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Untitled Article
fact , the chief errors of the Gnostics arose from the excess of their admiratioti for the spirituality and benevolence of Christ ' s religion . They looked upon it as the gift of a Being superior to &riy who had yet revealed himself , under any name , to mankind . They felt the doctrines of divine mercy , and human brotherhood , and
everlasting life , and the final extinction of all evil , to be an immense advance towards the solution of those problems on which they loved to speculate ; and they erred by carrying out these doctrines into ari extent of application which their knowledge cfn other subjects did not , in that early age , permit them 16 reach . All that Zoroaster , Pythagoras , and Plato had conceived most
delightful and sublime in their boldest and happiest speculations , faded into nothingness when compared with the teachings and ministry of Christ . Here was an actual mingling of earth and heaven ; and since they could hot bring themselves to relinquish their darling theories , they associated them with Christianity , and made Christ the centre of a cumbrous system of mythology .
Gibbon was right when he ascribed the prevalence of Christianity to the power of the moral principles which it recognised and addressed ; but the question beyond this he did not attempt to solve , how the enlightened sages , whose works he had studied and whose names he revered , should never have taught a religion , or exhibited an example , so full of beauty and truth , and so resistless in its influences over the thousand varieties of human
character and speculation , as the unlettered , persecuted ^ and crucified Missionary from the wild mountains of Galilee . III . It has been an object of research with scholars to determine the relation of mythology to history , and to detect , if possible , the secret principle by which the latter is evolved from the former . Mythology is the most ancient form of the accumulated
knowledge and wisdom of mankind . Their most ancient traditions , and t , heir earliest conceptions of moral , physical ^ and religious truth , were embodied in a series of symbolical representations , and thrown into a sort of poetical chaos , from which the several elements of human drt and science , —poetfry , history , agriculture , astronomy , and philosophy , —gradually disentangled
them&elves , and assumed theffr appropriate locality and form . We see something of this rtiixture df truth and fiction , of historical fact and allegoricril representation , in the Gnostic modification of Christianity . When * ve read of their iEpns , and Powers , and Syzygies , of their sfeparite trains of good and evil spirits , their two Gods , their two Christs , thfeir Symbols , their talismans , their
wars in heaven , their cycle of celestial revolutions , with the final consummation of all thihgs 5 n the plerom « £ of divine beatitude , we find it difficult to believe thdt there was any substratum of historical fatt berieath this congeries of arbitrary fictions ; and if we fcn ^ w nothing of Christianity but through the Grtostic rtlfedium ; we might be pardoned for supposing , aa fcom ^ Firfehch # riterd
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806 Oh the Influence of the
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1833, page 606, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2622/page/22/
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