Apology, which is addressed to Antoninus Pius, Marcus Antoninus, Lucius Verus, the Senate, and the people of Rome. The Second Apology is said by Eusebius to have been presented to Marcus Antoninus; but it is nevertheless supposed to have been addressed, as well as the former, to Antoninus Pius. In the first apology, Justin speaks of the birth of Christ as an event that had taken place one hundred and fifty years ago; and although he probably mentions the date in round numbers, we may, without much difficulty, assume that he wrote this work about the year 150. The "Dialogue with Trypho, the Jew," was written by Justin after the first Apology; and, although there are other works extant which are attributed to Justin, yet it is from his two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho, that materials will be gathered in this chapter to elucidate his sentiments.

When Justin became a convert to Christianity, the intimate knowledge which he had previously acquired in the mysteries of Grecian philosophy, enabled him to perceive that the strongholds of paganism were in the philosophical schools, and that therefore he must enter the lists with the philosophers, in sustaining the task he had imposed on himself of defending Christianity, either by his pen or by his system of public teaching. The multitude were to be won by other means; but the philosophers, who bewildered the minds of the educated classes with the subtilties of metaphysics, or the magnificent delusions of pantheism, and whose influence was considerable in all high places, must be met as the giants that defied the armies of the living God: and hence he was brought into collision with a certain Crescens, a cynical philosopher, who attacked Christianity, and who seems, by some expressions in the Second Apology, to have held public discussions with Justin on the truths of the Christian religion. Justin answered the cynic with sufficient asperity; and both spoke and wrote of that debased voluptuary with so much freedom that he excited his implacable enmity. Crescens succeeded in directing the attention of the government to Justin as a leading Christian; and, about the year 165, this celebrated apologist of Christianity was* put to death by decapitation at Rome, by command of Rusticus, the prefect of the city.

The contents of Justin's First Apology may be reduced to the following headst:1. Appeals to the justice of the ruling powers, and expostulations with them on the unfairness of their proceedings with the Christians, who were condemned without any previous investigation into their lives and opinions, merely because they were Christians; and were denied the liberty, allowed to all other subjects of the Roman empire, of worshipping the God whom they themselves preferred. 2. Refutation of the charges of atheism and disaffection to the Emperor, which were brought against the Christians these charges Justin refutes by appealing to the purity of the gospel precepts, and to the amelioration produced in the conduct of those who embraced Christianity; and by stating that the kingdom which Christians expected was not of this world. 3. Direct arguments in proof of the truth of Christianity, drawn from miracles and prophecy. With respect to the former, Justin principally occupies himself in refuting the objection that the miracles of Christ were performed by magical arts. With respect to the latter, he states, in forcible terms, the general nature of the argument from prophecy, and shews the accomplishment of many particular prophecies in the person of Jesus, inferring, from their accomplishment, the reasonableness of entertaining a firm persuasion that the prophecies yet unfulfilled-that for instance respecting Christ's second advent—will in due time be accomplished. 4. Justin does not confine himself to defending Christianity, but occasionally becomes the assailant, and exposes with success the absurdities of the gentile polytheism and idolatry. In further confirmation of the innocuous, or rather beneficial character of Christianity, he concludes his treatise with a description of the mode in which proselytes were admitted into the church,

Tatian, the disciple of Justin, attributes the martyrdom of his master to the freedom of his expressions against Crescens (Euseb. iv. 16); and of that sophist he says, that "he surpassed all men εv taidepaoria, and was wholly enslaved to the love of money." Tatian, who himself was known as a voluminous contributor to Christian literature in his day, in the only work of his which has come down to us, attacks the religion of the government so unsparingly, that it is difficult to account for his escaping untouched in those days of persecution.

+ See Bishop Kaye's Account of the Writings and Opinions of Justin Martyr, page 13.

of its other rites and customs, and of the habits and manner of life of the Christians, his contemporaries.

Justin is considered by many ecclesiastics to be a most orthodox writer; and there can be no question that he was opposed to the known heresies of his day but his statements respecting the persons of the Godhead, and more especially of the Son of God, are in some important respects inadmissible and dangerous, from whatever source he may have derived those statements. The inward light, that celebrated delusion of modern mystics, may be clearly discovered in his writings, as in the following passages:-"But lest any one should unreasonably object to what is taught by us, saying that Christ was born but a hundred and fifty years since, in the time of Cyrenius, and taught what we ascribe to him still later under Pontius Pilate, and should accuse us of maintaining that all men who lived before that time were not accountable for their actions, we will anticipate and solve the difficulty. We have learned, and have before explained, that Christ was the first-begotten of God, being the Word, or Reason, of which all men were partakers. Then they who lived agreeably to reason were really Christians, even if they were deemed atheists—κaι di μɛтa λoyov βιώσαντες Χριστιανοι εισι, καν αθεοι ενομισθησαν such as Socrates, Heraclitus, and the like among the Greeks; and among the Barbarians, Abraham, Ananias, Azarias, Misael, Elias, and many others, the actions and even the names of whom we at present omit. Those, therefore, who of old lived without right reason, the same were bad men, and enemies to Christ, and the murderers of those who lived agreeably to reason. Whereas they who ever lived, or now live, in a manner which reason would approve, are truly Christians, and are freed from fear or trouble (Edd. Paris. p. 83).

