitting objects to whom our confessions, invocations, and prayers may be offered; or, as she expresses it in her creed, ‘that the saints reigning with Christ are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God for us.’ The principle of heathen Romanism, and the principle of Christian Romanism are one and the same, the only difference is in the details of the names. And the origin of the practice is demonstrative of this; for when it was found, after the establishment of Christianity in the times of Constantine, when the great object of the court was to promote uniformity of religion, that many of the heathen would outwardly conform to Christianity if allowed to retain in private their worship of their guardian or tutelar divinities, they were so allowed, merely on changing the names of Jupiter to Peter, or Juno to Mary, still worshipping their old divinities under new names, and even retaining old images that were baptized with Christian names. This is apparent in the writings of those times, and was thought a measure of wisdom, a stroke of profound policy, as tending to produce a uniformity of religion among the unthinking masses. The invocations of Juno have been transferred to Mary; the prayers to Mercury have been transferred to Paul. We see not how the substitution of the names of Damian or Cosmo, for those of Mercury or Apollo, or how the substitution of the names of Lucy or Cecelia, for those of Minerva or Diana, can alter the idolatrous character of the practice. In some instances they have not even changed the names, and Romulus and Remus are still worshipped in Italy, under the more modern names of St. Romulo and St. Remugio. The simple people believe them to have been two holy bishops. I have myself witnessed this near Florence, and even Bacchus is not without his votaries, under the ecclesiastical name of St. Bacco. The principle and practice of papal Rome are identical with the principle and practice of pagan Rome. Every argument to justify one may be equally urged to justify or extenuate the other. And if the principle and practice of pagan Rome are to be pronounced as idolatrous, I see not why the very same principle and practice in papal Rome should not be pronounced as idolatrous likewise.”[17]

In the light of all the facts Mr. Seymore cannot fasten the pagan residuum upon Romanism alone. The controlling trend into paganism was established before the papacy was developed; and if new forms of expression appeared afterward, they were but the fruitage of earlier tendencies.

Renan, speaking of the relation between the religious cultus of the Orient and early Christianity, says:

“This is the explanation of the singular attraction which about the beginning of the Christian era drew the population of the ancient world to the religions of the East. These religions had something deeper in them than those of Greece and Rome; they addressed themselves more fully to the religious sentiment. Almost all of them stood in some relation to the condition of the soul in another life, and it was believed that they held the warrant of immortality. Hence the favor in which the Thracian and Sabasian mysteries, the thiasi, and confraternities of all kinds, were held. It was not so chilly in these little circles, where men pressed closely together, as in the great icy world of that day. Little religions like the worship of Psyche, whose sole object was consolation for human mortality, had a momentary prevalence. The beautiful Egyptian worship, which hid a real emptiness beneath a great splendor of ritual, counted devotees in every part of the empire. Isis and Serapis had altars even in the ends of the world. A visitor to the ruins of Pompeii might be tempted to believe that the principal worship which obtained there was that of Isis. These little Egyptian temples had their assiduous worshippers, among whom were many of the same class as the friends of Catullus and Tibullus. There was a morning service; a kind of mass, celebrated by a priest, shorn and beardless. There were sprinklings of holy water; possibly benediction in the evening. All this occupied, amused, soothed. What could any one want more?

“But it was above all the Mithraic[18] worship which, in the second and third centuries, attained an extraordinary prevalence. I sometimes permit myself to say that, if Christianity had not carried the day, Mithraicism would have become the religion of the world. It had its mysterious meetings, its chapels, which bore a strong resemblance to little churches. It forged a very lasting bond of brotherhood between its initiates; it had a Eucharist, a supper so like the Christian mysteries that good Justin Martyr the Apologist can find only one explanation of the apparent identity, namely, that Satan, in order to deceive the human race, determined to imitate the Christian ceremonies, and so stole them. A Mithraic sepulchre in the Roman catacombs is as edifying, and presents as elevated a mysticism, as the Christian tombs.”[19]

Describing the earliest Christianity, Killen bears valuable testimony to the fact that the features of paganism which became prominent at a later period were wholly wanting in the earliest Christianity. He shows that the Church was Judaistic in forms and practice.

These are his words:

“A Roman citizen, when present for the first time at the worship of the Church, might have remarked how profoundly it differed from the ritual of paganism. The services in the great heathen temples were but an imposing scenic exhibition. The holy water for lustration, the statues of the gods with wax tapers burning before them, the officials robed in white surplices, and the incense floating in clouds and diffusing perfume all around, could only regale the sense or light up the imagination. No stated time was devoted to instruct the assembly; and the liturgy—often in a dead language—as it was mumbled over by the priest, merely added to the superstition and the mysticism. But the worship of the Church was, in the highest sense, a ‘reasonable service.’ It had no parade, no images, no fragrant odors; for the first hundred years it was commonly celebrated in private houses or the open fields; and yet it addressed itself so impressively to the understanding and the heart that the congregations of the faithful frequently presented scenes incomparably more spirit-stirring and sublime than anything ever witnessed in the high places of Greek or Roman idolatry....

“No individual or church court is warranted to tamper with symbolic ordinances of divine appointment; for as they are the typical embodiment of great truths, any change essentially vitiates their testimony. But their early administrators overlooking this grave objection, soon ceased to respect the integrity of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. In the third century a number of frivolous and superstitious ceremonies—such as exorcism, unction, the making of the sign of the cross on the forehead, and the kiss of peace—were already tacked to baptism; so that the beautiful significance of the primitive observance could not be well seen under these strange trappings. Before the middle of the second century the wine of the Eucharist was mixed with water; fifty years afterwards the communicants participated standing; and at length the elements themselves were treated with awful reverence. The more deeply to impress the imagination, baptism and the Eucharist began to be surrounded with the secrecy of the heathen mysteries, and none save those who had received the ordinances were suffered to be present at their dispensation. The ministers of the Church sadly compromised their religion when they thus imitated the meretricious decorations of the pagan worship. As might have been expected, the symbols so disfigured were misunderstood and misrepresented. Baptism was called regeneration, and the Eucharist was designated a sacrifice. Thus a door was opened for the admission of a whole crowd of dangerous errors.”[20]

The tendency to religious syncretism, during the early centuries, was a prolific source of corruption to New Testament Christianity. Speaking of the results of this tendency, and of the composite character of the religious cultus at Alexandria, in the time of Hadrian (117-138 A.D.), Canon Farrar says:

“There was no city in the empire in which a graver task was assigned to the great scholars and teachers of Christianity than the city of Alexandria. It was the centre of the most energetic intellectual vitality; and there, like the seething of the grapes in the vine cluster, the speculations of men of every religion and every nationality exercised a reciprocal influence on each other.

“A single letter of Hadrian presented by Vopiscus will show the confusion of thought and intermixture of religions which prevailed in that cosmopolitan city, and the aspect presented by its religious syncretism to a cool and cynical observer. ‘Those who worship Serapis,’ he says in a letter to a friend, ‘are Christians, and those who call themselves Bishops of Christ are votaries of Serapis. There is no ruler of a synagogue there, no Samaritan, no presbyter of the Christians, who is not an astrologer, who is not a soothsayer, who is not a gymnast. The patriarch of the Jews himself when he comes to Egypt is forced by one party to worship Serapis, by the other Christ. They have but one God who is no God; him Christians, him Jews, him all races worship alike.’ To the disdainful and sceptical mind of the emperor, who deified his own unhappy minion, Christianity, gnosticism, Judaism, paganism were all forms of one universal charlatanry and sham.”[21]

In writing of Leo the Great (440-461) founder of the papacy, Dean Merivale gives a graphic picture of the state of Christianity at that time. Space is here taken for a copious extract that the weight of Merivale’s name and words may add force to the facts. He says:

“It will be admitted, I trust, without entering upon disquisitions which would be inappropriate to this occasion, that the corruptions of Christian faith against which our own national Church and many others rose indignantly at the Reformation had for the most part struck their foundations deep in the course of the fifth century; that though they had sprung up even from an earlier period, and though they developed more in some directions, and assumed more fixity in the darker times that followed, yet the working of the true Christian leaven among the masses was never more faint, the approximation of Christian usage to the manners and customs of paganism never really closer, than in the age of which we are now speaking. We have before us many significant examples of the facility with which the most intelligent of the pagans accepted the outward rite of Christian baptism, and made a nominal profession of the faith, while they retained and openly practised, without rebuke, without remark, with the indulgence even of genuine believers, the rites and usages of the paganism they pretended to have abjured. We find abundant records of the fact that personages high in office, such as consuls and other magistrates, while administering the laws by which the old idolatries were proscribed, actually performed pagan rites, and even erected public statues to pagan divinities. Still more did men, high in the respect of their fellow-Christians, allow themselves to cherish sentiments utterly at variance with the definitions of the Church. Take the instance of the illustrious Bishop Synesius. Was he a Christian, was he a pagan; who shall say? He was famous in the schools of Alexandria as a man of letters, a teacher of the ancient philosophies, an admirer of the pagan Hypatia. The Christian people of Ptolemais, enchanted with his talents, demanded him for their bishop. He protests not indeed that he is an unbeliever—but that his life and habits are not suitable to so high an office. He has a wife whom he cannot abandon, as the manners of the age might require of him; whom he will not consort with secretly, as the manners of the age would, it seems, allow. ‘But further I cannot believe,’ he adds, ‘that the human soul has been breathed into flesh and blood; I will not teach that this everlasting world of matter is destined to annihilation; the resurrection, as taught by the Church, seems to me a doubtful and questionable doctrine. I am a philosopher, and cannot preach to the people popularly.’ In short, he maintains to all appearance that if he is a believer in Jesus Christ, he is a follower of Plato; and such doubtless were many others. The people leave him his wife and his opinions, and insist that he shall be their bishop. He retains his family ties, his philosophy, his Platonism, his rationalism, and accepts the government of the Church notwithstanding. Again we ask, was Synesius a Christian or a pagan? The instance of such a bishop, one probably among many, is especially significant; but the same question arises with regard to other men of eminence of the period. Was Boëthius, a century later, the imitator of Cicero, Christian or pagan? Was Simplicius, the commentator on Plato? Was Ausonius, the playful poet and amiable friend of the Bishop Paulinus, who celebrates Christ in one poem, and scatters his allusions to pagan mythology indiscriminately in many others? We know that Libanius, the intimate friend and correspondent of Basil, was a pagan of the pagans; but he did not on that account forfeit the confidence of a sainted father of the Christian Church. So indifferent as Christians seem to have been at this period to their own creed, so indifferent to the creed of their friends and associates, we cannot wonder if it has left us few or but slight traces of a vital belief in the principles of divine redemption.

