Lectures on the Evidences of Christianity [pp. 250-294]

Early Controversies of Christianity.
elements, and adopted their formulas, to a degree that corrupted for a time its own inspired teaching: and when, finally,
it consented, under the blandishments of wealth and power, to
throw its sanctions over the abuses of despotic government, its
spirit, and in the end, its whole organic life, became infected,
and were perverted to the support of a despotism, more fearful
than the world had ever seen.
And, on the other hand, the reaction of Christianity upon the
endless systems of Greek and oriental philosophy, generated a
series of controversies, which may be classed upon the various
ground-forms of those philosophies, which moulded them into
shape. These may be included under three heads, according
to the solution they gave of the leading questions of ontology
and morals; viz., first, the nature and grounds of the certainty of human knowledge: second, of the origin and the nature
of evil: and thirdly, of the character and the influence of the
spiritual powers of the universe. From the first source we have
the controversies which sprang from the various systems of the
oriental Gnosticism, and one of the forms of Pantheism, mingled with the war of centuries between the principles of Plato
and Aristotle in the schools of the Church. From the second
source we derive the various forms of the Manichean heresies,
asserting the eternal existence of evil on the one hand, and the
pantheistic fatalism which grew out of the oriental quietism on
the other. And from the last there sprang the infinitely varied
and endless conflicts between the Christian teachings, touching
divine and superhuman agencies on the one side, and the various
mythologies of the pagan world on the other. The apologies
directed against Celsus and Porphyry exemplify the latter class.
Among the patristic writers who have contributed most largely
to this phase of Christian Apologetics, with reference to the
popular, and still more the pilosophical aspects of the pagan
mythologies, we need scarcely name Justin Martyr, Tertullian,
Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, and Augustine. We do not,
of course, include in our enumeration the controversies which
grew out of the reaction of Christianity upon the countless
philosophical systems of the pagan philosophy, touching the
person and nature of Christ, as these belong to the internal,
doctrinal, ratherthan the apologetical history of the Church.
1852.]
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