....for not only was this proved to the Greeks by Socrates, with the help of Reason, but also even amongst the Barbarians by Reason (or the Word) itself, which appeared in a bodily form, and became man, and was called Jesus Christ (p. 56). The doctrines of Plato are not different from those of Christ, though they are not altogether the same, as indeed neither are the writings of the Stoics, nor the poets, nor the historians, for each of them, from the measure of the divine word which was engrafted or sown in them, perceiving that which was in accordance, excellently declared it; but they who in matters of high import, taught things contrary to them, do not appear to have possessed superior science and irreprehensible knowledge. Whatsoever, therefore, has been well said amongst any men, belongs to us Christians; for we adore and love, next to God, the Word of the unborn and ineffable God, since he became a man on our account, that he might partake our feelings and sufferings, and provide for us a remedy; for all historians, by reason of the seed of the engrafted Word which was in them, have been able, though imperfectly, to see things as they are (p. 51). Whatsoever right things the philosophers and the lawgivers have discovered and promulgated, they have so done according to the measure of the discovery and the intuition of the Word, or Reason, which is Christ, and they have also often said things contradicting themselves (p. 48). Christ was known in part even by Socrates; for the Word, which is in all men, was and is (or he was the Word and is, which is in all men); and through the prophets he foretold things that were to take place; and he himself, having become of like passions with us, taught us these things" (p. 49).

It is, perhaps, scarcely requisite to remark that the word in the original which we have sometimes translated "the Word," and sometimes "reason," is in the original Aoгo (logos); and it is by help of this word that Justin has been able to portray a mystical Christ, at one time applying it in the classical, and at another in the ecclesiastical sense; but, whether in the classical or ecclesiastical sense, intending to designate the Christ within every man, known by Socrates and Abraham, by Heraclitus and Elias, by the heathen philosophers and lawgivers, not less than by the holy prophets of Israel! The apologist of Christianity is here in perfect accordance with the great apologist* of Quakerism; but had the Roman Emperors, to whom

• Robert Barclay, in his "Apology for the Christian Divinity of the Quakers," quotes the last passage of Justin, which we have brought forward; but he seems, in other respects, to have been ignorant of the writings of this father.-Prop. vi. 23. It is curious to compare Barclay with Justin. "By this inward light," says the apologist of the Quakers, "s many of the heathen philosophers were sensible of the loss received by Adam, though they knew not the outward history: hence Plato asserted that man's soul had fallen into

Justin addressed his work, been acquainted with the materials of Christian polemics, they would surely have paid but little regard to such an interpreter of the religion of the proscribed sect, who clearly was making statements on a very important subject not in unison with the scriptures of the Christians, and, indeed, leading to consequences destructive of the fundamentals of Christianity. If Socrates knew Christ in part, and if "the doctrines of Plato were not different from those of Christ, though not altogether the same," and if all the wise men amongst the heathen who have lived according to reason, have been "Christians, even if they have been deemed atheists," then must the gospel be in every man, and Christ, the wisdom of God and the power of God, be in every man by nature; and then must it be unnecessary to preach the gospel, since they who follow right reason will become good Christians, without "the obedience of faith." The apostle Paul teaches that "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved;" but then he immediately puts the question, most exact to the point, "How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard ?" and this question, which seems to have been recorded in the scriptures for the perpetual confutation of the inward light, can indeed be only answered by denying altogether that it is necessary either to call on the name of the Lord, to believe in him, or to hear of him—an answer which the mystics have not scrupled to put forth and to defend with all the subtilties* of their peculiar art. But notwithstanding all that can be said by those who would evade salvation by faith-and by faith, too, in a declared record of a truth which must first be announced before it can be accepted—this remains true, that "the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ is unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference"-that we are "saved by grace through faith, and that not of ourselves, it is the gift of God”—and that "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."

When Justin Martyr coupled Socrates with Abraham, he ought to have remembered that the patriarch of the Jewish people is not held forth as our example in scripture, because he followed "right reason," but because he believed in God, and it was counted to him for righteousness, "that he might be the father of all them that believe, that righteousness might be imputed to them also." To believe in God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they are (Rom. iv. 17)—was a secret never elicited by all the disputations of the intellectual and clear-sighted son of Sophroniscus.

