There never was a time when Christianity was free from controversy. Disputes about its very essence arose among the Apostles themselves, and became bitter quarrel within a generation after the death of Jesus. The second and third centuries are marked deeply with the traces of theological strife within the church. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity was all but torn in pieces by controversial rage. The party that was most respectable in number was least respectable in temper; and if for any brief period one of the contending sects might, from its momentary position, claim for itself the sole possession of orthodox Christianity, it instantly invalidated its own claim by a display of intolerant fury that would have disgraced a Jew. The Roman church, painfully and late, established an apparent uniformity of belief in western Europe; but its definition of Christianity was from the first powerfully disputed, and at no period deserved to be called the one faith, catholic and universal. Centuries of controversy preceded it; centuries of controversy disturbed its peace. It was, at best, but one interpretation of Christianity among many, and its prominence as an interpretation was due mainly to the political eminence of its seat, very little to its philosophical and religious character-not at all to its conformity with the teachings of Christ.

The Protestant movement made a ghastly rent in the seamless coat of infallible orthodoxy. Two Christianities glared at each other in western Europe-disputed in words, fought with bloody weapons of war; and while this great battle was waging, other smaller Christianities crept from their hiding places, and took sides. Then Protestantism split into fragments, and each fragment was a new Christianity, carefully distinguishing itself from all the rest. The printing and distributing of the translated Bible caused an immense increase in the number of sects. Old men learned the alphabet for the sake of spelling out the sacred text; young people, just past the age of childhood, crowded the churches to hear it read. It was a common thing for several to contribute for the purchase of a single copy of the precious volume, and to retire with it to an upper chamber, or to a forest solitude, there to study its word. In those days of costly books, every German Bible, and especially every English Bible, was the seed of a new doctrine, and it was not long ere Christianity became an unmeaning name. Definitions of Christianity are num

bered now by hundreds: we have Trinitarians, Socinians, Arians, and Humanitarians; Lutherans and Calvinists of several shades; Romanists; Episcopalians, high and low; Presbyterians of all sorts; Congregationalists of many colors; Moravians, Mennonites, Campbellites; Quakers, orthodox and heterodox; Methodists under different names; Baptists diverse in kind; Shakers, Universalists, Unitarians, Swedenborgians; two or three schools of so-called Orthodox; Dorrelites, Millerites, Mormonites, and multitudes more. Christianity, as commonly understood, is not one thing, but many things. There are numerous Christianities; there are several hostile and irreconcilable Christianities. How are we to find the true one? We can not find it unless we have a new definition of the term Christianity, and seek for it as the faith, not of Christendom, but of Christ.

But none of these various, conflicting Christianities can claim to be called the Christianity of Christ. The oldest of them can not advance that claim; nor can the most eminent. Neither Roman Catholic Christianity nor Protestant Christianity can assert that pretension with any plausibility. If we go down to the primitive dogmas which lie at the basis of every largely-professed system of Christian belief, to those central and root doctrines that are held in common by all the leading sects-which Protestantism, making in them mischievous alterations, borrowed from the elder church, and which that elder church traces back to apostolical traditions-these radical and "essential" doctrines, so-called, have but a nominal connection with Christ: they bear his name, and that is all.

The religion of Jesus is the peculiar form which the religious sentiment took in the soul of Jesus; it is identified, therefore, with his person. But Christianity as commonly professed has its origin in forms of the religious sentiment that were antecedent to the birth of Christ, and as respects its elemental dogma might have grown up independently of him. Its connection with him is accidental, rather than substantial. Christianity is the legitimate offspring of intercourse between the Eastern and the Western thought, both passing through the medium of Judaism. During the long term of their Babylonish captivity, the Jews, as their apocryphal books declare, had become familiar with the religion of Persia, and had softened with the philosophy of oriental mysticism the hard features of their ancient Hebrew faith.

The space between man and God is filled up with angels and demi-gods; a belief in incarnation prevails; the two principles, Ormuzd and Ahriman, modestly take their place in Jewish theosophy; speculations upon the nature of God are common, and assume the Eastern cast of thought; and in several minor points, as we shall see presently, the character of Judaism was essentially modified. On the other side, through the Alexandrian Philo, the philosophic Jew, the Hebrew religion was brought in contact with the Western thought, and soon became blended inextricably with it. Thus, before Christ appeared, the three currents of speculation-the Persian, the Hebrew, and the Greek-had mingled in one stream, which was directing its course westward. This was the fountain-head of the Christian church. As it passed through Judea, it chanced that the name of Christ was bestowed upon it, giving it a human interest, and linking it with historical associations. The pure ideas of the East and West received from Christ a local and historical reality; the heavenly Logos of Philo wanted nothing but human personality, and this personality was furnished by Christ. It was due rather to accident, therefore, than to necessity, that the religious belief of the Western world was called Christian that belief itself, as a system of theology, existed in embryo before Jesus was born, and might have come to its maturity without any forming agency of his.