“We must make, indeed, large allowance for the intellectual trials of an age of transition when it was not given to every one to see his way between the demands urged upon an intelligent faith by the traditions of a brilliant past on the one hand, and the intimations of an obscure and not a cheerful future on the other. We hardly realize, perhaps, the pride with which the schools of Athens and Alexandria still regarded their thousand years of academic renown, while the Christian Church was slowly building up the recent theological systems on which its own foundations were to be secured for the ages to follow. We need not complain of Leo, and other Christian doctors, if they shrank, as I think they did, from rushing again into polemics with the remnant of the philosophers, whose day, they might think, was sure to close at no distant date. But the real corruption of the age was shown in the unstinted adoption of pagan usages in the ceremonial of the Christian Church, with all the baneful effects they could not fail to produce on the spiritual training of the people. There are not wanting, indeed, passages in the popular teachings of St. Leo, in which he beats the air with angry denunciations of auguries, and sortilege, and magic, stigmatizes idolatry as the worship of demons, and the devil as the father of pagan lies. But neither Leo, nor, I think, the contemporary doctors of the Church, seem to have had an adequate sense of the process by which the whole essence of paganism was throughout their age constantly percolating the ritual of the Church and the hearts of the Christian multitude. It is not to these that we can look for a warning that the fasts prescribed by the Church had their parallel in the abstinence imposed by certain pagan creeds, and required to be guarded and explained to the people in their true Christian significance; that the monachism they extolled so warmly, and which spread so rapidly, was in its origin a purely pagan institution, common to the religions of India, Thibet, and Syria, with much, no doubt, to excuse its extravagance in the hapless condition of human life at the period, but with little or nothing to justify it in the charters of our Christian belief; that the canonizing of saints and martyrs, the honors paid them, and the trust reposed in them, were simply a revival of the old pagan mythologies; that the multiplication of formal ceremonies, with processions and lights and incense and vestments, with images and pictures and votive offerings, was a mere pagan appeal to the senses, such as can never fail to enervate man’s moral fibre; that, in short, the general aspect of Christian devotion, as it met the eye of the observer, was a faint and rather frivolous imitation of the old pagan ritual, the object of which, from first to last, was not to instruct, or elevate man’s nature, but simply to charm away the ills of life by adorning and beautifying his present existence.”[22]

Witness also the following from Westropp and Wake:

“In popular customs, and even in religious institutions, these things are as plainly perceived to-day as when Adonis and Astarte were the Gods of the former world. The sanctities, the powers, the symbols, and even the utensils of the ancient faith have been assumed, if not usurped or legitimately inherited, by its successors. The two holies of the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists, Sophia and Eirene—Wisdom and Peace—were adopted as saints in the calendar of Constantinople. Dionysius, the god of the mysteries, reappears as St. Denys in France, St. Liberius, St. Eleutherius, and St. Bacchus; there is also a St. Mithra; and even Satan, prince of shadows, is revered as St. Satur and St. Swithin. Their relics are in keeping. The holy virgin Astræa or Astarte, whose return was announced by Virgil in the days of Augustus, as introducing a new golden age, now under her old designation of Blessed Virgin and Queen of Heaven, receives homage as ‘the one whose sole divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates.’ The Mother and Child, the latter adorned with the nimbus or aureole of the ancient sun-gods, are now the objects of veneration as much as were Ceres and Bacchus, or Isis and Horus, in the mysteries. Nuns abounded alike in Christian and Buddhist countries, as they did formerly in Isis-worshipping Egypt; and if their maidenhood is not sacrificed at the shrine of Baal-Peor, or any of his cognate divinities, yet it is done in a figure; they are all ‘brides of the Saviour.’ Galli sing in the churches, and consecrated women are as numerous as of old. The priestly vestments are like those formerly used in the worship of Saturn and Cybele; the Phrygian cap, the pallium, the stole, and the alb. The whole Pantheon has been exhausted, from the Indus, Euphrates, and the Nile, to supply symbolic adornment for the apostles’ successors. Hercules holds the distaff of Omphale. The Lily has superseded the Lotus, and celibacy is exalted above the first recorded mandate of God to mankind....

“It is true, doubtless, that there is not a fast or festival, procession or sacrament, social custom or religious symbol, that did not come ‘bodily’ from the previous paganism. But the pope did not import them on his own account; they had already been transferred into the ecclesiastical structure, and he only accepted and perhaps took advantage of the fact. Many of those who protest because of these corruptions are prone to imitate them more or less, displaying an engrafting from the same stock.”[23]

A late German writer of note and authority, Lechler, thus states the relative influence of paganism and Judaism on early Christianity:

“Putting together all that has been said, we get the impression that, in respect to the Gentile Christians in the second half of the Apostolic age, heathenism was the vastly predominant power that partly from without threatened the Church, and partly from within prepared the most hazardous disputes. It was an anti-Christian gnosis proceeding from heathen ideas; frequently also a moral error stained with heathen licentiousness, that became dangerous to souls. On the other hand, according to all the documents of that later apostolic time that we possess, Judaism, broken as a political power, was no longer a dangerous opponent of the Church of Christ as a spiritual power; the time in which Judaizing errorists possessed a powerful influence over spirits was visibly passed.”[24]

With such a preview, made up from writers of such authority and ability, the fact of the existence of an immense amount of pagan residuum in Christianity is placed beyond question. The reader may be surprised; may shrink from such facts. But shrinking from facts, or denying them, does not remove or destroy them. Facts are immortal. He who will take the trouble to follow through the successive chapters will see by what means, and in what ways, Christianity was corrupted, and whence came the pagan residuum that yet remains. Suggestions in outline will also be found, as to how the remaining residuum can be removed.

CHAPTER II.
PAGAN METHODS OF INTERPRETING THE SCRIPTURES.

Contrast between the Christianity of the New Testament and That of the Later Centuries—Gnosticism and Allegorical Interpretation—Testimony of Harnack and Bauer Concerning the “Hellenization of Christianity”—Hatch on “Pagan Exegesis”—The “Fathers” as Allegorists; Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Barnabas, and Others—Examples: “The Red Heifer a Type of Christ”; “Spiritual Circumcision”; “Scriptural Significance of Foods”; “The Cross in the Old Testament”; “Why Are There One Hundred and Fifty Psalms?” “The Phœnix a Type of the Resurrection”; “Gnostic Exposition of the Decalogue”; “Types of Christ”; Various Examples from Augustine.

The student of history cannot fail to note the wide difference between the Christianity of the New Testament period and that of the fourth century. The religion which Christ taught was a direct outgrowth of Judaism. His mission was “not to destroy but to fulfil.” This He did by giving a higher conception and a broader view of all which Judaism had held hitherto. He gave a new meaning to the fatherhood of God. He explained and enforced the moral precepts of the Old Testament, developing their deeper spiritual sense, and giving them a new application to the inner life of men. He enlarged Judaism without destroying it. He clarified and intensified the ten commandments. He discarded the outward formalities of the Jews, and “reached the heart of things” by His interpretation of the ancient Scriptures, by His new precepts, and by His example. He developed Christianity within the Jewish Church, making it the efflorescence of all that was best in the ancient dispensation.

Christ presented love for God, for truth, and for man, as the mainspring of action in all religious living. Under His teachings Christianity arose as a new life, springing from the law of God, written in the hearts of men. New Testament Christianity was a life born of love, and finding expression in loving obedience. It was a system of right living, as in the divine presence, and by the help of the divine Spirit. Men were drawn to each other and to Christ by the power of this love. Such was Christianity at its birth.

The earliest Christian congregations were communities for holy living, upon the ground of a mutual faith in Christ. They expected still greater revelations of Him, and through Him, in the near future. The facts connected with His life and the memory of His teachings formed the soil in which Christianity had its earliest roots. A common hope and the struggle for holy living according to the law of God bound these communities together. They were made up of Jews alone, or of Jews and those Gentiles who had been converts to Judaism. Beyond this common hope there was no settled doctrine, no formal ecclesiastical organization. There were no written scriptures except the Old Testament. As the history of Christianity progressed, its enlarging spirit brought about a conflict with the narrower phases of Judaism, and hence more or less antagonism towards certain Judaistic interpretations of the Old Testament.

The Christianity of the third and fourth centuries presents the strongest possible contrast when placed alongside of that which existed during the New Testament period. The Sermon on the Mount was the promulgation of a new law of conduct. “The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts, and partly of dogmatic inferences.”[25] Some adequate reason must be found for this difference. How did this change in the central character of Christianity come to pass? By what influences was it transformed from a system of right living to a system of metaphysical belief; to right thinking rather than right doing? The answer is suggested by the fact that this change in character is contemporaneous with the transferring of Christianity from Semitic to Greek influence. Thus we are brought to face the fact that the religion of a given people at a given time bears certain definite relations to the mental attitude of that time. Religion is a part of common life which cannot be separated from its surroundings. While we may consider religious problems as distinct from other questions, they can never be understood except as a part of the complex life with which they are interwoven.

We therefore must commence by inquiring after the characteristics of the pagan world into which the infant Christianity passed when the stream of its history left the soil of Palestine and entered the field of Greek and Roman influences.

Gnosticism.

Long before the time of Christ the Oriental religions had developed a system of philosophy in which were the seeds of that which in later times was known as gnosticism. This claimed to hold within itself “the knowledge of God and of man, of the being and the providence of the former, and of the creation and destiny of the latter.”[26] In its journey westward this system had mingled with Jewish thought and given rise to the Kabbalists or Jewish Gnostics. In the Oriental religions all external phenomena expressed a hidden meaning. Applying this doctrine to the Scriptures, the Jewish Gnostics taught that a hidden meaning was to be found in all laws, ceremonies, and rituals. They invented the theory that a secret tradition had been handed down from the time of Moses; the interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures had been greatly perverted in this way. Gnosticism said: “Nothing is what it seems to be; everything tangible is the symbol of something invisible. By this means the history of the Old Testament was sublimated into a history of the emancipation of reason from sense.”[27] This application of the allegorical method of interpretation to the Old Testament enabled pagan philosophers to draw from it whatever fancies they chose. This method also favored a tendency among the early Christians to interpret the Old Testament so as to find upon every leaf of the book some reference to Christ and the Christian religion. Thus gnosticism had prepared the way for the obliteration of the concrete positiveness of the Old Testament, and destroyed its authority in a great degree.

The entire Grecian world was thoroughly permeated as to its literature and philosophy with the spirit and practice of gnosticism. It formed the bridge between Judaism on its intellectual side, and the Oriental, Grecian, and Egyptian cults. When the infant Christianity came in contact with Greek thought, gnostic influences and tendencies assailed it on every hand. Thus, through a gnostic element already within the Jewish Church, and the cultured, powerful gnostic influences in the pagan world, nascent Christianity was like the traveller from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves. The intellectual unrest of the age favored the process of corruption which went rapidly forward.

Biblical Exegesis.

Whatever touches the Bible and its interpretation touches Christianity at a vital point. The fundamental difference between the pagan gnosticism and Christianity lay in the fact that Christianity was a revealed religion, finding its beginning and end in the divine love and life unfolded in Christ Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. On the contrary, gnosticism found its source in human reasoning, human philosophy, and speculations.

Dr. Schaff describes its influence when he says:

“It exaggerates the Pauline view of the distinction of Christianity from Judaism, sunders Christianity from its historical basis, resolves the real humanity of the Saviour into a doketistic illusion, and perverts the freedom of the Gospel into Antinomian licentiousness. The author or first representative of this baptized heathenism, according to the uniform testimony of Christian antiquity, is Simon Magus, who unquestionably adulterated Christianity with pagan ideas and practices, and gave himself out, in pantheistic style, for an emanation of God. Plain traces of [of the existence of] this error appear in the later epistles of Paul to the Colossians, to Timothy, and to Titus, the second epistle of Peter, and the first two epistles of John, the epistle of Jude, and the messages of the Apocalypse to the seven churches.”[28]

This rapid survey of the field shows us that gnostic influences represent what Professor Harnack calls “The acute vulgarization of Christianity, or its Hellenization.” We are therefore prepared to accept his testimony relative to the influence of the Gnostics as formulators of Christian doctrine. The following are his words:

“Under this view the Gnostics should be given their place in the history of dogmas as has not been done hitherto. They are simply the theologians of the first century; they were the first to transform Christianity into a system of doctrines. They were the first to elaborate tradition systematically; they undertook to prove Christianity to be the absolute religion, and by it to hunt down all other religions, including Judaism; but to them the absolute religion, so far as its content was concerned, was identical with the results of religious philosophy, for which a revelation was to be sought as a foundation. Thus they became Christians who tried by quick measures to win Christianity for the Hellenic culture, and the Hellenic culture for Christianity. To this end they would surrender the Old Testament that they might make it more easy to establish the union between the two powers, and to gain the possibility of proclaiming the absoluteness of Christianity....

“We may also consider the majority of the gnostic efforts as efforts to transform Christianity into a theosophy, or, so to say, into a system of revealed metaphysics, with a complete disregard for the Jewish Old Testament foundation, on which it originated, and by the use of the Pauline ideas. We can also compare later writers, such as Barnabas and Ignatius, with the so-called Gnostics, by which the latter will be seen to possess a well formulated theory, and the former to be in possession of fragments which bear a remarkable likeness to said theory.”[29]

Bauer, a careful student of gnosticism, gives a description of its mission and methods which shows how it was prepared to exert such a controlling influence on the history of early Christianity, and how destructive that influence was in the matter of biblical interpretation. He says:

“Gnosis and allegory are essentially allied conceptions; and this affords us a very marked indication of the path which will really lead us to the origin of gnosticism; for we shall find that allegory plays an important part in most of its systems, especially in those which exhibit its original form.

