To so clear and distinct a testimony to Christ and his miracles, I subjoin an equally sublime specimen of this apostle's inspired reasoning, from Archbishop Wake's translation: "Understand therefore, my children, these things more fully, that Abraham, who was the first that brought in circumcision, looking forward in the spirit to Jesus crucified, received the mystery of three letters; for the Scripture says, that Abraham circumcised three hundred and eighteen men of his house. But what, therefore, was the mystery that was made known unto him? Mark, first, the eighteen, and next the three hundred: for the numeral letters of ten and eight are IH, and these denote Jesus; and because the cross was that whereby we were to find grace, therefore he adds three hundred, the note of which is T; wherefore, by two letters he signifies Jesus, and by the third, his cross. "He who has put the engrafted gift of his doctrine within us, knows that I never taught to any one a more certain truth than this; but I trust that ye are worthy of it.* "Consider how God hath joined both the cross and the water together; for thus he saith, blessed are they who put their trust in the cross, and descend into the water.+ "Jesus Christ is the heifer; the wicked men who were to offer it, were those sinners who brought him to death. "But why were there three young men appointed to sprinkle? Why, to denote Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And why was the wool put upon a stick? Why, but because the kingdom of Jesus Christ was founded upon wood.‡ Blessed be our Lord, who has given us this wisdom, and a heart to understand his secrets."§ SAINT CLEMENT, A. D. 96. ST. CLEMENT is with great confidence considered to be the individual honourably mentioned by St. Paul in those words, "help those women which laboured with me in the Gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow labourers whose names are in the book of life." He is ordinarily * Barnabas's Catholic Epist. in Wake, p. 176. + Ibid. p. 180. Ibid, p. 174. Phil. iv. 3. called Clemens Romanus, as having been bishop of Rome, in the first century, to distinguish him from the no less illustrious Clemens Alexandrinus, who was bishop of Alexandria, about a hundred years after. In the Chronography generally attached to Evagrius's Ecclesiastical History, his name is arranged as third in succession of the bishops of Rome from St. Peter, the order standing thus: St. Peter, St. Linus, St. Annicetus, or Anencletus, St. Clement.* There is but one ancient manuscript of his writings in existence + his first epistle only is held to be genuine. Measureless are the forgeries which Christian piety and conscientiousness had for ages put upon the world under his name. It is not without shrewd reason that the epistle which Paley quotes has been rejected from the place which it for many ages held in the volume of the New Testament itself. The passage, however, generally adduced from this epistle to prove the martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul, is too brief, and too evidently itself taken from some other authority, to admit of the fact being received on the evidence of this one single sentence, in one solitary manuscript of an author upon whom so many Christian forgeries have been committed. Clement evidently refers to some existing and generally received accounts of the martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul, of which accounts his Philippian converts must have been in possession ere they could be thus loosely and generally called on to "take them as examples." Of the martyrdom of St. Paul, not the least account is traceable in the new Testament; but the very reverse of the probability of such a consummation of his history is indicated in the last allusion to him which the sacred text contains: "And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with all confidence, no man forbidding him." -Acts xxviii. 31. This, in Rome-this, under the reign of the tyrant Nero-this, when the tyrant Nero was not only reigning, but resident in Rome, unquestionably looks much askew "He had been first bishop of Sardis, and was afterwards translated to the more lucrative see of Rome."-Dorotheus. So early was the office of a bishop a good thing! + Lardner, vol. 1, p. 290. on the probability of those horrible stories of peaceably and quietly conducted Christians being put to such horrible torments, as the interest of those who would harrow up our feelings with those stories, requires us to believe. Of the martyrdom of St. Peter, in like manner, the only authentic record in the case deposeth not a syllable. The last mention of his name in the canonical Acts of the Apostles informs us, that after having successfully set the power of the magistrates at defiance, burst out of chains that "fell off from his hands," and passed through an iron gate," which opened to him of his own accord, he went down from Judæa to Cæsarea, and there abode."* This is the scriptural account of the matter; and though no story in the Arabian Nights Entertainments could possibly be more absurd, yet nothing in ecclesiastical history could be more authentic. On what authority, then, can St. Clement be supposed to remind the Philippians, that "Peter, by unjust envy, underwent not one or two, but many sufferings, till at last, being martyred, he went to the place of glory that was due unto him;" and that " Paul, in like manner, at last suffered martyrdom by the command of the governors, and departed out of the world, and went unto his holy place, being become a most eminent pattern of patience unto all ages?" Surely the modernism of this manner of description must strike almost the dullest apprehension. Here are neither place, nor time, nor circumstance specified, as we should look for them in an historical statement. And "by the command of the governors," forsooth! Oh, yes; any governors you please: Bonaparte, or the Great Mogul, I suppose. It is outrageous romance! 