The life and work of St. Paul

GNOSTICISM IN THE GERM. 613
that the proof of its being so would hardly be weakened, even if these
Epistles could be banished from the canon to which hostile criticism has only
succeeded in showing more conclusively that they must still be considered to
belong.
The Christology, then, of these Epistles is nothing more than the systematic
statement of that revelation respecting the nature of Jesus, which is
implicitly contained in all that is written of Him in the New Testament 1 and
j
the so-called " Gnosticism " with which these Epistles deal is nothing more
than a form of error a phase of the crafty working of systematic deception
which is common to the intellectual, moral, and spiritual aberrations
of all ages and countries. It is found in the Zend Avesta;
it is found
in Philo ; it is found in Neoplatonism ; it is found in the Kabbala ; it
is found in Yalentinus. Abject sacerdotalism, superstitious ritual, extravagant
asceticism, the faithlessness which leads men to abandon the privilege of
immediate access to God, and to thrust between the soul and its One Mediator
all sorts of human and celestial mediators ; the ambition which builds upon
the unmanly timidity of its votaries its own secure and tyrannous exalta-
tion ; the substitution of an easy externalism for the religion of the heart ; the
fancy that God cares for such barren self-denials as neither deepen our own
spirituality nor benefit our neighbour ; the elaboration of unreasonable systems
which give the pompous name of Theology to vain and verbal speculations
drawn by elaborate and untenable inferences from isolated expressions of
which the antinomies are unfathomable, and of which the true exegetic history
is deliberately ignored ; the oscillating reactions which lead in the same sect
and in even the same individual to the opposite extremes of rigid scrupulosity
and antinomian licence :
2
these are the gerins not of one but of all the heresies
; these are more or less the elements of nearly every false religion. The
ponderous technicalities of the systematiser ; the interested self-assertions of
the priest ; the dreamy speculations of the mystic ; the Pharisaic conceit of
the externalist ; the polemical shibboleths of the sectarian ; the spiritual pride
and narrow one-sidedness of the self-tormentor ; the ruinous identification of
that saving faith which is a union with Christ and a participation of His life
with the theoretic acceptance of a number of formulae : all these elements
have from the earliest dawn of Christianity mingled in the tainted stream of
heresy their elements of ignorance, self-interest, and error. In their dark
features we detect a common resemblance.
" Facies non omnibus una
Nee diversa tarn en, quales decet esse sororum."
There was Gnosticism in the days of St. Paul as there is Gnosticism now,
though neither then nor now is it recognised under that specific name.
We may, therefore, pass to the study of the Epistle with the strongest
1 " Les plus Snergiques expressions de 1'Epltre aux Colossiens ne font qu'encherir on
pea ur celles des Epltreg anterieures" (Kenan, St. P. x.).
(Bern. Alex. Mrem. iii. 5; "Ow. iii. 1 7 J Jude 8; Rev. ii. 14, 2022.