“It is well known that allegory is the soul of the Alexandrian religious philosophy. Nothing else, indeed, can enable us to understand the rise of the latter, so closely is allegory interwoven with its very nature. Allegory is in general the mediator between philosophy and the religion which rests upon positive tradition. Wherever it is seen on a large scale, we notice that philosophical views have arisen side by side with, and independently of, the existing religion; and that the need has arisen to bring the ideas and doctrines of philosophy into harmony with the contents of the religious belief. In such circumstances, allegory appears in the character of mediator. It brings about the desired conformity by simply interpreting the belief in the sense of the philosophy. Religious ideas and narratives are thus clothed with a figurative sense, which is entirely different from their literal meaning. It was thus that allegory arose before the Christian time among the Greeks. The desire was felt first by Plato, and afterward still more strongly by the Stoics, to turn the myths of the popular religion to account on behalf of their philosophical ideas, and so to bridge over the gulf between the philosophical and the popular mind; and with this view they struck out the path of allegory, of allegorical interpretation of the myths. It is well known what extensive use the Stoics made of allegory when they wished to trace their own ideas of the philosophy of nature in the gods of popular belief, and the narratives concerning them.

“But in Alexandria, this mode of interpretation assumed still greater importance. Here it had to solve the weighty problem, how the new ideas that had forced their way into the mind and consciousness of the Jew, were to be reconciled with his belief in the authority of his sacred religious books. Allegory alone made it possible to him, on the one hand, to admire the philosophy of the Greeks, and in particular of Plato, and to make its ideas his own; and, on the other, to reverence the Scripture of the Old Testament as the one source of divinely revealed truth. The sacred books needed but to be explained allegorically, and then all that was wished for, even the boldest speculative ideas of the Greek mind, could be found in the books themselves. How widely this method was practised in Alexandria, may be judged from the writings of Philo, in which we see the most extensive use made of allegorical interpretation, and find the contents of the Old Testament blended intimately with everything that the systems of Greek philosophy could offer. But it would be quite erroneous to think that it was nothing but caprice and the unchecked play of fancy, that called forth this allegorical explanation of the Scriptures, which came to exercise such influence. For to the Alexandrian Jew, at the stage of scriptural development which he had now reached, with his consciousness divided between his ancestral Hebraism and modern Hellenism, this allegorizing was a necessary form of consciousness; and so little did he dream that the artificial link by which he bound together such diverse elements was a thing he had himself created, that all the truth which he accepted in the systems of Greek philosophy seemed to him to be nothing but an emanation from the Old Testament revelation.

“Now the gnostic systems also, for the most part, make very free use of the allegorical method of interpretation; and this is enough to apprise us that we must regard them under the same aspect as the Alexandrian religious philosophy. As far as we are acquainted with the writings of the Gnostics, we see them to have been full of allegorical interpretations, not indeed referring, as with Philo, to the books of the Old Testament (for their attitude toward the Old Testament was entirely different from his); but to those of the New, which were for the Gnostics what the books of the Old Testament were for Philo.

“In order to give their own ideas a Christian stamp, they applied the allegorical method, as much as possible, to the persons and events of the Gospel history, and especially to the numbers that occur in it. Thus for the Valentinians the number thirty in the New Testament, especially in the life of Jesus, was made to signify the number of their æons; the lost wandering sheep was for them their Achamoth; and even the utterances of Jesus, which contain a perfectly simple religious truth, received from them a sense referring to the doctrines of their system.

“The lately discovered Philosophoumena of the pseudo-Origen who undertook the task of refuting all the heresies show us even more clearly than before what an extensive use the Gnostics made of allegory.

“They applied it not merely to the books of the Old and New Testaments, but even the products of Greek literature, for instance, to the Homeric poems; their whole mode of view was entirely allegorical.

“The whole field of ancient mythology, astronomy, and physics, was laid under contribution to support their views. They thought that the ideas that were the highest objects of their thought and knowledge were to be found expressed everywhere.”[30]

Hatch offers important testimony as to the pagan elements in early exegesis, in these words:

“The earliest methods of Christian exegesis were continuations of the methods which were common at the time to both Greek and Græco-Judæan writers. They were employed on the same subject-matter. Just as the Greek philosophers had found their philosophy in Homer, so Christian writers found in him Christian theology. When he represents Odysseus as saying,[31] ‘The rule of many is not good; let there be one ruler,’ he means to indicate that there should be but one God; and his whole poem is designed to show the mischief that comes of having many gods.[32] When he tells us that Hephæstus represented on the shield of Achilles ‘the earth, the heaven, the sea, the sun that rests not, and the moon full-orbed,’[33] he is teaching the divine order of creation which he learned in Egypt from the books of Moses.[34] So Clement of Alexandria interprets the withdrawal of Oceanus and Tethys from each other to mean the separation of land and sea.[35] And he holds that Homer when he makes Apollo ask Achilles, ‘Why fruitlessly pursue him, a god,’ meant to show that the divinity cannot be apprehended by the bodily powers.[36]

“Some of the philosophical schools which hung upon the skirts of Christianity mingled such interpretations of Greek mythology with similar interpretations of the Old Testament. For example, the writer to whom the name Simon Magus is given, is said to have ‘interpreted in whatever way he wished both the writings of Moses and also those of the Greek poets’[37]; and the Ophite writer, Justin, evolves an elaborate cosmogony from a story of Herakles narrated in Herodotus,[38] combined with the story of the Garden of Eden.[39]...

“A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretation were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians. But the method was soon applied to new data. Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the Christian writers endeavored to show that the writings of the Hebrew preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm, the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the breath of God flowed in divine music into the soul.”[40]

The Fathers as Allegorists.

Beginning with Justin, the leaders of thought in the Church, from the middle of the second century, were men who had been brought up as pagan philosophers, or educated under pagan influence. It was therefore unavoidable that this corrupting system of exegesis should be applied to the books of the New Testament. This was done by the Gnostics, according to their theory that the true meaning of all writings was hidden. Christ’s life presented many difficulties to the philosophers. To explain its seeming contradiction, they resolved the mission of Christ into a series of superhuman movements, and the New Testament into a sort of hieroglyphic record of those movements. Instance: Simeon, taking the young Christ in his arms in the temple,

“was a type of the Demiurge, who, on the arrival of the Saviour, learned his own change of place, and gave thanks to Bythus. They also assert that by Anna, who is spoken of in the Gospel as a prophetess, and who, after living seven years with her husband, passed all the rest of her life in widowhood until she saw the Saviour, and recognized Him, and spoke of Him to all, was most plainly indicated Achamoth, who, having for a little while looked upon the Saviour with his associates, and dwelling all the rest of the time in the intermediate place, waited for Him till He should come again and restore her to her proper consort. Her name, too, was indicated by the Saviour when he said, ‘Yet wisdom is justified by her children.’ This, too, was done by Paul in these words, ‘But we speak wisdom among them that are perfect.’ They declare also that Paul has referred to the conjunctions within the Pleroma, showing them forth by means of one; for, when writing of the conjugal union in this life, he expressed himself thus: ‘This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the Church.’”[41]

Another instance is found in the interpretation which they made of the raising of Jairus’ daughter:

“They maintain further, that that girl of twelve years old, the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, whom the Lord approached and raised from the dead, was a type of Achamoth, to whom their Christ, by extending himself, imparted shape, and whom he led anew to the perception of that light which had forsaken her. And that the Saviour appeared to her when she lay outside of the Pleroma as a kind of abortion, they affirm Paul to have declared in his Epistle to the Corinthians (in these words): ‘And last of all, He appeared to me also, as to one born out of due time.’ Again, the coming of the Saviour with His attendants, to Achamoth is declared in like manner by him in the same epistle, when he says: ‘A woman ought to have a veil upon her head, because of the angels.’ Now that Achamoth, when the Saviour came to her, drew a veil over herself through modesty, Moses rendered manifest when he put a veil upon his face. Then, also, they say that the passions which she endured were indicated by the Lord upon the cross. Thus, when He said, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ he simply showed that Sophia was deserted by the light, and was restrained by Horos from making any advance forward. Her anguish again was indicated when He said, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death’; her fear by the words, ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’; and her perplexity, too, when He said, ‘And what I shall say, I know not.’”[42]

This Method Opposed by Some.

Some of the early Fathers, those who were least tinctured with Greek thought, especially Tertullian, opposed this method at the first. He declared that it was one of the arts of Satan, against which Christians must wrestle. But the system was too deep-seated in all the prevailing currents of influence to be displaced. Even while Tertullian was opposing it, it was tightening its grasp upon the Christian communities; a grasp which is by no means yet removed. Starting first at Alexandria and strengthened by the union of Greek philosophy and Hebrew theology, it gathered force like an increasing tide, and overwhelmed all other forms of exegesis. A pertinent example is found in Clement of Alexandria, in a philippic against the Sophists:

“Look to the tongue and to the words of the glozing man,

But you look on no work that has been done;

But each one of you walks in the steps of a fox,

And in all of you is an empty mind.”

Clement of Alexandria comments on this as follows:

“This, I think, is signified by the utterance of the Saviour, ‘The foxes have holes, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’ For on the believer alone, who is separated entirely from the rest, who by the Scripture are called wild beasts, rests the head of the universe, the kind and gentle Word, ‘Who taketh the wise in their own craftiness. For the Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain’; the Scripture calling those the wise (σοφοὺς) who are skilled in words and arts, sophists (σοφιστὰς).”[43]

In another place the story of the feeding of the multitude by Christ is explained in these words:

“And the Lord fed the multitude of those that reclined on the grass opposite to Tiberias with the two fishes and the five barley loaves, indicating the preparatory training of the Greeks and Jews previous to the divine grain, which is the food cultivated by the law. For barley is sooner ripe for the harvest than wheat; and the fishes signified the Hellenic philosophy that was produced and moved in the midst of the Gentile billow, given, as they were, for copious food to those lying on the ground, increasing no more, like the fragments of the loaves, but having partaken of the Lord’s blessing, had breathed into them the resurrection of God-head through the power of the Word. But if you are curious, understand one of the fishes to mean the curriculum of study, and the other the philosophy which supervenes. The gatherings point out the word of the Lord.”[44]

Christianity, according to the New Testament, could not be developed under such exegesis. These pagano-Christian leaders had still greater love for the allegorical method because it enabled them to “explain away” the difficulties which they found in considering Christianity—as they conceived of it—to be the product of the Old Testament. From the first they had identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge, the creator of the world and of matter, in which was only evil. They claimed that Jehovah could not make a revelation for all time, nor one worthy of their confidence. Hatch, speaking of the Old Testament, says:

“An important section of the Christian world rejected its authority altogether; it was the work, not of God, but of His rival, the god of this world; the contrast between the Old Testament and the New was part of the larger contrast between matter and spirit, darkness and light, evil and good. This was the contention of Marcion, whose influence upon the Christian world was far larger than is commonly supposed.”[45]

Further Examples.

Still further examples of the fanciful perversions of the Scriptures, by the Fathers, are presented in order that the reader may be left without a doubt as to the ruinous effects which the pagan allegorizing methods produced upon the infant Church.