It is no impossible or extremely difficult task, though it is a tedious and laborious one, to prove that Christianity is not of Christ. Its central doctrines are borrowed directly from the world's philosophy, which we loosely and reproachfully name Paganism. Take its doctrine of a threefold personality in the being of God-the doctrine of Trinity; this is demonstrably of Pagan extraction. The Roman Catholic church confesses that it is not taught in Scripture, and receives it on the authority of tradition purely. The dogma of Trinity is the offspring of Gentile philosophy; not that in its perfect statement it can be found. in Gentile philosophy, either Platonic or Persian, but the seed and root of it is there. It is of Gentile parentage, and was nursed by Gentile influences. The Krept, Phtha and Reith, of Egypt; the Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, of India,-give us a dim foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine. When Plato teaches that God is distinct from the created world, and yet is one with it, because it is the reflection of his perfect mind; when he

teaches that God is absolute Goodness, and that Goodness has begotten a Son, he furnishes a hint to the same purpose. But we need go no further back than the Logos doctrine of Philo, itself a fair and inevitable deduction from the "Ideas" of Plato, to prove that the Christian Trinity has a Gentile origin; for its whole history is but a history of that Logos doctrine, as it was assumed and amplified by the debates of the Christian Fathers. The doctrine of Trinity was of gradual and slow formation. There was no Trinity in the time of Christ; none in the age of the Apostles; none in the first century; none in the second century; strictly speaking, none in the third century. Justin Martyr is no Trinitarian; no more is Irenæus, Clement of Alexandria, or Origen. Tertullian does not teach the doctrine, neither does Lactantius or Cyprian. It was a development, through a long course of controversy, of the old Philonic theme, the Logos; and these controversies were conducted in accordance with the old philosophical methods. The issue made did not lie between the doctrine of Christ and other doctrines that were not of Christ, but between doctrines neither of which were at all identified or associated with Christ, but merely represented antagonistic schools of philosophy. Take the Arian controversy, for instance, which did so much to define the belief of the future church. The dispute here was between two distinct schools of speculative thought, the Western and the Eastern, the Alexandrian or Philonic, and the Persian and rabbinical, the orientalized Platonic and the occidentalized Zoroastrian. According to the former system, which was victorious in the name of Athanasius, the Son, as the divine Logos, existed eternally with God, having an absolute and necessary being independent of God's particular will; only as a distinct person did he have his birth, before the creation, but in time. According to the other system, which Arius supported, and which was defeated, the Son had no absolute, eternal being, and was wholly non-existent until created before the foundation of the world by a special act of the divine will. It is true that the condemned theory was unquestionably heathen, being no other than the ancient emanation theory of the Persians. But the conquering theory was heathen no less, borrowing its lineage directly from Plato; and as defeat does not make Arius a Pagan, victory does not make Athanasius a Christian. The dogma of Trinity is held by men who call themselves disciples of Christ, but it has no

more claim on that account to be considered a Christian dogma, than has the theory of Laplace respecting the genesis of the universe, or the theory of Reichenbach respecting odyllic forces, both of which are held by persons calling themselves Christians.

The philosophical origin of the Trinity is now conceded by multitudes. But the other fundamental doctrines of Christianity may be, even more easily than this one, traced to a Gentile source. The doctrine of the Fall, in passing over to Christianity, was hardly modified in its form, and in substance remained essentially unchanged. Plato teaches that the spirits which, through inability to maintain their pristine state of heavenly purity, were seized with confusion, oblivion, and sloth, fell from heaven, and assuming a mortal form, became men. The mythus is too long. to be extracted in full here, but may be found in the "Phædrus." Its analogy with the Christian mythus is very striking. In fact, it is the same thing, only clothed in the historical shape which it borrowed from the Book of Genesis. Let it be granted that Plato ascribes the Fall to the want of spiritual power, to natural inability to rise, or to remain in the sphere of the Absolute, while Christianity ascribes the Fall to an act of wilfulness, by which man tore himself away from God, and exalted his will above the divine will; still, inasmuch as this particular act of wilfulness was due to a disposition, a power or a want of power lying back of each separate determination, the two views do not differ so much as at first they seemed to. Both agree in suggesting that the condition which is natural to man in his present state is not his primeval one; that the cause of the Fall, whatever notion of moral guilt may be attached to it, exists outside of man's temporal consciousness, and precedes the individual volition; that man himself, his true nature alone considered, is different from man as he appears in mortal existence, as different as an angelic being is from an imperfect and guilty one. Granting, too, that according to Plato the Fall is the descent of a pure spirit from heaven to earth, while according to Christianity it is the descent of a man from a state of moral perfection to a state of moral depravity, this circumstance does not in the least affect the similarity of the two ideas; for, not to urge the obvious thought that, in either case, the change is first an inward and then an outward one, a lapse from a higher to a lower state of spirituality, followed by a lapse from a higher to a lower state of existence,