1 The merit of the invention, however, belongs to other hands. It will be found, on a critical investigation, that the source from whence Clement drew, and from which is derived also the common belief that the apostles suffered martyrdom, is the Famous and Renowned Apostolic History of Abdias, the first bishop of Babylon, who (if we will believe,) had been ordained immediately by the apostles themselves, and who with his own eyes had seen the Lord. These ten books of Abdias, though rejected entirely by the shrewder prudence of modern Christianity, contain the continuance of that broken and irregular jumble of the real journal of some Egyptian missionaries with the fabulous * Acts xii. adventures of imaginary apostles, which the church retains under the name of the Acts of the Apostles. Nothing can be more sophistical than the whole plan of reasoning, and system of exhibition observed throughout the laborious volumes of Lardner. His method is to sift the works of these Fathers for any expression of similar character or cast of thought to such as are found in the New Testament, upon which similarity he would draw the inference that they must have read the New Testament and have held it in the light of a divine revelation; while he passes over the egregious anachronisms, the gross blunders, and the monstrous absurdities, which show those writings to be such as any one who sincerely wished to serve the Christian cause would wish had never existed. As they appear in Lardner's management, the reader is deceived into an apprehension that they were at least respectable. St. Paul's 1st Epistle to the Corinthians is the only book of the New Testament quoted by Clement. As a parallel to 1 Cor. xv. 20, " But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept," Dr. Lardner quotes from the 24th chapter of the first of Clement, the words, "Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord does continually show us that there shall be a resurrection, of which he has made the Lord Jesus Christ the first fruits, having raised him from the dead;" where, in the same chapter of Clement, follows an argument from seeds, resembling St. Paul's, 1 Cor. xv. 36, 37, 38; but where Dr. Lardner wholly omits to let us know that Clement's main argument for the resurrection is not taken from the celebrated 15th chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, but from the no less celebrated and far more entertaining 15th book of Ovid's Metamorphoses,* where is the whole story of the phoenix regenerating itself from its own ashes, and returning every five hundred years, to die and revive again in the flames upon the idolatrous altars of the temple of the sun :—an argument which it is utterly impossible that St. Clement could have used, had the gospels then in existence been considered as of higher credibility than the stories of Ovid, or had he himself believed that the resurrection of Christ was more probable than the fable of the phoenix. * Hæc tamen ex aliis ducunt primordia rebus; Ovid. Metamorph. lib. 15, line 391, SAINT HERMAS, A. D. 100. Bishop of Philipolis, Who is saluted by St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, and whose work entitled The Pastor, or Shepherd, was, in the time of Eusebius, publicly read in the churches,* and in the judgment of Origen was held to be divinely inspired,+ deserves all the respect due to an author who confesses himself to be a wilful asserter of known falsehood. Lardner, who makes large extracts from his writings, to prove thereby the credibility of the gospel history; has the disingenuineness to conceal, and pass over entirely unnoticed, this characteristic feature of an authority that serves him well enough, at the time, to support his gospel credibility, leaving the character of the holy Father out of all weight in the consideration of his testimony. I cannot send this apostolic father and his divinely inspired book to their eternal rest, in the judgment of my readers, with greater fairness, than by presenting them with a chapter as a specimen. The annexed is the whole of the fourth chapter of the second book, from Archbishop Wake's translation: "1. Moreover, the angel said unto me, Love the truth, and let all the speech be true which proceeds out of thy mouth, that the spirit which the Lord hath given to dwell in thy flesh, may be found true towards all men, and the Lord be glorified, who hath given such a spirit unto thee; "2. Because God is true in all his words, and in him there is no lie; "3. They, therefore, that lie, deny the Lord, and become robbers of the Lord, not rendering to God what they received from him: "4. For they received the spirit free from lying; if, therefore, they make that a liar, they defile what was committed to them by the Lord, and become deceivers. "5. When I heard this, I wept bitterly; and when the angel saw me weeping, he said unto me, Why weepest thou? "6. And I said, Because, sir, I doubt whether I can be saved. "7. He asked me, Wherefore? "8. I replied, Because, sir, I never spake a true word in my life, but always lived in dissimulation, and affirmed |