The Epistle of Barnabas, falsely attributed to the companion of Paul, is a notable example of unmeaning allegories which totally pervert the Scriptures. Take the following examples:

“THE RED HEIFER A TYPE OF CHRIST.[46]

“Now what do you suppose this to be a type of, that a command was given to Israel, that men of the greatest wickedness should offer a heifer, and slay and burn it, and that then boys should take the ashes, and put these into vessels, and bind round a stick purple wool along with hyssop, and that thus the boys should sprinkle the people one by one, in order that they might be purified from their sins? Consider how he speaks to you with simplicity. The calf is Jesus; the sinful men offering it are those who led Him to the slaughter. But now the men are no longer guilty, are no longer regarded as sinners. And the boys that sprinkle are those that have proclaimed to us the remission of sins and purification of heart. To these He gave authority to preach the gospel, being twelve in number, corresponding to the twelve tribes of Israel. But why are there three boys that sprinkle? To correspond to Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, because these were great with God. And why was the wool [placed] upon the wood? Because by wood Jesus holds His kingdom, so that [through the cross] those believing on Him shall live forever. But why was hyssop joined with the wool? Because in His kingdom the days will be evil and polluted in which we shall be saved, [and] because he who suffers in body is cured through the cleansing efficacy of hyssop. And on this account the things which stand thus are clear to us, but obscure to them, because they did not hear the voice of the Lord.”[47]

Chapter ix. discusses the spiritual meaning of circumcision. The closing portion of the chapter is as follows:

“Yea, the Egyptians also practise circumcision. Learn then, my children, concerning all things richly, that Abraham, the first who enjoined circumcision, looking forward in spirit to Jesus, practised that rite, having received the mysteries of the three letters. For [the Scripture] saith, ‘And Abraham circumcised ten and eight and three hundred men of his household.’ What then was the knowledge given to him in this? Learn the eighteen first, and then the three hundred. The ten and the eight are thus denoted—ten by I, and eight by H. You have [the initials of] Jesus, and because the cross was to express the grace [of our redemption] by the letter T, he says also, ‘three hundred.’ He signifies, therefore, Jesus by two letters, and the cross by one. He knows this, who has put within us the engrafted gift of His doctrine. No one has been admitted by me to a more excellent piece of knowledge than this, but I know that ye are worthy.”[48]

The tenth chapter, which treats of the Spiritual Significance of the Precepts of Moses Respecting Different Kinds of Food, can be quoted only in part; portions of it are unfit for the public eye, and yet these portions, gross as they are, are solemnly set forth as an exegesis of Scripture. The chapter follows here, except the grosser sentences:

“Now, wherefore did Moses say, ‘Thou shalt not eat the swine, nor the eagle, nor the hawk, nor the raven, nor any fish which is not possessed of scales?’ He embraced three doctrines in his mind [in doing so]. Moreover, the Lord saith to them in Deuteronomy, ‘And I will establish my ordinances among this people.’ Is there then not a command of God that they should not eat [these things]? There is; but Moses spoke with a spiritual reference. For this reason he named the swine, as much as to say, ‘Thou shalt not join thyself to men who resemble swine,’ for when they live in pleasure they forget their Lord; but when they come to want they acknowledge the Lord. And [in like manner] the swine, when it has eaten, does not recognize its master; but when hungry it cries out, and on receiving food is quiet again. ‘Neither shalt thou eat,’ says he, ‘the eagle, nor the hawk, nor the kite, nor the raven.’ ‘Thou shalt not join thyself,’ he means, ‘to such men as know not how to procure food for themselves by labor and sweat, but seize on that of others in their iniquity, and, although wearing an aspect of simplicity, are on the watch to plunder others.’ So these birds, while they sit idle, inquire how they may devour the flesh of others, proving themselves pests [to all] by their wickedness. ‘And thou shalt not eat,’ he says, ‘the lamprey, or the polypus, or the cuttle-fish.’ He means, ‘Thou shalt not join thyself or be like to such men as are ungodly to the end, and are condemned to death.’ In like manner as those fishes above accursed, float in the deep, not swimming [on the surface] like the rest, but make their abode in the mud which lies at the bottom....

“Moses then issued three doctrines concerning meats with a spiritual significance; but they received them according to fleshly desire as if he had merely spoken of [literal] meats. David, however, comprehends the knowledge of the three doctrines, and speaks in like manner: ‘Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,’ even as the fishes [referred to] go in darkness to the depths [of the sea], ‘and hath not stood in the way of sinners,’ even as those who profess to fear the Lord, but go astray like swine; ‘and hath not sat in the seat of the scorners’ even as those birds that lie in wait for prey. Take a full and firm grasp of this spiritual knowledge. But Moses says still further, ‘Ye shall eat every animal that is cloven-footed and ruminant.’ What does he mean? [The ruminant animal denotes him] who on receiving food recognizes Him that nourishes him, and being satisfied by Him, is visibly made glad. Well spake [Moses] having respect to the commandment. What then does he mean? That we ought to join ourselves to those that fear the Lord, those who meditate in their heart on the commandment which they have received, those who both utter the judgments of the Lord and observe them, those who know that meditation is a work of gladness, and who ruminate upon the word of the Lord. But what means the cloven-footed? That the righteous man also walks in this world, yet looks forward to the holy state [to come]. Behold how well Moses legislated. But how was it possible for them to understand or comprehend these things? We then, rightly understanding his commandments, explain them as the Lord intended. For this purpose He circumcised our ears and our hearts, that we might understand these things.”[49]

Chapter xii. is a meaningless discussion of the cross as prefigured in the Old Testament. A part of the chapter will suffice.

“In like manner he points to the cross of Christ in another prophet, who saith, ‘And when shall these things be accomplished?’ And the Lord saith, ‘When a tree shall be bent down, and again arise, and when blood shall flow out of wood.’[50] Here again you have an intimation concerning the cross and Him who should be crucified. Yet again he speaks of this in Moses, when Israel was attacked by strangers. And that He might remind them, when assailed, that it was on account of their sins they were delivered to death, the Spirit speaks to the heart of Moses, that he should make a figure of the cross, and of Him about to suffer thereon; for unless they put their trust in Him they shall be overcome forever. Moses, therefore, placed one weapon above another in the midst of the hill, and standing upon it, so as to be higher than all the people, he stretched forth his hands, and thus again Israel acquired the mastery. But when again he let down his hands, they were again destroyed. For what reason? That they might know that they could not be saved unless they put their trust in Him. And in another prophet he declares, ‘All day long I have stretched forth my hands to an unbelieving people, and one that gainsays my righteous way.’ And again Moses makes a type of Jesus [signifying] that it was necessary for him to suffer, [and also] that He would be the author of life [to others] whom they believed, to have destroyed on the cross when Israel was falling.”[51]

Justin Martyr is an eminent example of one who perverted the Scriptures while claiming to explain them. Witness the following from the account of his conversion to Christianity:

“And when I had quoted this, I added, ‘Hear then how this man, of whom the Scriptures declare that He will come again in glory after His crucifixion, was symbolized both by the tree of life, which was said to have been planted in paradise, and by those events which should happen to all the just.’ Moses was sent with a rod to effect the redemption of the people; and with this in his hands, at the head of the people, he divided the sea. By this he saw the water gushing out of the rock; and when he cast a tree into the waters of Marah, which were bitter, he made them sweet. Jacob, by putting rods into the water troughs, caused the sheep of his uncle to conceive, so that he should obtain their young. With his rod the same Jacob boasts that he had crossed the river. He said that he had seen a ladder, and the Scripture has declared that God stood above it.

“But that this was not the Father we have proved from the Scriptures. And Jacob having poured oil on a stone in the same place is testified to by the very God who appeared to him, that he had anointed a pillar to the God who appeared to him. And that the stone symbolically proclaimed Christ, we have also proved by many Scriptures; and that the unguent, whether it was of oil or of stacte, or of any other compounded sweet balsams, had reference to Him we have also proved, inasmuch as the word says, ‘Therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.’ For indeed all kings and anointed persons obtained from Him their share in the names of kings and anointed; just as he himself received from the Father the titles of King, and Christ, and Priest, and Angel, and such like other titles which He bears or did bear. Aaron’s rod which blossomed, declared him to be the high priest. Isaiah prophesied that a rod would come forth from the root of Jesse [and this was] Christ. And David says that the righteous man is ‘like the tree that is planted by the channels of waters, which should yield its fruit in its season, and whose leaf should not fade.’ Again, the righteous is said to flourish like the palm tree. God appeared from a tree to Abraham, as it is written, near the oak in Mamre. The people found seventy willows and twelve springs after crossing the Jordan. David affirms that God comforted him with a rod and staff. Elisha, by casting a stick into the river Jordan, recovered the iron part of the axe with which the sons of the prophets had gone to cut down trees to build the house, in which they wished to read and study the law and commandments of God; even as our Christ, by being crucified on the tree, and by purifying [us] with water, has redeemed us, though plunged in the direst offences, which we have committed, and has made [us] a house of prayer and adoration. Moreover, it was a rod that pointed out Judah to be the father of Tamar’s sons by a great mystery.”[52]

Still more confusing fancies, under the name of exegesis, appear near the close of the Dialogue. Witness the following:

“‘You know then, sirs,’ I said, ‘that God has said in Isaiah to Jerusalem, “I saved thee in the deluge of Noah.”[53] By this, which God said, was meant that the mystery of saved men appeared in the deluge. For righteous Noah, along with the other mortals at the deluge, i. e., with his own wife, his three sons, and their wives, being eight in number, were a symbol of the eighth day wherein Christ appeared when He rose from the dead, forever the first in power. For Christ being the first-born of every creature, became again the chief of another race regenerated by Himself through water, and faith, and wood, containing the mystery of the cross; even as Noah was saved by wood when he rode over the waters with his household. Accordingly, when the prophet says, “I saved thee in the times of Noah,” as I have already remarked, he addresses the people who are equally faithful to God, and possess the same signs. For when Moses had the rod in his hands he led your nation through the sea. And you believe that this was spoken to your nation only, or to the land. But the whole earth, as the Scripture says, was inundated, and the water rose in height fifteen cubits above all the mountains; so that it is evident this was not spoken to the land, but to the people who obeyed Him, for whom also He had before prepared a resting-place in Jerusalem, as was previously demonstrated by all the symbols of the deluge; I mean that by water, faith, and wood, those who are afore prepared, and who repent of the sins which they have committed, shall escape from the impending judgment of God.’”[54]

Another illustration of the utterly unmeaning and fanciful interpretations of Scripture is found in Fragments from Commentaries on Various Books of Scripture, by Hippolytus, Bishop of Rome. He is explaining why there are one hundred and fifty psalms. The main reason adduced is that fifty is a sacred number, and the Psalms, on account of the destruction of God’s enemies, should contain not only one set of fifty, but three such, for the name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. The sacred character of the number fifty is explained as follows:

“The number fifty, moreover, contains seven sevens, or a Sabbath of Sabbaths, and also over and above these full Sabbaths, a new beginning in the eighth, of a really new rest that remains above the Sabbaths. And let any one who is able observe this [as it is carried out] in the Psalms with more, indeed, than human accuracy, so as to find out the reasons in each case, as we shall set them forth. Thus, for instance, it is not without a purpose that the eighth Psalm has the inscription, on the wine presses, as it comprehends the perfection of fruits in the eighth; for the time for the enjoyment of the fruits of the true vine could not be before the eighth. And again, the second Psalm inscribed, on the wine presses, is the eightieth, containing another eighth number, viz., in the tenth multiple. The eighty-third again is made up by the union of two holy numbers, viz., the eighth in the tenth multiple, and the three in the first multiple. And the fiftieth Psalm is a prayer for the remission of sins, and a confession. For, as according to the Gospel, the fiftieth obtained remission confirming thereby that understanding of the jubilee, so he who offers up such petitions in full confession hopes to gain remission in no other number than the fiftieth. And again there are also certain others which are called songs of degrees, in number fifteen, as was also the number of the steps of the temple, and which show thereby, perhaps, that the steps (or degrees) are comprehended within the number seven and the number eight. And these songs of degrees begin after the one hundred and twentieth Psalm, which is called simply a Psalm, as the more accurate copies give it. And this is the number of the perfection of the life of man. And the hundredth Psalm, which begins thus, I will sing of mercy and judgment, O Lord, embraces the life of the saint in fellowship with God. And the one hundred and fiftieth ends with these words, Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.”[55]

Clement of Rome, one of the earliest Fathers from whom anything genuine has come to our time, presents other prominent examples of myth and allegory, as follows:

“Let us consider that wonderful sign [of the resurrection] which takes place in Eastern lands, that is, in Arabia, and the countries round about. There is a certain bird which is called a phœnix. This is the only one of its kind, and lives five hundred years. And when the time of its dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices, into which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But as the flesh decays, a certain kind of worm is produced, which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird, brings forth feathers. Then when it has acquired strength, it takes up that nest in which are the bones of its parent, and, bearing these, it passes from the land of Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And in open day, flying in the sight of all men, it places them on the altar of the sun, and, having done this, hastens back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the registers of the dates, and finds that it has returned exactly as the five hundredth year was completed.”[56]

Here is a pagan sun-myth gravely set forth as fact, and made to illustrate a Christian truth; an example of what was common in the writings and theories of those who became leaders in the Church.

