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    period ,, and then , for the sake of justifying his view of it , should write up the history to that period , and , under the influence of this bias , should garble or mistate facts , should omit or insert them to serve a particular purpose , or draw them from sources confessedl y impure , we could neither respect his motives nor have confidence in his conclusions , but must treat him as a historical

    heretic . If this be a just criterion of heresy and orthodoxy , there can be little doubt under which head we must class a very large portion of the gnostic speculations . Their modes of criticism and interpretation are essentially heretical ; their object was not to ascertain facts , and deduce warrantable conclusions ; but they arbitraril y assumed certain principles , and made these principles at once the test of facts and the measure of their inferences .

    Whatever church , or sect , or teacher among modern Christians criticises and interprets the books of Scripture in this mode , is to that extent , as it appears to us , chargeable with heresy . II . The Gnostics have indirectly rendered most essential

    service to Christianity . By their wild sallies of imagination , and by their boldly incorporating with the facts of the Gospel history whatever notions and statements , derived from whatever system , might happen to harmonize with their theories , they compelled the learned Catholics to make a careful discrimination of the

    authentic from the apocryphal books , and to trace back in an unbroken channel the pure stream of tradition to the original fountain of apostolic truth . Their testimony , also , so far as it goes , to the facts and teachings of Jesus , is invaluable , not only

    because it is impartial , but because it is strongly imbued with the spirit of the primitive times , and exhibits another ramification of those endless fibres by which Christianity is fast rooted in the soil of ages , and through which , in spite of the assaults of infidelity , it still maintains its historical identity and place .

    Ergo non hiemes illam , non flabra , neque imbres Convellunt ; immota manet

    And what a witness to the moral power and beauty of Christianity in the influence which it exercised over the bold and discursive flight of the endless vagaries of theosophism ! Men who had been nursed amid the dreams of Platonism , who revered the symbols and mysteries of Egypt , and whose imagination had been accustomed to range among the vague and shadowy creations of the wisdom of Chaldea , and the still remoter East ; men who loved the pride and the pomp of philosophy , and who valued it chiefly as a badge of superiority to the vulgar ; even these men were smitten with the moral beauty of the teachings of Jesus ; and among the thousand theories of the splendid speculations of the East , and of the sterner and prouder philosophy of the West , could not refuse the profoundest homage of their hearts to the simple majesty and unpretending loveliness of the Gospel . In

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    Spirit of Gnosticism . 605

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  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 605, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/21/