The profound mysteries of Platonism obviously exercised an undue influence over the mind of Justin, even when he supposed that in the knowledge of Christ he was emancipated from "philosophy and vain deceit," and had been lifted up to a glorious eminence, from which he could look down triumphantly on the "rudiments of

a dark cave, where it only conversed with shadows. Pythagoras saith, Man wandereth in this world as a stranger, banished from the presence of God; and Plotinus compareth man's soul, fallen from God, to a cinder out of which the fire is extinguished. Some of them said that the wings of the soul were clipped or fallen off, so that they could not flee unto God. All which, and many more such expressions that might be gathered from their writings, shew that they were not without a sense of this loss (i. e., the loss received by Adam). Also they had a knowledge and discovery of Jesus Christ inwardly, as a remedy in them to deliver them from that evil seed, and the evil inclinations of their own heart, though not under that particular denomination," &c. &c.

William Penn, apparently quite ignorant of the lucubrations of Justin Martyr, has asserted that Socrates was a Christian, regardless of "the cock to Esculapius," which that dying Christian enjoined with his parting breath. The inward light does not forbid idolatry. "By the operation of this light and seed some have been and may yet be saved, to whom the gospel is not outwardly preached, nor the history of Christ outwardly known. Though the heathen know it not outwardly, yet if they know it inwardly, by feeling the virtue and power of it-the name "Jesus" indeed (which signifies a Saviour) to free from sin and iniquity in their hearts-they are saved by it. I confess there is no other name to be saved by: but salvation lieth not in the literal, but in the experimental knowledge; albeit, those that have the literal knowledge are not saved by it, without this real experimental knowledge, yet those that have the real knowledge may be saved without the external..... That little small thing that reproves them in their heart, however they have despised or neglected it, is nothing less than the gospel preached in them; Christ, the wisdom and power of God, being in and by that seed, secking to save their souls," &c.---Barclay's Apology.

the world" that once held him in captivity. Hence he uses expressions which would lead one to conjecture that he still, even as a Christian, thought the universe, the To Tav, to be the body of God. "When Plato," says he, "discussing the physical nature of the Son of God, saith in his Timæus, 'He impressed him on the universe in the form of a cross,' he here borrowed his assertion from Moses; for in the writings of Moses it is recorded, that, at the time when the Israelites came out of Egypt, and were in the desert, venomous serpents met them and destroyed the people and that Moses, by the inspiration and power which were given him from God, took brass and made it in the form of a cross, and placed this upon the holy Tabernacle, and said to the people, 'If ye look upon this figure, and believe ye shall be saved by it.' He related also that as soon as this was done, the serpents perished, and the people escaped death. Plato, reading this relation, and not fully comprehending it, nor aware that it was a type of the cross, but conceiving only a division in that form, said that the virtue which was next to the supreme God, was impressed upon the universe in the form of a cross. And he spoke also of a third quality, since, as we have already said, he read what Moses related of the Spirit of God being carried over the waters. For he assigns the second place to the Word of God, whom he declares to have been impressed upon the universe in the form of a cross; and the third, to the Spirit, which is said to have been borne over the water, when he saith, and what is in the third place about the third.'"

Here we are immediately struck with a recurrence of that which was conspicuous in the Epistle of Barnabas-a tampering with the scriptures: for all that Justin has here said about the pole being made in the form of a cross, and the words which Moses uttered on occasion of its construction, is pure fable; he does not report the record of the scriptures, but his own inventions: and in so doing, he affords a striking specimen, not only of the licence which the fathers allowed themselves in commenting on the written word, but of that absurd and pernicious superstition which, by this time, was become fashionable amongst Christians—a reverence of the cross and all resemblances of its material form. The serpent lifted up in the wilderness was indeed a type of Him who, being lifted up, is for the healing of sin; and in whose blood". we have redemption, even the forgiveness of sins;" but the sensual tendency of the religion of the then Christians led them to dote on the very cross itself, the material wood, and on all things in heaven and in earth which by an ingenious turn could in any way be made to bear any resemblance to a cross; and, with this foolish passion, we shall continually find the fathers propounding solemn trifles about the cruciform mystery, as if it were a fundamental doctrine of the religion of Jesus. But this is not all, for the words of Justin import that Plato was not in error when he was "physiologising"-pvotoλoyovμevov-about the "body of the Son of God in the universe"-to understand which we should be acquainted with the speculations of Plato, to which Justin refers. Plato, in the Timæus, teaches that the Artificer Evvioras, and Father of the universe, whom to discover is very difficult, and whom to declare by words is impossible, determined to create the universe visible and tangible; that it should be a work the most beautiful and the best-that it should be, in fact, perfect and that it should be ONE, unique, and wholly inimitable; hence the universe became the only begotten μovoyevns of God, is so, and always will be onlybegotten. After describing the process of cosmogony in a very visionary and mysterious picture, he informs us that the Artificer "placed soul in the middle of the universe, and extended it through the whole; and besides this, he externally invested the body of the universe with soul, and causing circle to revolve in circle, established the universe one singular solitary nature, able, through inherent virtue, itself to converse with itself, indigent of nothing external, and sufficiently known and friendly to itself."—And when the plan was complete, "he cast the whole composition in two, lengthways, and placed the two portions together, fixing each by the middle, one on the other, like the letter X, and then bent them into a circle, connecting them both with themselves and with each other in such a manner that their extremities might be combined in the point opposite to their intersection, and impressed upon them the movement of a circle, a movement always the same, and always revolving on the same point"*; and he sums up the mystery by telling us that "the body of the world

* It is not of much moment to ascertain the dark meaning of Plato, but he intends apparently to intimate that the universe, when completed, was formed like an X in a circle,

is visible, but the soul of the world is invisible, and participates in the reason and harmony of beings that are intelligible and eternal, and is the most perfect of all things that the perfect being has ever formed."

In one word, then, it may be stated, that the Platonicians, and indeed some of the older philosophers or theologues of India, taught that the universe is the only begotten Son of God, that it is divine, holy, eternal, endowed with perfect wisdom, foresight, knowledge, and goodness; that it is animated with a divine life from the centre to the extremities, and is itself* God; and it is this solemn system of organised pantheism which the Fathers have been too ready to claim as undoubted anticipations of Christianity, vouchsafed to the learned and wise amongst the heathen by a peculiar revelation.

Here, then, we discern, by indications not to be mistaken, the introduction of Platonic pantheism into the church; and as far as we know, Justin Martyr may claim the melancholy honour of having been the first in this mischievous work, though it is not improbable that without his venerable example, the Alexandrine school of Christians would, from the same source, have introduced the same errors. Tatian, the scholar of Justin, has thus Platonised, in his view of the second person in the Trinity; "God was in the beginning: but we understand the beginning to be the power of the Word, or Logos; for the Lord of all things, being himself the substance of all things, with reference to the creation which did not yet exist, was alone; but inasmuch as he comprehended all power, and all things, visible and invisible, subsisted in him, all things were with him. For with him also, by a rational power, subsisted the Word who was with him. By the unity of his will, the Word went forth

pornda oyos-and the word going forth, not ineffectually, became the first-born work of the Spirit. Him, the Word, we know to be the beginning of the universe. He was begotten by division, not by abscission.

For that which is cut off is

separated from the original: but that which is divided, voluntarily taking its part in the economy, does not impoverish that from which it is taken. As many fires are lighted from one torch, yet the light of the first torch is not diminished by the lighting of many from it; so the Word, or Reason, proceeding from the power of the Father, did not render him who begat destitute of Logos or Reason." In all this apparatus of mystical jargon, it is easy enough to ascertain that the universe is here taught to be the Logos, and to be God, which is in fact pantheism; and is precisely the doctrine of the Hermaic Books and the Platonicians.

Justin has published some startling speculations on the subject of demons, or devils. "Evil demons, in times of old, assuming various forms, went in unto the

this circle always revolving on the same pole in the same place. The explanation of this hieroglyph is probably to be sought in astronomy; which it would be foreign to our purpose to examine.

* The Egyptian theologues entered deeply into the mystery of the Aor. Hence Plutarch, in his treatise on Isis and Osiris, says, that "The Word" made the universe, and that the mixture of good and evil which he permitted in his work was denoted by the mythos of "the Word" making harp strings of the sinews of Typhon, that is to say, out of discordant and evil principles he made concordant and good ones, by mixing good and evil together; but that "the Word" himself was unmixed and pure. By some fragments of the Hermaic books, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, we can pretty well understand the ancient theology of Egypt on this head. Apuleius has quoted a fragment of the Asclepian Dialogue, which thus speaks: "The Lord and Former of all things, whom we might call God, made from himself a second God, that he might be visible and sensible. Which second God I call sensible, not because he himself employs his senses (for this is a question hereafter to be discussed); but because he occurs to the senses of those that see. Because, therefore, he had made this God, the first out of himself, and the second compared to himself, and because he seemed to him to be good, as one that was full of all goodness, he loved him as the offspring of his own divinity." Cyril has preserved another fragment :"The world has a ruler set over it, the Creator Word-dnμiovpyov λoyov-that came from the Lord of all things. This is the first power after himself, uncreated, infinite, looking out from him, and is set over and rules over all things that were created by himself; this is the first-born and complete and genuine Son of him who is entirely perfect." Sometimes" the first-born is the soul of the universe, and sometimes Reason or AOTOY; and with this clue it is not very difficult to understand the Platonicians when divulging the ancient doctrine of Egypt and the East.