The Bible, with its simple truths and plain ethical teachings, was an insipid book to men whose tastes had become abnormal and perverted through feeding on such pagan fancies and superstitions.

One more example from Clement of Alexandria. It must be remembered that the “Christian” writers who condemn gnosticism as a heresy still claimed that there was a “true Christian gnosticism”; the difference between them and those whom they condemned was in degree more than in kind. The following extracts are from Clement’s Gnostic Exposition of the Decalogue. It needs little to show that when the law of God was thus expounded, its power and authority were practically destroyed. Such expositions were part and parcel of the lawlessness which was the unavoidable fruitage of gnosticism. Clement says:

“And the Decalogue, viewed as an image of heaven, embraces sun and moon, stars, clouds, light, wind, water, air, darkness, fire. This is the physical Decalogue of the heaven.

“And the representation of the earth contains men, cattle, reptiles, wild beasts; and of the inhabitants of the water, fishes and whales; and again of the winged tribes, those that are carnivorous, and those that use mild food; and of plants likewise, both fruit-bearing and barren. This is the physical Decalogue of the earth.

“And there is a ten in man himself: the five senses and the power of speech, and that of reproduction; and the eighth is the spiritual principle communicated at his creation; and the ninth, the ruling faculty of the soul; and tenth, there is the distinctive characteristic of the Holy Spirit, which comes to him through faith.

“Besides, in addition to these ten human parts, the law appears to give its injunctions to sight and hearing, and smell and touch and taste, and to the organs subservient to these, which are double the hands and the feet. For such is the formation of man. And the soul is introduced, and previous to it the ruling faculty, by which we reason, not produced in procreation; so that without it there is made up the number ten, of the faculties by which all the activity of man is carried out....

“Is not man, then rightly said ‘to have been made in the image of God’?—not in the form of his [corporeal] structure; but inasmuch as God creates all things by the Word (λόγῳ) and the man who has become a Gnostic performs good actions by the faculty of reason (τῷ λογικῷ) properly therefore the two tables are also said to mean the commandments that were given to the twofold spirits—those communicated before the law to that which was created, and to the ruling faculty; and the movements of the senses are both copied in the mind, and manifested in the activity which proceeds from the body.”[57]

Even Tertullian, who inveighed so strongly against certain phases of gnosticism, as represented in the Alexandrian schools, has given interpretations which are no less unreliable and fanciful than those which he condemns.

Hear him on “Types.”

“Types of the Death of Christ: Isaac, Joseph; Jacob against Simeon and Levi; Moses praying against Amalek; the Brazen Serpent.

“On the subject of his death, I suppose you endeavor to introduce a diversity of opinion, simply because you deny that the suffering of the cross was predicted of the Christ of the Creator, and because you contend, moreover, that it is not to be believed that the Creator would expose His son to that kind of death on which He had Himself pronounced a curse. ‘Cursed,’ says he, ‘is every one who hangeth on a tree.’ But what is meant by this curse, worthy as it is of the simple prediction of the cross, of which we are now mainly inquiring, I defer to consider, because in another passage, we have given the reason of the thing preceded by proof. First, I shall offer a full explanation of the types. And no doubt it was proper that this mystery should be prophetically set forth by types, and indeed chiefly by that method; for in proportion to its incredibility would it be a stumbling block, if it were set forth in bare prophecy; and in proportion, too, to its grandeur, was the need of obscuring it in shadow, that the difficulty of understanding it might lead to prayer for the grace of God. First, then, Isaac, when he was given up by his father, as an offering, himself carried the wood for his own death. By this act he even then was setting forth the death of Christ, who was destined by his Father as a sacrifice, and carried the cross whereon he suffered. Joseph, likewise, was a type of Christ, not, indeed, on this ground (that I may not delay my course) that he suffered persecution for the cause of God from his brethren, as Christ did from his brethren after the flesh, the Jews; but when he is blessed by his father in these words, ‘His glory is that of a bullock; his horns are the horns of a unicorn; with them shall he push the nations to the very ends of the earth,’—he was not, of course, designated as a mere unicorn with its one horn, or a minotaur with two; but Christ was indicated in him—a bullock in respect of both His characteristics; to some as severe as a judge, to others gentle as a Saviour, whose horns were the extremities of his cross. For of the antenna, which is a part of a cross, the ends are called horns; while the midway stake of the whole frame is the unicorn. By this virtue, then, of His cross, and in this manner horned, He is both now pushing all nations through faith, bearing them away from earth to heaven; and will then push them through judgment, casting them down from heaven to earth. He will also, according to another passage in the same Scripture, be a bullock when he is spiritually interpreted to be Jacob against Simeon and Levi, which means against the scribes and the pharisees; for it was from them that these last derived their origin. [Like] Simeon and Levi, they consummated their wickedness by their heresy, with which they persecuted Christ. ‘Into their counsel let not my soul enter; to their assembly let not my heart be united; for in their anger they slew men,’ that is, the prophets; ‘and in their self-will they hacked the sinews of a bullock,’ that is, of Christ. For against Him did they wreak their fury, after they had slain His prophets, even by affixing Him with nails to the cross. Otherwise it is an idle thing, when, after slaying men, he inveighs against them for the torture of a bullock. Again, in the case of Moses, wherefore did he at that moment particularly, when Joshua was fighting Amalek, pray in a sitting posture with outstretched hands, when in such a conflict it would surely have been more seemly to have bent the knee, and smitten the breast, and to have fallen on the face to the ground, and in such prostration to have offered prayer? Wherefore, but because in a battle fought in the name of that Lord who was one day to fight against the devil, the shape was necessary of that very cross through which Jesus was to win the victory? Why, once more, did the same Moses, after prohibiting the likeness of everything, set up the golden serpent on the pole, and, as it hung there, propose it as an object to be looked at for a cure? Did he not here also intend to show the power of our Lord’s cross, whereby that old serpent, the devil, was vanquished—whereby also to every man who was bitten by spiritual serpents, but who yet turned with an eye of faith to it, was proclaimed a cure from the bite of sin, and health for evermore?”[58]

The allegorizing method continued with great pertinacity. Augustine, the master mind of the fifth century, whose influence yet abounds in the doctrines of both Catholics and Protestants, was under its sway. With him, as with those who preceded him, this allegorical interpretation perverted the Scriptures and obscured truth. A single instance must suffice:

“Hence, also, in the number of the large fishes which our Lord, after His resurrection, showing this new life, commanded to be taken on the right side of the ship, there is found the number fifty, three times multiplied with the addition of three more [the symbol of the Trinity] to make the holy mystery more apparent; and the disciples’ nets were not broken, because in that new life there shall be no schism, caused by the disquiet of heretics. Then [in this new life] man, made perfect and at rest, purified in body and in soul, by the pure words of God which are like silver purged from its dross, seven times refined, shall receive his reward, the denarius. So that with that reward the numbers ten and seven meet in Him. For in this number seventeen [there is found] as in other numbers representing a combination of symbols, a wonderful mystery. Nor is it without good reason that the seventeenth Psalm is the only one which is given complete in the Book of Kings, because it signifies that kingdom in which we shall have no enemy. For its title is, ‘A Psalm of David in the day that the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.’ For of whom is David the type, but of Him who, according to the flesh, was born of the seed of David? He, in His church, that is, in His body, still endures the malice of enemies. Therefore the words which from heaven fell upon the ear of that persecutor whom Jesus slew by His voice, and whom He transformed into a part of His body (as the food which we use becomes a part of ourselves), were these: ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ And when shall this His body be finally delivered from enemies? Is it not when the last enemy, death, shall be destroyed? It is to that time that the number of the one hundred and fifty-three fishes pertains. For if the number seventeen itself be the side of an arithmetical triangle, formed by placing above each other rows of units, increasing in number from one to seventeen, the whole sum of these units is one hundred and fifty-three: since one and two make three; three and three, six; six and four, ten; ten and five, fifteen; fifteen and six, twenty-one; and so on: continue this up to seventeen, the total one hundred and fifty-three.”[59]

The foregoing examples are neither isolated nor peculiar. They represent fully and fairly the prevailing methods of exegesis, falsely so called. Such men shaped the faith and governed the thought of Christianity west of Palestine after the middle of the second century. Other fruitage of their system will be found in another chapter, in the Antinomian and anti-Sabbath doctrines by which the authority of Jehovah and His word were still further undermined. A careful examination of the entire group of “Christian writings” of the first five centuries shows that the age was uncritical and utterly wanting in the learning and habits of thought which prepare men to interpret the Bible. It was brought down to the level of the pagan books with which these men were familiar, both as to its authority and as to the methods by which its meaning was sought. Indeed, its real meaning was not sought; the main effort was to show how it accorded with pagan books, and with the philosophical speculations which were popular. If, in any case, it was recognized as the supreme authority, the prevailing methods of interpretation obscured and perverted its meaning, so that men were not governed by what it really taught. Men who did not have clear and correct views of the Bible could not impart them to others. The masses did not possess copies of the Bible, and could not have interpreted it critically had it been in their hands. Killen declares these Fathers to be untrustworthy and incompetent interpreters of the Bible. These are his words:

“Earlier writers, such as Origen or Clement of Alexandria, frequently expounded the word of God in the way in which Neo-Platonists explained the pagan mythology—that is, they regard it as an allegory from which they extract whatever meaning happens to be most agreeable to themselves—and too many continued to adopt the same system of interpretation. But among the Fathers of the fourth century there were some who followed sounder principles of exegesis, and carefully investigated the literal sense of the holy oracles. Still, comparatively few of the Christian writers even of this period are very valuable as biblical interpreters. These authors occasionally contradict themselves, and, without acknowledgment, copy most slavishly from each other. Jerome argues that the great duty of an expositor is, not so much to exhibit the mind of the Spirit, as to set before the reader the conflicting sentiments of interpreters....

“But though we discover in these Fathers so many traces of human infirmity, we must make allowance for the time in which they lived, and for the prejudices in which they were educated. Christianity passed through a terrible ordeal when it suddenly became the religion of the Empire. Society was by no means prepared for so vast a change. Already the Gospel had suffered sadly from adulteration, and now it was more rapidly deteriorated. Many who were quite uninstructed became pastors of the Church; pagan forms and ceremonies were incorporated with its ritual; pagan superstitions were recognized as principles of action; and pagan philosophy corrupted theological science. A dense cloud of errors soon overspread the whole spiritual firmament.”[60]

This chapter may well close with the following quotation from Uhlhorn, which shows how nearly Christianity was ruined through the prevalence of this gnostic allegorizing system, which obscured or perverted the meaning of the Scriptures, and destroyed their authority. He says:

“I have already called gnosticism the antipode of montanism. Such indeed it was. If montanism was over-narrow, here we find an all-embracing breadth. Gnosticism knew how to utilize every mental product of the age. Elements, Oriental and Occidental, in a curious medley, philosophy and popular superstition—all were collected and used as materials for the building of gnostic systems. The myths of the heathen may be found side by side with the Gospel histories, which were only myths to the gnostic. One proof text is taken from the Bible, and the next from Homer or Hesiod, and both alike are used by an allegorical exegesis to support the ready-made creations of the author’s fancy. Breadth enough, too, in morality; no trembling fear of pollution, no anxious care to exclude the influence of heathenism. It was no fiction inspired by the hatred of heresy, when the gnostics were said to be very lax in their adhesion to the laws of morality. Many of them expressly permitted flight from persecution.

“Gnosticism extended far and wide in the second century. There was something very imposing in those mighty systems which embraced heaven and earth. How plain and meagre in comparison seemed simple Christianity! There was something remarkably attractive in the breadth and liberality of gnosticism. It seemed completely to have reconciled Christianity with culture. How narrow the Christian Church appeared! Even noble souls might be captivated by the hope of winning the world over to Christianity in this way; while the multitude was attracted by the dealing in mysteries with which the gnostic sects fortified themselves by offering mighty spells and amulets, thus pandering to the popular taste. Finally some were no doubt drawn in by the fact that less strictness of life was required, and that they could thus be Christians without suffering martyrdom.

“But the victory of gnosticism would have been the ruin of Christianity. Christianity would have split into a hundred sects, its line of division from heathenism would have been erased, its inmost essence would have been lost, and instead of producing something really new, it would have become only an element of the melting mass, an additional ingredient in the fermenting chaos of religions which characterized the age.”[61]

When the fountain of formative Christianity was thus widely and early corrupted, what wonder that the banks of the stream are covered with pagan débris, and that the waters are yet turbid from its sediment?

CHAPTER III.
ASIATIC PAGAN WATER-WORSHIP.

Fundamental Corruption of Christian Baptism through Pagan Water-Worship—“Baptismal Regeneration,” the Product of Paganism—Spiritual Purity Sought through Pagan Baptism—Testimonies from Jamblicus, Virgil, Ovid, Herodotus, Juvenal, and others—Baptism and Serpent-Worship—Baptism and Egyptian Sun-Worship—The Sacred Nile—The Prevalence of Water-Worship in India—Sacred Wells—Sacred Rivers—Modern Buddhistic and Modern Hindu Baptism.

Corrupting Influence of Pagan Water-Worship.

The work of corrupting Christianity went forward systematically, as though an enemy planned to undermine its fundamental truths and ruin the Church through internal errors. When allegorical methods had shorn the Bible of authority, and pushed God, as represented in his word, far away from men, the next important step was to corrupt the developing Church by a false standard of membership, thus planting a sure seed of decay in its heart. In New Testament Christianity, baptism—submersion in water—was the outward symbol of a new spiritual life, beginning through faith and repentance. As such it had a specific meaning, and from the earliest times formed the door to membership in the Christian communities. He who accepted Christ as the Messiah, testified such acceptance by being “buried with him in baptism.” This was the sign of an inward purity which entitled the believer to a place in the community, and to the fellowship of “those who believed.”

It was not the agent by which purity was produced, nor the source from which the new spiritual life sprung. All this was changed by introducing the pagan idea. The materials for such a corrupting process were fully developed in the pagan world.

Various forms of baptism, and the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, were common characteristics of pagan religion before the birth of Christ.

The pagan water-worship cult is secondary only to sun-worship, in age and extent. Its native home was in the East, but it appears in all periods and on both hemispheres. It had two phases: water as an object of worship, and as a means of inspiration; and water used in religious ceremonies to produce spiritual purity. These phases often mingle with each other.

This reverence for water, and faith in its cleansing efficacy, arose from the idea that it was permeated by the divine essence, from which it had supernatural power to enlighten and purify the soul, without regard to the spiritual state of the candidate. This doctrine of baptismal regeneration was transferred to Christianity before the close of the second century, and through it the Church was filled rapidly with baptized but unconverted pagans.

Sun-worship and water-worship were closely united in the pagan cultus, as they were in the corrupted Christian baptism. For instance, one fountain noted by Jamblicus is described thus, by Bryant:

“From this history of the place we may learn the purport of the name by which this oracular place was called. Colophon is Col-Oph-On, Tumulus Dei Solis Pythonis, and corresponds with the character given. The river into which this fountain ran was sacred, and named Halesus; it was called Anelon, An-El-On, Fons Dei Solis. Halesus is composed of well known titles of the same God.”[62]

The following are the words of Jamblicus:

“It is acknowledged then by all men that the oracle in Colophon gives its answers through the medium of water. For there is a fountain in a subterranean dwelling from which the prophetess drinks; and on certain established nights after many sacred rites have been previously performed, and she has drunk of the fountain, she delivers oracles, but is not visible to those that are present. That this water, therefore, is prophetic is from hence manifest. But how it becomes so, this, according to the proverb, is not for every man to know. For it appears as if a certain prophetic spirit pervaded through the water. This is not, however, in reality the case. For a divine nature does not pervade through its participants in this manner, according to interval and division, but comprehends, as it were, externally, and illuminates the fountain, and fills it from itself with a prophetic power. For the inspiration which the water affords is not the whole of that which proceeds from a divine power, but the water itself only prepares us, and purifies our luciform spirit, so that we may be able to receive the divinity; while in the meantime, there is a presence of divinity prior to this, and illuminating from on high.”[63]

Of another oracle Jamblicus says:

“The prophet woman too, in Branchidæ, whether she holds in her hand a wand, which was at first received from some God, and becomes filled with a divine splendor, or whether seated on an axis, she predicts future events, or dips her feet, or the border of her garment in the water, or receives the God by imbibing the vapor of the water; by all these she becomes adapted to partake externally of the God.”[64]

Jamblicus also states that baths were a part of the preparation for being thus inspired. The same combination is shown by Virgil, in the following:

“He started up, and viewing the rising beams of the ethereal sun, in his hollow palms with pious form he raised water from the river, and poured forth to heaven these words: ‘Ye nymphs, ye Laurentine nymphs, whence rivers have their origin; and Thou, O Father Tiber, with thy sacred river, receive Æneas and defend him at length from dangers. In whatever source thy lake contains thee, compassionate to our misfortunes, from whatever soil thou springest forth most beauteous, hornbearing river, monarch of the Italian streams, ever shalt thou be honored with my veneration, ever with my offerings. O grant us thy present aid, and by nearer aid confirm thy divine oracles.’”[65]

Ovid, describing the feast of Pales, held in May, exhibits the same combination of sun and water-worship:

“Often in truth have I leaped over the fires placed in three rows, and the dripping bough of laurel has flung the sprinkled waters.... Shepherd, purify the full sheep at the beginning of twilight, let the water first sprinkle them, and let the broom made of twigs sweep the ground.... Protect thou alike the cattle, and those who tend the cattle, and let all harm fly afar, repelled from my stalls. Let that happen which I pray for, and may we at the close of the year offer cakes of goodly size to Pales, the mistress of the shepherds. With these words must the goddess be propitiated; turning to the East, do you repeat these words three times, and in the running stream thoroughly wash your hands.”[66]

In another place Ovid tells us of Deucalion and Pyrrha, resolving to seek the sacred oracles, in prayer, at the temple of the goddess Themis; he says:

“There is no delay; together they repair to the waters of Cephissus, though not yet clear, yet now cutting their wonted channel. Then when they had sprinkled the waters poured on their clothes and their heads, they turn their steps to the temple of the sacred goddess, the roof of which was defiled with foul moss, and whose altars were standing without fires.”[67]

The same combination appears among the Persians. Herodotus, describing the crossing of the Hellespont by Xerxes on his way to the invasion of Greece, says:

“That day they made preparations for the passage over; and on the following they waited for the sun, as they wished to see it rising, in the meantime burning all sorts of perfumes on the bridges, and strewing the road with myrtle branches. When the sun rose, Xerxes, pouring a libation into the sea out of a golden cup, offered up a prayer to the sun, that no such accident might befall him as would prevent him from subduing Europe, until he had reached its utmost limits. After having prayed, he threw the cup into the Hellespont, and a golden bowl and a Persian sword, which they call acinace. But I cannot determine with certainty, whether he dropped these things into the sea as an offering to the sun, or whether he repented of having scourged the Hellespont and presented these gifts to the sea as a compensation.”[68]

Purity Sought through Baptism.

The pagan conception that water produced spiritual purity was expressed in many ways. Juvenal describes the custom of Roman women who sought to expiate their sins, committed in licentious revelries, as follows:

“She will break the ice and plunge into the river in the depth of winter, or dip three times in the Tiber at early dawn, and bathe her timid head in its very eddies, and thence emerging, will crawl on bending knees, naked and shivering, over the whole field of the haughty kings [the Campus Martius]. If white Io command, she will go to the extremity of Egypt, and bring back water fetched from scorching Meroe, to sprinkle on the temple of Isis, that rears itself hard by the sheep-fold. For she believes that the warning is given her by the voice of the goddess herself.”[69]

Mithraic and Gnostic Baptism.

The conception that water cleansed from sin was a prominent feature in Mithraicism and in gnosticism. King, who is authority on all gnostic questions, says:

“In my account of Mithraicism, notice has been taken of the very prominent part that sacraments for the remission of sin play in the ceremonial of that religion; the following extracts from the grand Gnostic text-book will serve to show how the same notions, (and probably forms) were transferred to the service of Gnosticism.

“‘Baptism Remitting Sins.’—(Pistis-Sophia) (298).

“‘Then came forth Mary and said: Lord, under what form do baptisms remit sins? I have heard thee saying that the Ministers of Contentions (ἐριδαῖοι)[70] follow after the soul, bearing witness against it of all the sins that it hath committed, so that they may convict it in the judgments. Now, therefore, Lord, do the mysteries of Baptism blot out the sins that be in the hands of the Receivers of Contention, so that they shall utterly forget the same? Now, therefore, Lord, tell us in what form they remit sins; for we desire to know them thoroughly. Then the Saviour answered and said: Thou hast well spoken; of truth those Ministers are they that testify against all sins, for they abide constantly in the places of judgment, laying hold upon the souls, convicting all the souls of sinners who have not received the mystery, and they keep them fast in chaos tormenting them. But these contentious ones cannot pass over chaos so as to enter into the courses that be above chaos; in order to convict the souls therefore receiving the mysteries, it is not lawful for them to force so as to drag them down into chaos, where the Contentious Receivers may convict them. But the souls of such as have not received the mysteries, these do they desire and hail into chaos; whereas the souls that have received the mysteries, they have no means of convicting, seeing that they cannot get out of their own place, and even if they did come forth, they could not stop those souls, neither shut them up in their chaos. Hearken, therefore, I will declare to you in truth in what form the mystery of Baptism remitteth sins. If the souls when yet living in the world have been sinful, the Contentious Receivers verily do come, that they may bear witness of all the sins they have committed, but they can by no means come forth out of the regions of chaos, so as to convict the soul in the places of judgment that be beyond chaos. But the counterfeit of the spirit testifies against all the sins of the soul, in order to convict it in the places of judgment that be beyond chaos. Not only doth it testify, but also sets a seal upon all the sins of the soul, so as to print them firmly upon the soul, that all the Rulers of the judgment place of the sinners may know that it is the soul of a sinner, and likewise know the number of sins which it hath committed from the seals that the counterfeit of the spirit hath imprinted upon it, so that they may punish the soul according to the number of its sins; this is the manner in which they treat the soul of a sinner. (300) Now, therefore, if any one hath received the mysteries of Baptism, those mysteries become a great fire, exceeding strong and wise, so as to burn up all the sins; and the Fire entereth into the soul secretly, so that it may consume within it all the sins which the counterfeit of the spirit hath printed there. Likewise it entereth into the body secretly, that it may pursue all its pursuers, and divide them into parts—for it pursueth within the body, the counterfeit of the spirit, and Fate—so that it may divide them apart from the Power and the Soul, and place them in one part of the body—so that the fire separates the counterfeit of the spirit, Fate, and the Body into one portion, and the Soul and the Power into another portion. The mystery of Baptism remaineth in the middle of them, so that it may perpetually separate them, so that it may purge and cleanse them in order that they may not be polluted by Matter. Now, therefore, Mary, this is the manner whereby the mystery of Baptism remitteth sins and all transgressions.

(301) “‘And when the Saviour had thus spoken, he said to his disciples: Do ye understand in what manner I speak with you? Then came forth Mary saying: Of a truth, Lord, I perceive in reality all the things that thou hast said. Touching this matter of the Remission of Sins, thou speaketh aforetime to us in a parable, saying: I am come to bring fire upon the earth, nay more; let it burn as much as I please. And, again thou hast set it forth openly, saying: I have a baptism wherewith I will baptize and how shall I endure until it be accomplished? Ye think that I am come to bring peace upon the earth? By no means so, but dissension, which I am come to bring. For from this time forth there shall be five in one house; three shall be divided against two, and two against three. This, Lord, is the word that thou speakest openly. But concerning the word that thou spakest: I am come to bring fire upon the earth, and let it burn so much as I please; in this thou hast spoken of the mystery of Baptism in the world, and let it burn as much as thou pleasest for to consume all the sins of the soul, that it may purge them away. And again thou hast shewn the same forth openly, saying: I have a baptism wherewith I will baptize, and how shall I endure until it be accomplished? The which is this: Thou wilt not tarry in the world until the baptisms be accomplished to purify all the perfect souls. And again what thou spakest unto us aforetime: “Do ye suppose I am come to bring peace upon earth,” etc. (302) This signifieth the mystery of Baptism which thou hast brought into the world, because it hath brought about dissension in the body of the world, because it hath divided the Counterfeit of the spirit, the Body, and the Fate thereof, into one party, and the Soul and the Power into the other party. The same is, “There shall be three against two, and two against three.” And when Mary had spoken these things the Saviour said: Well done thou spiritual one in the pure light, this is the interpretation of my saying.’”[71]

The opinion of Simon Magus, a representative Gnostic, concerning baptism is expressed by King thus:

“The Kabbalists, or Jewish Gnostics, like Simon Magus, found a large portion of apostolic teaching in accordance with their own, and easily grafted upon it so much as they liked. Again the Divine power of working miracles possessed by the Apostles and their successors, naturally attracted the interest of those whose chief mystery was the practice of magic. Simon the Magician was considered by the Samaritans to be ‘the great Power of God’; he was attracted by the miracles wrought by the Apostles, and no doubt he sincerely ‘believed’—that is, after his own fashion. His notion of Holy Baptism was probably an initiation into a new mystery, with a higher Gnosis than he possessed before, and by which he hoped to be endued with higher powers; and so likewise many of those who were called Gnostic Heretics by the Christian Fathers, were not Christians at all, only they adopted so much of the Christian doctrine as accorded with their system.”[72]

Baptism of Blood.

The importance which the sun-worship cult attached to baptism is further shown in the baptism of blood, which formed a prominent feature in the Mithraic system of atonement and spiritual enlightenment. This is commented upon by King as follows:

“The ‘Taurobolia,’ or Baptism of Blood, during the later ages of the Western Empire, held the foremost place, as the means of purification from sin, however atrocious. Prudentius has left a minute description of this horrid rite, in which the person to be regenerated, being stripped of his clothing, descended into a pit, which was covered with planks pierced full of holes; a bull was slaughtered upon them whose hot blood, streaming down through these apertures (after the fashion of a shower-bath) thoroughly drenched the recipient below. The selection of the particular victim proves this ceremony in connection with the Mithraic, which latter, as Justin says, had a ‘baptism for the remission of Sins’; and the Bull being in that religion the recognized emblem of life, his blood necessarily constituted the most effectual laver of regeneration. No more conclusive evidence of the value then attached to the Taurobolia can be adduced, than the fact mentioned by Lampridius that the priest-emperor Heliogabalus thought it necessary to submit to its performance; and a pit, constructed for the purpose as late as the fourth century, has lately been discovered within the sacred precincts of the Temple at Eleusis, the most holy spot in all Greece.”[73]

Baptism at Death, and for the Dead.

The following throws light upon the pagan origin of baptism as a saving act, at death, and after death. Describing the nature of the mystic formulæ which the Gnostics used, King says:

“The motive for placing in the coffin of the defunct illuminato these ‘words of power’ graven on scrolls of lead, plates of bronze, the gems we are considering, and doubtless to an infinitely greater extent on more perishable materials, derives much light from the description Epiphanius gives of the ceremony whereby the Heracleonitæ prepared their dying brother for the next world. They sprinkled his head with water, mingled with oil, and opobalsamum, repeating at the same time the form of words used by the Marcosians in baptism, in order that his Inner Man, thus provided, might escape the vigilance of the Principalities and Powers whose domains he was about to traverse, and mount up unseen by any to the Pleroma from which he had originally descended. Their priests therefore instructed the dying man that as he came before these Powers he was to address them in the following words: ‘I, the son from the Father, the Father pre-existing, but the son in the present time, am come to behold all things, both of others and of my own, and things not altogether of others, but belonging unto Achamoth (Wisdom) who is feminine, and hath created them for herself. But I declare my own origin from the Pre-existing One, and I am going back unto my own from which I have descended.’ By the virtue of these words he will elude the Powers and arrive at the Demiurgus in the eighth sphere, whom again he must thus address: ‘I am a precious vessel, superior to the female power who made thee, inasmuch as thy mother knoweth not her own origin, whereas I know myself, and I know whence I am; and I invoke the Incorruptible Wisdom who is in the father and in the mother of your mother who hath no father—nay, not even a male consort, but being a female sprung from a female that created thee, though she herself knows not her mother, but believes herself to exist alone. But I invoke the mother.’ At this address the Demiurgus is struck with confusion (as well he might be) and forced to acknowledge the baseness of his origin; whereupon the inner man of the Gnostic casts off his bondage as well as his own angel or soul, which remains with the Demiurgus for further use, and ascends still higher into his proper place.”[74]

We shall find that this pagan conception became very prominent in the early Church. The “being baptized for the dead,” of which Paul speaks, and which was much practised after the second century, sprang from this source; also delaying baptism until the moment of death.

Baptism and Serpent-Worship.

The serpent worshippers formed a prominent branch of the Gnostics, if they were not the originators of the system. Water-worship was a special and fundamental idea in their creed. Witness the following from King.

“The well-informed and temperate Hippolytus, writing at the most flourishing period of these transitional theosophies, thus opens his actual ‘Refutation of All Heresies,’ and his Fifth Book with the description ‘of that sect which hath dared to boast the Serpent as the author of their religion, as they prove by certain arguments wherewith he hath inspired them. On this account the apostles and priests of this creed have been styled “Naaseni,” from “Naas” the Hebrew word for serpent; but subsequently they entitled themselves “The Gnostics,” because they alone understood the deep things of religion. Out of this sect sprung many other teachers, who, by diversifying the original doctrines through inventions of their own, became the founders of new systems.’ Further on he has a passage bearing immediately upon this subject. ‘This Naas is the only thing they worship, for which reason they are called “Naaseni,” (i. e., Ophites, or Serpent-worshippers). From this same word Naas, they pretend that all the temples (ναοί) under Heaven derive the name. And unto this Naas are dedicated every rite, ceremony, mystery, that is; in short, not one rite can be found under Heaven into which this Naas does not enter. For they say the Serpent signifies the element Water; and with Thales of Miletus contend that nothing in the Universe can subsist without it, whether of things mortal or immortal, animate or inanimate. All things are subject unto him; and he is good, and hath all good things within himself as in the horn of a unicorn, so that he imparts beauty and perfection unto all that is, inasmuch as he pervades all things, as flowing out of Eden, and divided into four heads.... This Naas is the “water above the firmament” and likewise “the living water” spoken of by the Saviour. Unto this Water all Nature is drawn, and attracts out of the same whatever is analogous to its own nature, each thing after its own kind, with more avidity than the loadstone draws the iron, the ray of the sea-hawk, gold, or amber straws. Then they go on to boast: We are the Spiritual, who have drawn our own portion out of the living water of the Euphrates that flows through the midst of Babylon; and who have entered in through the True Gate, the which is Jesus the Blessed. And we of all men are the only Christians in the Third Gate, celebrating the Mystery, being anointed with the ineffable ointment out of the horn, like David, not out of the earthen vessel, like Saul who conversed with the Evil Spirit of carnal concupiscence.’”[75]

The conception of water as a life-producing agent appears prominently in the religion of the Egyptians. They associated it with Osiris, the life-producing god of the sun. Speaking of this King says:

“The symbols of the same worship have been to some extent explained by persons writing at a time when they were still a living though fast expiring language. Of such writers the most valuable is Plutarch, who in his curious treatise De Iside et Osiride, has given the meaning of several of these symbols, and, as it would appear, upon very good authority. According to him, Isis sometimes signifies the Moon, in which sense she is denoted by a Crescent: sometimes the Earth as fecundated by the waters of the Nile. For this reason water, as the seed of Osiris, was carried in a vase in the processions in honor of this goddess.”[76]

James Bonwick, F.R.G.S., says:

“The baptism of Egypt is known by the hieroglyphic terms of ‘waters of purification.’ In Egypt, as in Peru, the water so used in immersion absolutely cleansed the soul, and the person was said to be regenerated. The water itself was holy, and the place was known, as afterwards by the Eastern Christians, by the name of holy bath. The early Christians called it being ‘brought anew into the world.’ The ancients always gave a new name at baptism, which custom was afterwards followed by moderns. The Mithraic font for the baptism of ancient Persians is regarded as of Egyptian origin. Augustine may, then, well say that ‘in many sacrilegious rites of idols, persons are reported to be baptized.’”[77]

The Sacred Nile.

Pagan water-worship everywhere was closely associated with sacred rivers. Hardwick speaks of the Nile as follows:

“As the Nile, for instance, was a sacred river and as such was invoked in the Egyptian hymns among the foremost of the national gods, whatever bore directly on the culture of the soil, and the succession of the crops in every district of the Nile valley, was enforced among the duties claimed from husbandmen by that divinity. To brush its sacred surface with the balance bucket at a forbidden time was a crime equal in atrocity to that of reviling the face of a king or of a father.”[78]

Water-Worship in India.

Sir Monier-Williams describes water-worship in India as follows:

“Rivers as sources of fertility and purification were at an early date invested with a sacred character. Every great river was supposed to be permeated with the divine essence, and its waters held to cleanse from all moral guilt and contamination, and as the Ganges was the most majestic, so it soon became the holiest and most sacred of all rivers. No sin was too heinous to be removed, no character too black to be washed clean by its waters. Hence the countless temples with flights of steps lining its banks; hence the array of priests, called ‘Sons of the Ganges,’ sitting on the edge of its streams, ready to aid the ablutions of conscience-stricken bathers, and stamp them as whitewashed when they emerge from its waters. Hence also the constant traffic carried on in transporting Ganges water in small bottles to all parts of the country.”[79]

Sacred wells abound in India, especially in and around the city of Benares. Mr. Williams describes some of these as follows. The one first noted is said to be sacred, because when a certain temple was destroyed by the Mohammedans the outraged god took refuge in this well; thus it became a sacred shrine. Mr. Williams says:

“Thither, therefore, a constant throng of worshippers continually resort, bringing with them offerings of flowers, rice and other grain, which they throw into the water thirty or forty feet below the ground. A Brahman is perpetually employed in drawing up the putrid liquid, the smell or rather stench of which, from incessant admixture of decaying flowers and vegetable matter, makes the neighborhood almost unbearable. This he pours with a ladle into the hands of the expectant crowds, who either drink it with avidity, or sprinkle it reverentially over their persons. A still more sacred well, called the Manikarnika, situated on one of the chief Ghats leading to the Ganges, owes its origin, in popular belief, to the fortunate circumstance that one of Siva’s earrings happened to fall on the spot. This well is near the surface and quite exposed to view. It forms a small quadrangular pool, not more than three feet deep. Four flights of steps on the four sides lead to the water, the disgusting foulness of which, in the estimation of countless pilgrims, vastly enhances its efficacy for the removal of sin. The most abandoned criminals journey from distant parts of India to the margin of this sacred pool. There they secure the services of Brahmans, appointed to the duty, and descending with them into the water are made to repeat certain texts and mutter certain mystic formulæ, the meaning of which they are wholly unable to understand. Then, while in the act of repeating the words put into their mouths, they eagerly immerse their entire persons beneath the offensive liquid. The longed-for dip over, a miraculous transformation is the result; for the foul water has cleansed the still fouler soul. Few Hindus venture to doubt that the most depraved sinner in existence may thus be converted into an immaculate saint, worthy of being translated at once to the highest heaven of the god of Benares.

“But to return to the temple of Visvesvara. I found when I visited it a constant stream of worshippers passing in and out. In fact, Siva, in his character of the lord of the universe, is the supreme deity of Benares. Not that the pilgrims are prohibited from worshipping at the shrines of other gods, but that Siva is here paramount, and claims the first homage. Yet this supreme god has no image; he is represented by a plain conical stone, to wit, the Linga or symbol of male generative power. The method of performing worship in this great central and confessedly typical temple of Hinduism, appeared to me very remarkable in its contrast with all Christian ideas of the nature of worship. All that each worshipper did was to bring Ganges water with him, in a small metal vessel, and pour the water over the stone Linga; at the same time ringing one of the bells hanging from the roof, to attract the god’s attention towards himself, bowing low in obeisance and muttering a few texts, with the repetition of the god’s name. In this way the god’s symbol was kept perpetually deluged with water, while the crowds who passed in and out lingered for a time close to the shrine, talking to each other in loud tones. Nor did any idea of irreverence seem to be attached to noisy vociferation in the interior of the sanctuary itself. Nor was any objection made to an unbeliever, like myself, approaching and looking inside; whereas in the south of India I was strictly excluded from all the avenues to the inner Linga sanctuaries.[80] In the courts adjacent to the Linga were other shrines dedicated to various deities, and in a kind of cloister or gallery which encircled the temple, were thousands of stone Lingas crowded together carelessly, and apparently only intended as votive offerings. I noticed the coil of a serpent carved around one or two of the most conspicuous symbols of male generative energy, and the combination appeared to be very significant and instructive.”[81]

In another work Mr. Williams says:

“Passing on to the worship of water, especially running water, it is to be observed that river-water is everywhere throughout India held to be instinct with divinity. It is not merely holy, it is especially pervaded by the divine essence. We must, however, be careful to distinguish between the mere sacredness of either fire or water, and their worship as mere personal deities. In Rig-Veda, X., 30, X., 9, VII., 47, and other passages of the Veda, the Waters are personified, deified and honored as goddesses, and called the Mothers of earth. In X., 17, 10, their purifying power, and in VI., 50, 7, their healing power, is celebrated. They cleanse their worshippers from sin and untruthfulness (I., 6, 22, 23).... The river Sarasvati—called the purifier in Rig-Veda, I., 3, 10—was to the earlier Hindus what the Ganges was to the later. She was instinct with divinity, and her influence permeated the writers of the Vedic hymns. Sometimes she is identified with the Vedic goddess, vac, speech, and invoked as the patroness of Science.”[82]

The confluence of the Ganges with the Jumna and Sarasvati is one of the most hallowed spots in India. Many other rivers are held as being especially sacred. The river Narboda is deemed by some to surpass all others. The mere sight of it cleanses the soul from all guilt. It makes all other waters sacred for thirty miles northward and eighteen southward. The banks of all the chief rivers in India are considered holy ground from their source to the sea. Pilgrimages, which continue for six years, are undertaken, the pilgrim going down one bank of the Ganges, and returning by another. Many hardships are incidental to such pilgrimages, but are counted light, and the greater the difficulties the greater the resultant merit.

In a still later work, Sir Williams describes the present baptismal custom in Thibet and Mongolia, as follows:

“It is noticeable that a kind of baptism is practised in Tibet and Mongolia. It is usual to sprinkle children with consecrated water, or even to immerse them entirely on the third or tenth day after birth. This is called Khrus-sol (according to Jäschke). The priest consecrates the water by reciting some formula, while candles and incense are burning. He then dips the child three times, blesses it, and gives it a name. After performing the ceremony he draws up the infant’s horoscope. Then, as soon as the child can walk and talk, a second ceremony takes place, when prayers are said for its happy life, and an amulet or little bag is hung around its neck, filled with spells and charms against evil spirits and diseases.”[83]

Other writers support the foregoing, though Sir Williams is too high an authority to need confirmation. Alabaster says:

“Baptism was a religious rite from very ancient times, the Brahmins holding that if any one who had sinned went to the banks of the Ganges and saying: ‘I will not sin again,’ plunged into the stream, he would rise to the surface free of sin, all his sins floating away with the water; hence it is called baptism, or the rite of washing off offences, so that they floated away. Sometimes where any one was sick unto death, his relatives would place him by the river, and give him water to drink, and pour water over him till he died, believing that he would thus die holy and go to heaven.”[84]

Mr. Wilkins says:

“Dasahara: this festival commemorates the descent of the Ganges from heaven to earth, and is called Dasahara, because bathing at this season is said to remove all the sins committed in ten births, i. e., during ten different lives. This is a most interesting ceremony. Thousands upon thousands of the people bring their offerings of flowers, fruits and grain to the river-side, and then enter the sacred stream. It is a thing worthy of note that although in many places men and women bathe together, the men having simply a cloth around their loins, and the women often having the upper part of their bodies exposed, I have never seen the slightest impropriety of gestures on these occasions. In some festivals, as previously noticed, the grossest impropriety of language and gesture are freely indulged in: but at bathing festivals I have never noticed anything indecent. It is proper to bathe in the Ganges, for those who live near enough; but other rivers may take the place of the Ganges, and legends have been manufactured to show that their virtues are even greater than those of the Ganges; if there is no river convenient, then a tank can be substituted.”[85]

Modern Buddhistic Baptism.

The modern water-worship connected with Buddhism is described by Sir Monier-Williams in his latest book[86] as follows:

“In Burmah, where a good type of southern Buddhism is still to be found, the New Year’s festival might suitably be called a ‘water festival.’ It has there so little connection with the increase of the New Year’s light that it often takes place as late as the early half of April.[87] It is, however, a movable feast, the date of which is regularly fixed by the astrologers of Mandalay, who ‘make intricate calculations based on the position of various constellations.’ The object is to determine on what precise day the king of the Naths will descend upon the earth and inaugurate the new year. When the day arrives all are on the watch, and just at the right moment, which invariably occurs at midnight, a cannon is fired off, announcing the descendant of the Nath king upon earth. Forthwith (according to Mr. Scott) men and women sally out of their houses, carrying pots full of water, consecrated by fresh leaves and twigs of a sacred tree, repeat a formal prayer, and pour out the water on the ground. At the same time all who have guns of any kind discharge them, so as to greet the new year with as much noise as possible.

“Then, ‘with the first glimmer of light’ all take jars full of fresh water and carry them off to the nearest monastery. First they present them to the monks, and then proceed to bathe the images. This work is usually done by the women of the party, ‘who reverently clamber up’ and empty their goblets of water over the placid features of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Then begins the Saturnalia. All along the road are urchins with squirts and syringes, with which they have been furtively practising for the last few days. The skill thus acquired is exhibited by the accuracy of their aim. Cold streams of water catch the ears of the passers-by. Young men and girls salute one another with the contents of jars and goblets. Shouts of merriment are heard in every quarter. Before breakfast every one is soaked, but no one thinks of changing his garments, for the weather is warm and ‘water is everywhere.’ The girls are the most enthusiastic, as they generally go in bands and carry copious reservoirs along with them; ‘unprotected males’ are soon routed. Then a number of ‘zealous people’ go down to the river, wade into the water knee-deep, splash about, and drench one another till they are tired. No one escapes. For three days no one likes to be seen with dry clothes. The wetting is a compliment.”[88]

“In Tibet there is a water festival in the seventh or eighth month (about our August and September). At this festival the Lamas go in procession to rivers and lakes and consecrate the waters by benediction or by throwing in offerings. Huts and tents are erected on the banks, and people bathe and drink to wash away their sins. It concludes with dancing, buffoonery, and masquerading.”[89]

Lydia Maria Child thus describes

Baptism among the Hindus:

“Water is supposed to cleanse the soul and guard from evil. When a child is born priests sprinkle it, and sprinkle the dwelling, and all the inmates of the house bathe. They do this from an idea that it keeps off evil spirits. People perform ablutions before they eat; and priests purify themselves with water, accompanied with prayers, on innumerable occasions. When a man is dying, Brahmins hasten to plunge him into a river, believing that the departing soul may be thus freed from impurities before it quits the body. Some rivers are deemed more peculiarly holy and efficacious than others, such as the Ganges, the Indus, and the Chrishna; the water of the Ganges is used on all the most solemn occasions. Images of the deities are washed with it, and Brahmins are sprinkled with it, when inducted into the priestly office. Happy above other men is he who is drowned in that sacred stream. Once in twelve years the waters of Lake Cumbhacum are supposed to be gifted with power to cleanse from all sin. As this period approaches, Brahmins send messengers in every direction to announce when the great day of ablution will take place. The shores are crowded with a vast multitude of men, women, and children from far and near. They plunge, at a signal from the officiating Brahmin, and in the universal rush many a one is suffocated or has his limbs broken. Water from the Ganges is kept in the temples, and when the people are dying they often send from a great distance to obtain some of it. Before devotees put their feet into a river they wash their hands and utter a prayer.”[90]

These witnesses show us that water-worship and baptism, the water being variously employed, by immersion, sprinkling, pouring, etc., has formed a prominent feature in Oriental paganism from the earliest time until now. It passed from the Orient to Greece and Rome. Perhaps the stream from Egypt was an independent one, which came from the south. Before considering the immediate contact of pagan water-worship with early Christianity, it is necessary to note its existence outside of the Orient and Egypt.

CHAPTER IV.
WATER-WORSHIP IN NORTHERN EUROPE AND IN MEXICO.

Water-Worship Prominent in Many Ways, and Associated with Holy Seasons—Infant Baptism among the Scandinavians and Teutons—Pagan “Christening of Children”—Sacred Water as a Safeguard against Disease, etc.—Virtue of Water Used for Mechanical Purposes—Water Sprites—Similarity between Roman Catholicism and Paganism of Mexico—Aztec Baptism—Prayer for “Baptismal Regeneration” of Child by Mexican Midwife.

The existence of a widespread system of water worship in Northern Europe is attested by the direct history of paganism, by the history of Christianity at its first introduction, by the decrees of councils, capitularies, and similar documents. These sources show that the Allamanns, Franks, and others worshipped rivers and fountains, and used water in various ways for sacred purposes. They prayed upon the banks of sacred rivers and at sacred fountains. Springs which gushed from the earth were considered especially sacred, as being produced directly by divine agency. Lighted candles were used in the worship of fountains and wells. This custom continues until the present day in the semi-religious habits of the people, who gaze into wells by the light of a candle on Christmas and Easter nights. Sacred brooks and rivers were believed to have been produced from the pouring of water by the gods out of bowls and urns.

Water drawn at holy seasons, such as midnight and sunrise, has always been known as “holy water.” Running spring-water gathered on holy Christmas night, while the clock strikes twelve is yet known as heilway, and is believed to be good for certain diseases. At the present time the common people of Northern Europe believe that between eleven and twelve on Christmas night, and on Easter night, spring water changes into wine. A similar faith is found as far back as the latter part of the fourth century, which is noted by Chrysostom in an Epiphany sermon preached at Antioch.

The following quotation will show that pagan water-worship was indigenous in Northern Europe as well as in the Orient:

“It is no less remarkable that a kind of infant baptism was practised in the North, long before the dawning of Christianity had reached those parts. Snorri Sturlason, in his chronicle, speaking of a Norwegian nobleman who lived in the reign of Harald Harfagra, relates that he poured water on the head of a new-born child, and called him Hakon, from the name of his father. Harald himself had been baptized in the same manner, and it is noted of King Olaf Tryggvason, that his mother, Astrida, had him thus baptized and named as soon as he was born. The Livonians observed the same ceremony, which also prevailed among the Germans, as appears from a letter which the famous Pope Gregory the third sent to their Apostle Boniface directing him expressly how to act in this respect. It is probable that all these people might intend, by such a rite, to preserve their children from the sorceries and evil charms which witched spirits might employ against them at the instant of their birth. Several nations of Asia and America have attributed such a power to ablutions of this kind; nor were the Romans without such a custom, though they did not wholly confine it to new-born infants.”[91]

S. Baring Gould testifies concerning pagan baptism in Scandinavia as follows: