Translated By: Archtelos Intelligence

Chapters

Theologoumena Pantodapa

Sive, de Natura, Ortu, Progressu, et Studio Verae Theologiae, Libri Sex.

Concerning the Nature, Origin, Progress, and Study of True Theology, in Six Books — tracing the history of theology from the natural knowledge of Adam before the fall, through its corruption and successive restoration in the Adamic, Noachic, Abrahamic, and Mosaic administrations, the rise and fall of the Jewish church, and finally the evangelical theology given in Christ.

By John Owen, D.D.

Oxford. 1661.

Letter to the Reader

To the reader who is well-disposed and sincerely devoted to evangelical truth — Εὖ πράττειν ("greeting," literally "to fare well").

Were I not persuaded, learned reader, that it concerns you to know accurately at least some of the matters that come up for examination in this little book, I would sooner have cast it itself into the flames than exposed myself to the prejudices which many threaten against undertakings of this kind. For every consideration that elsewhere tends, one by one, to deter anyone from such studies, all of them at this time present themselves to me in a crowd. But since for many years now past it has been my purpose, in wish and thought, to live a life by which I might in some way profit those devoted to heavenly wisdom and divine truth, I judged that my mind must be fortified against those μορμολύκεια ("bugbears, hobgoblins") which otherwise find ready access to the minds of men who are far from evil. I know the strength of that fierce lion in the way — whom the most excellent teacher of both divine and human wisdom mentions — who frightens the slothful from their duty; and I am the less moved by it, the more I have long since experienced it. Nor is it a matter confined to one place, or even one age — those to which that creature owes all its borrowed fierceness — where the increase of spiritual light, advancing day by day toward its perfect day, is being seriously deliberated. And although the prejudices of many minds have kept them from perceiving the fruit, however praiseworthy, of any such undertaking, yet once these prejudices are at least removed with posterity, there can be the greatest hope and expectation that what we, relying on divine help and assistance, undertake for the illustration of truth will not be left without its desired outcome. Each age has its own labor in this work; and it not infrequently happens that men reap a richer harvest from the nocturnal studies of those who have already departed this life — studies which, being far removed from the causes of envy, rivalry, hatred, and partisan zeal, are received the more freely — than from the labors of those who, looking only to their own advantage, are themselves scarcely aware that they will be of use to posterity. For it is nothing new that the fairness of a man's deeds should incur the envy of his neighbor. But indeed that infinite wisdom which governs all things has determined to meet the vices of mortals with so sweet a disposition and inscrutable connection of all things and ages among themselves, that they should in no way block the path of the predetermined increases of divine truth. There is no reason, therefore, why anyone sincerely engaged in these studies should abandon an undertaking otherwise rightly begun, whether out of fear of detractors or by yielding to prejudice. Our duty does not in the least turn upon such things. Nor would he be a servant of Christ whose sole aim was set on pleasing men. This too, by the good providence of God so disposing it, commonly comes as a comfort to those laboring in the Lord's field: that the seed cast into the ground, hoed about with slanders and covered over with the dung of reproaches, grows more happily and more abundantly than that upon which, out of the foulest excess of contrary pulling, the popular breeze blows most flatteringly. But since, from the time I first set my mind to writing this, I have made it my first concern to let men's talk flow past me, so long as I might benefit those who seriously desire ἀληθεύειν ἐν ἀγάπη ("to speak the truth in love"), I have both anticipated in thought and resolved to count as nothing all those things which the δοκησισοφία ("pretended wisdom") of some, and the τύφος ζηλωτικός ("zealot's conceit") of others, proclaim or portend as fearful. Nor indeed, I hope, have I undertaken anything invidious or open to detraction, nor anything foreign to the office which, by God's grace, I have now for some time sustained in the church. The plan of the work I have undertaken the very title of the book will show without my needing to say it: it inquires into the nature of true theology, and sets forth the way and manner in which such an inquiry may holily be carried out by others. How far, in this or that part of the work, I have attained to the mind of Christ, it is for you, pious and learned reader — for this concerns you — to weigh accurately. But that I may more fully share with you the reasoning behind my studies in this work, certain things must be traced a little further back and recalled — things which, since they proved a hindrance to many students of theology, gave me occasion, or even seemed to lay upon me a certain necessity, to bring these reflections forward. For reason itself, by which we are men, teaches us that we are not born for ourselves alone; and the gospel foretells that we shall at last render an account of all those things which are freely given us by Christ. But if anyone should think he has caught me somewhere stumbling unawares into the thorns, let him consider that I approached these matters with no other intent than to disentangle those whom I saw sticking fast at the goal-posts in them; and he will perhaps be no unfair judge of our labors on that account, when he cannot deny that we have, as it were, pointed out the right way with our finger to those who had gone astray.

There are — to speak first of these — those to whom any careful investigation of the whole of divine wisdom seems altogether superfluous, and who reckon that no reasons are weighty enough for anyone to bend the edge of his mind toward it. They too have certain shadows of reasoning to support their persuasion — or rather their madness — all of which it would be too long to pursue here, and would draw us far from our purpose; but whatever they pretend outwardly, within lies a hatred of true piety and evangelical truth. To contend with a man who, as the poet says, ἕτερον μὲν κεύθει ἐνὶ φρεσὶν, ἄλλο δὲ βάζει ("hides one thing in his heart, and speaks another"), would be to spend one's effort to no purpose. Such men — lacking the capacity of mind for more useful things, having nothing else at home to do or to live by — would have others enslave themselves to this pursuit, judging it unfair that those endowed with a lively natural disposition and keen wit, who are borne toward higher things, should be weighed down under its barren yoke. That anyone should seek this divine wisdom, or that it ought to be sought, for any other fruit or end than riches, wealth, honors, popular veneration, or the favor of great men, they never so much as dream. Hence they wish all inquiry into it to be confined within limits accessible to the laziest, the busiest, even the most wicked of mortals; whatever lies beyond that they reckon among things vain, fictitious, curious, and uncertain. For although they judge the thing itself to be in some way necessary to the conduct of life, they think that an exact and diligent pursuit of it carries with it inconveniences which it is very much in the interest of public peace, and of that religious sentiment which ignorance breeds, to forestall in good time.

But it is easier to defend our cause against the assaults of these brutes than to sweat much effort over it. I shall say it in a word: ὅσ᾽ οὐκ οἶδασι βλασφημοῦσιν ("they revile what they do not understand"), understanding neither what the nature of theology is, nor what its end is, nor how much it matters not to perish eternally. It was once said, I admit, by hypocrites: "What a weariness is it!" and "What profit is it?" (Malachi 1:13; 3:14). But those who seriously consider that God nowhere employs greater severity in his precepts, or greater grace in his promises, than when he demands this knowledge of himself from us, will not think alike with such men — unless they themselves too are held fast under the dominion of sin. Very few indeed there are — and these either slaves of little industry, or openly impious — who openly, and, as the phrase goes, γυμνῇ τῇ κεφαλῇ ("with bare head," i.e. shamelessly), condemn as folly all industry devoted to the study and inquiry of heavenly truth. But those who in reality reckon whatever time is spent on it as loss are neither few, nor would they wish to be thought impious. Nor do I speak only of those for whom it matters as much not to be strangers and foreigners in this business as it matters to have the salvation of their own souls — which is the condition of all men — but also of those who make open profession of devoting themselves to the study of this wisdom, and profess themselves initiates of its mysteries. Hence, after some years spent in whatever other pursuits have gained them the name of theologians, many come forward as politicians, physicians, poets, orators, historians, philosophers — or would that they merely came forward as such, since they are nothing less than what they most wish to appear! For a peculiar bearing or dress, a certain gait, a countenance composed and feigned into a false and shadowy semblance of modesty — beneath which the empty covering of pride, insolence, and stubbornness shows through more plainly than through a sieve — degrees and titles, or other designations of leisure, wealth, and dominion: it is something we have long since discovered by experience that these do not make theologians. And this comes about because in reality they neither care for nor love the mysteries of this wisdom; and although they most shamelessly make use of its name as a pretext for other ends, they wage the bitterest enmity against its heavenly and spiritual power, purity, and efficacy. But let us leave this class aside: they have their reward. Nor does what I say concern those who are hindered in various ways in the study of theology, when it comes to those who are their own sole hindrance. What indeed most obstructs students in this business is the native and vicious blindness of the human mind; and unless a man removes this by the efficacy of that Spirit who once said, "Let light shine out of darkness," whoever devotes study and labor to the investigation of this wisdom will be hunting the winds with a net. But since we must treat of this at greater length, and expressly, in the body of the work itself, we shall pass over it here, and pursue only those things which, arising from various particular causes, do the greatest disservice to the right conduct of these studies. And since these pertain to two heads — one regarding the students themselves, the other the studies themselves — having first touched briefly on one or two examples of the former, we shall then treat the latter so far as it satisfies our purpose and subject.

In the first place there presents itself to us that sloth by which we see no small part of students grow torpid. It would indeed be easy to accuse this vice, and if I tried to bring forward everything that might be said to that effect, the discourse would be immense. But since it burns with such ill repute that even the laziest feel bound, for their own reputation's sake, at least in words to speak ill of it, I will gladly spare myself that labor. I will instead draw briefly into the light its hidden causes, so that whoever does not reckon the loss of a whole life's fruit compensated for by the softness of a single vice may the better meet it. Chief among these is the efficacy of innate lust, itching toward the love of pleasures. For it cannot be that a mind given over to desire, hindered by love, longing, cupidity, and luxury, should seriously consider any of those things in which, unless one is diligent and frugal, all labor is spent in vain. Every servitude softens the mind, and above all the servitude of sin. And since a mind addicted and given over to lust shrinks from all labor of the intellect — because the very vice of nature occupies it and holds it bound fast in darkness — it is therefore most deeply averse to one who undertakes to handle divine and spiritual things. Hence it happens that, once men have contracted for themselves, in the servitude of sin, a new habit of vices proper to that depraved nature, you may see very many bound by many names to the pursuit of divine truth, whom, like spent horses, no goad can force to keep going on the appointed road — especially once they have obtained those very things for whose sake they perhaps bore that heavy burden for a while. For it is impossible that anyone should be at once a lover of pleasure (φιλήδονος, "a lover of pleasure") and a lover of God (φιλόθεος, "a lover of God"). And yet such is, among very many, this most foul falling-away from Christ's most holy doctrine, that they are by no means content to expose themselves carelessly, securely, and negligently to those incitements to lust which the world, lying in wickedness, continually offers to all; but beyond that they diligently and carefully pursue whatever may serve, for themselves and for others, as fuel for pleasure and as enticement to sin. Of the pernicious brood that springs from this root through the whole of human life, this sloth is one — which forces souls, first cast down from all things arduous, illustrious, and divine, and enslaved to things vain, rotten, and perishing, to perish eternally. I know some who, while they burn with too great a desire for earthly things, wish for a time to endure the tedium of study, and take up the pursuit for a season — a pursuit that will shortly cut every sinew of their industry. And of these, some indeed persist in their resolve until they attain their purpose, that is, until they have gotten wealth or honors, which is for them the goal of all study; but far more, gradually growing slack, give themselves over to the most idle and shameful leisure. The reason, then, why we see so many of those who profess to have devoted themselves to the study of the liberal arts, and even of divine wisdom itself, grow torpid in such neglect and sloth, arises chiefly from this: that they take no care to have their vicious and carnal affections of mind subdued by the Spirit and grace of Christ. For it is vain to expect that a mind sick with vices should set itself to any honorable endeavor, or long persevere in anything worthy of praise. Nothing indeed could be imagined more inept, or more at odds with the nature of things, than that one who indulges pride, arrogance, ambition, avarice, or any other depraved lust of corrupted nature, should suppose that he can rightly and fruitfully apply himself to the study of the most holy revelation of the mind of God in Christ, or persevere in that shadowy exercise which, with a thoroughly ill-disposed mind, he tolerates only for a season.

Besides this, there is in many an incurable defect of natural talent, which, stripped of any hope of progress, ends in mindless inertia. For very rarely is there, among those whose responsibility it chiefly is, any selection of talents in the training of students. Tutors hired for pay offer their labor indiscriminately to all, and it makes no difference who is brought to the schools, so long as there is someone to pay the fee. The same rule holds in the universities.

Hence very many go about in the scholar's gown who are as fit for study as a fox for the plow. Countless are the things that hand these men — who have tried some sterile and fruitless efforts of nature — over to idleness and sloth. And it would be well if they merely abandoned the good arts they had vainly taken up, without going on into bad ones. But, driven from those pursuits for which they were perhaps suited, by taking up others for which they are wholly unsuited, and since they grow weary of labor in the latter while ashamed to return to the former, they for the most part plunge themselves into vice. To these we may add the example of the age, openly falling away from all the institutions of the most holy religion of Jesus Christ, and inclined not so much to vice as headlong into it. As soon as this contagion, like a plague, has invaded youth devoted to study, then — with all care for industry, modesty, piety, self-denial, and preparation to bear the cross utterly despised — its whole desire at once becomes this: that, marked off from the loose dregs of the age by no more than some outward covering, it should in everything else be as like that age as possible. Hence they dissolve into luxury and idleness, grow proud, squander, think little of the examples of good men, despise the evangelical life — indeed despise all moderation whatsoever — and yet do not doubt that wisdom will fall into their lap from heaven while they behave so. But what else should be expected of men of this kind, than that, gradually relaxing all the labor of study, they should overspread the powers of their minds with sloth? Unless students watch diligently against these causes of pernicious idleness and resist them in good time, then however much, from a certain empty swelling of mind which the vanity and custom of the age inflates, they may be Suffenuses to themselves — self-admiring nobodies, after the proverbial poet of Catullus — no prudent person will ever allow himself to hope for any progress in them of any real worth or moment.

Further — to speak of these in the second place — very many whom pleasure and sloth do not ruin are carried off into byways by devotion to sects and parties, which hinders them enormously in the inquiry after truth. Diversity of opinion constitutes parties in religion, and many other causes increase and confirm them; but in these there is the greatest mockery of men's minds. For you will find no men more slavishly addicted and enslaved to a sect than certain ones who, simply because in that corner of the world where it falls to them to spend their years they belong to the party that is greatest in number, think nothing more worthy of suspicion in themselves than that they should condemn all sects as wicked and foolish. Thus it has seemed to many that it is not men's minds but a deficiency of numbers that constitutes sects, and that the name marks differences not of substance but of place — when in reality, wherever agreement on a formula of concord is reached out of a servile, and so to speak sectarian, spirit, or for whatever worldly reasons, the perniciousness of the sect is only increased by the number of those agreeing to it. But it is not my purpose now to expound the nature of a sect, or to pursue its vices; I will say only this — how devotion to it throws up obstacles to the pursuit of true wisdom. This happens because most of those who make up a sect think it a crime to be wise beyond its tenets, since the party of which each is a member is supposed to contain, as from a cornucopia, all knowledge, piety, doctrine, and wisdom. It cannot be told what evils arise from this and invade weak minds — minds liable to depraved affections and open to unjust suspicions — evils which all retard men's judgment in the inquiry after truth, and, what is worse, induce in the mind a habit that is depraved, arrogant, and quarrelsome, one with which the Holy Spirit is unwilling to mingle his gifts. "The man who reveres the LORD — him he will teach which way to choose; the secret of the LORD is with those who revere him, that they may know his covenant," Psalm 25:12, 14. Those who are not truly natives of a sect's opinions, but use it to advance themselves and their own interests, enjoy pleasantly enough the blind zeal and folly of its adherents, and yet favor the honor of the sect no less, and swear to its advantage no less, and show no less contempt for others than do its zealots hatred. There is indeed no heavier prejudice against the study of divine truth, nor anything that more obscures a mind hindered by depraved affections, than arises from this: that someone — whether by the very condition of his birth, or by others' instruction, or by desire for earthly things — before he has learned to exercise a sincere, free, and mature judgment, is grafted into one of the numerous religious sects, especially one whose worship is served above all by the enticements of wealth, rank, and popular veneration. For such people the sect is the rule and measure of truth and of every study; nor do they follow any pole-star more closely in whatever they undertake than the most scrupulous caution not to stumble unwittingly upon the tenets of other sects — lest they should thereby borrow light from others, at the cost of losing the most pleasant, and often most useful, of their own errors. Meanwhile they consider themselves alone learned, understanding, prudent, and pious — no wonder, given a certain sense, wisdom, and piety shared in common by the sect; that is, a collier's faith. Hence too arise quarrels, hatreds, lawsuits, and endless disputes, from which all Christian charity and gentleness are utterly absent. Kings return to favor after mutual and enormous slaughters more quickly than do theologians inflamed with party zeal. Nothing so absurd, unlearned, futile — indeed almost impious — can be belched forth in matters of religion, but that, if it proceeds from one who leads, escorts, or is followed by a numerous company, the sect's admirers embrace it the instant it appears, as if it were a shield fallen from heaven; men who watch sharply over one thing alone — how to defend the ill-spoken words of their own, and attack the well-spoken words of others. And if they are at last brought to admit that someone who is not of their party is neither foolish nor wicked — which happens very rarely — they at once wage every kind of hostility against him all the same, and there is no one among them who would not most gladly triumph over him, even in some trifling matter, or rejoice to see him triumphed over by others. Most wretched little men, who, imposing on themselves the worst of servitudes, while with lofty brow they condemn others for error, ignorance, even heresy and schism, and put their trust in their sect — perhaps the very worst one, which alone, in their eyes, is no sect at all — very often take on all these very faults for themselves as their own peculiar possession; except that none of this can be said of them, because their folly exceeds it all. I do not think I shall have anything in common with men of this sort in the business we are about, of advancing divine truth. They all know the limits of wisdom, and how far divine truth extends its bounds — that is, the tenets of the sect. For those who have gold enough at home, or who reckon nothing dearer than gold, will not run the risk of sailing to lands unknown to them. Our purpose, then, diverges so far from the practice of such men that I have never come to hope that what we have determined to discuss here would in any way serve their advantage, or suit their taste. I have judged it best to pass over or disregard above all those whose blind love of self and of their sect has so far extinguished the light of reason that they fail to understand that they wage hostility against every other sect — as indeed they profess to do — for no other reason than that the one to which they have sold themselves into bondage should alone hold sway. Nor do I say this as though it were not necessary for every believer to join himself to some assembly professing faith in Christ and the worship of God as he himself has prescribed it, unless he would rather be reckoned ἄτοπος ("out of place, absurd") and ἄτακτος ("disorderly"); but it matters almost infinitely with what spirit anyone joins himself to any of these. He who, having first given himself to our Lord Jesus Christ, thereafter attaches himself to one of those companies which, together with the study and profession of divine truth and observance of the commandments of the Lord Jesus, holily cultivates true piety, sobriety, justice, modesty, and separation from the world — and attaches himself in order that, having been made a partaker of the spiritual privileges of the church and of the gifts of the Holy Spirit within it, he too might do his part, to the best of his ability, toward advancing the building up of the body of Christ in faith and charity — such a man, in my judgment, does rightly, and according to what the reckoning of the duty we owe to Christ in the gospel demands. We charge with obstructing the course of truth only those who, for reasons either depraved, or merely worldly, or for no reason at all — but as if by some chance, or carried by the force of outward circumstances in which they became entangled, onto the shores of a sect, and perhaps puffed up by its carnal privileges — look upon all others as though they had never been born. But let us set aside any further consideration of such men, whose disease of mind, without God's special grace, is altogether incurable, since in it they not only take the greatest pleasure in themselves but seriously exult; nor do they suppose that those who would free them from the superstitious excess that agitates them wish to save them, but rather to destroy them.

Let us proceed now to those studies by which men's minds are polished, to be devoted at some point to the pursuit of heavenly wisdom. For, as the Greeks say, ἀρχὴ παντὸς ἔργου μέγιστον ("the beginning is the greatest part of every undertaking"). But I fear that vices lie hidden within these very studies, vices which weigh down minds occupied with them in the pursuit of divine truth. I have no wish here to rehearse what learned men of every kind, men practiced by experience, have written about the teaching of these disciplines otherwise than is commonly done — for I am weary of the fashion of the age, whereby, if anything of that sort is produced, it is at once seized upon as fuel for quarrelsome hair-splitting and idle chatter, and, if it rises a little higher, for envy besides. It belongs to our present purpose to deal only with what is everywhere in common use. But since the student of theology needs — besides what we shall say elsewhere expressly concerning the grace and Spirit of Christ — a disciplined judgment, a candid and sincere mind free of prejudice, pious affections, and honest morals, we will here say a few words about those vices common at the very threshold of study, which, unless checked in good time, are apt either to deprave the affections and corrupt the morals, or to entangle the mind itself in the snares of errors and empty reasonings, from which one will not easily extricate himself. Let us begin with poetry, on which letters once laid their foundations, and from which very many even now set out upon their studies. It has its own praises and its ivy-wreaths, which I will not grudge it. Because it once pleased holy men of old to employ it in singing the praises of the living God, poetry has won for itself a praise that eternity itself will regard. There is also a certain authority and reverence belonging to its very antiquity, especially since, that it might never fall into disuse, it has, through so many ages, won to itself the greatest talents to exercise themselves in it. It must also be granted that its ancient cultivators were skilled, with a lively and subtle sagacity of mind, in depicting the vicious manners of men artfully and adroitly, and moreover were practiced in the art of feigning likelihoods, by whose imitation the minds of others might be trained toward the investigation of truth itself — so that it is no wonder if they spread the fame of their name widely through nearly the whole world. There is also, without doubt, the greatest charm for the mind situated in the art itself — a charm which nevertheless the wisest of the heathen did not hesitate to compare to the delight given by flute-girls, whom unskilled men hire for a fee to cheer their spirits at banquets, since by their own conversation, for lack of skill, they cannot be agreeable to one another. And indeed all the allurements of speech that serve to soothe men's senses and charm their minds, poetry embraces within its compass, and it opens an easy access for these very things to the affections of the mind, and fixes them tenaciously in the memory. But it is not now my business to say what the use of poetry, or of the ancient poets, is — which I grant to be great — but rather what the abuse of both is, which I judge to be greater. For I do not go along with the opinion of the orator who acknowledged no solid usefulness in poetry at all, and affirmed that all its delight was childish. But I think there is no one to whom it is hidden by what stain — indeed by what filth — poetry was polluted from its very beginnings among the wise men of the Gentiles. For if you were to take away the deification (ἀποθέωσιν, "deification") of wicked men, the adulteries of the man-shaped gods (ἀνθρωποφυέων, "of human form"), their murders, quarrels, robberies, unnameable sins; the lies, impure loves, cunning, cruelty, ambition, tyranny, crimes, and the wicked and superstitious rites of idolatry — even the worship of the devil himself — found among the men held up for imitation, the books in which ancient poetry holds sway, which now stride about with gigantic bulk, would shrink to dwarfs and pygmies. To these old comedy added buffoonery (βωμολοχίαν, "scurrility"), in which, together with the abuse of innocent men (ἀκάκων, "the blameless"), the ridiculous (τὸ γελοῖον) held sway — a scurrility, or slanderousness, of the most worthless of bipeds, in which many today take the greatest delight, and which the power of the Macedonians put an end to. Whoever set out such things with art and care, and without shame or modesty, so as to leave stings in the minds of his readers and kindle like passions in them, is thought, if not to carry off the first prize, at least to stand out among the rest. Unhappy youth is steeped from its very infancy in disgraceful fables of this kind, and while the unwary meditate on them, breathe them, and repeat them, they induce in their minds a vicious — and not rarely unconquerable — disposition (ἵξιν, "habit, settled disposition"). Those authors whom every pagan who in any way stood against an age rushing into worse things, so that the morals of mankind might not be utterly ruined, judged fit to be banished far from the company of all good men — these very authors are the ones youths are bidden to hold dear from their tenderest years, to cherish in their bosom, and to turn over in their hands by night and by day. Certain wise men denied that anyone among the Greeks could ever have been wise or just, however much he might have wished it, seeing that they lent their ears to poets who taught them everything else — as Philostratus relates in his Life of Apollonius. For how most young men make use of the vices of others is shown by the comic poet in his Chaerea, an example on which Augustine says much in his books On the City of God. It is also very well known that Plato's Socrates banished the poets from that city of good men which he was founding — a deed that others approved, men no less learned than he. "Do you see," says Marcus Tullius, "what harm the poets do? They bring the bravest of men on stage lamenting; they soften our minds; and then they are so sweet that they are not merely read but even learned by heart. Thus, when the poets are added to a bad upbringing at home and to a shadowy and pampered way of life, they cut away every sinew of virtue. Rightly, then, are they banished by Plato from that city which he imagined, when he sought out the best morals and the best condition of a commonwealth. But we — learned, of course — learn these very things from Greece from our very boyhood, and think this a liberal education and true learning." But either these words were spoken by such men carelessly and without reason, or most of our own people think less soundly than they did, and are less concerned for the honesty of morals; or the reasons on which they relied do not apply to us as they did to them — as to which of these it is, that is an easy and light controversy, which anyone may settle without much trouble.

It is true that the Stoics twisted the poetic fables into natural interpretation, and others into moral interpretation, most ineptly ascribing to the story-tellers things that had never once entered their minds — as Eusebius shows at length in those most learned books he wrote On the Preparation for the Gospel, and before him Marcus Tullius, who says: "Whether the poets corrupted the Stoics, or the Stoics gave authority to the poets, I cannot easily say; for monstrous and shameful things are said by both alike." But what have such things to do with boys scarcely out of the cradle, who, while they hunt after pleasure and praise in these most putrid fables, very often pour out their wretched souls poisoned by a deadly venom — while those applaud whose very office it was to instill true reverence for God in their tender years? But, they say, boys can be taught in a single word that what they learn are fabulous monstrosities, and that most of what the authors they read celebrate with such praise ought to be shunned. But no one, I think, is so unhappily stupid as to prefer a festering sore to a healing salve, or a deadly poison to an antidote. If what the poets relate is utterly false, and what they celebrate is utterly shameful, why do we hasten, by acquainting tender youth with the one and lauding the other, not so much to instruct it as to destroy it? The efficacy of evils is more certain than that of remedies; this business, then, is played out over the deepest of wells. "The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." We know what the human mind is when not yet illumined by divine grace — with what force it is carried into the embrace of the allurements of lust; how sluggish, slow, and stubborn it is when better and more wholesome things are suggested to it; and with what ease it slides into a settled habit of the most putrid imaginings. Whoever would deny that its innate vanity ought to be restrained in every way from all the incitements of pleasure and lust would be altogether unworthy of the Christian name. For such Christianity as that is a shameful thing, having nothing in common with the genuine article but its name. "But it is necessary," they say, "that we imitate the ancients." But to contaminate minds not yet mature in judgment with a sink of fables and vices is a crime and the height of folly, not an instruction useful toward imitation. "Be not deceived" (Μὴ πλανᾶσθε, "Do not be led astray"), says the apostle, 1 Corinthians 15:33: "Evil communications corrupt good manners" (Φθείρουσιν ἤθη χρῆσθ' ὁμιλίαι κακαί) — words which, as Jerome notes, he took from Menander, or rather from Euripides, as from a proverb well known to them, as though to run them through with their own sword. Many indeed deny that they have admitted any stain or dishonor from their first schooling in the books of the poets, and accordingly, in order to serve as an example to others, think they must go on learning, even to old age, the very things it is a disgrace for boys merely not to have learned. But it is not given to all to be so armed with such a charm that, whenever they please, they may mix with the plague and remain safe; nor is it given to all who stand between the rock and the altar to be veiled, Homer-fashion, in a cloud. Those who know, or care, about themselves, about the innate depravity of the human mind, about evangelical holiness — who believe that they must at last render to God an account of all their studies — will perhaps be of another mind. Indeed, either what we read is not the gospel, or the pride and self-conceited wisdom (δοκησισοφία, "seeming-wisdom, conceit of wisdom") of such men, who exalt themselves in contempt of divine grace and of self-denial, will go into judgment without any sincere repentance. We do not deny that poetry itself may have some use among the other secular disciplines — a use no different from the cultivation of the soul's natural faculties, consisting in the eliciting and distinct exercise of its innate principles, whereby the mind's grasp of things is broadened, perception and the power of discernment sharpened, and memory strengthened. But unless its claws and hair are shaved off, we do not think it right that it should be granted citizenship in a Christian commonwealth. How this might be done, and the legitimate use of this art restored — setting aside those allurements of depraved affections, and all its masters of impurity, on whom very many seem to spend their labor either too long or too carelessly, neither sufficiently wary of the poison they administer, nor sufficiently instructed in the right use of it, if any there be — it is not the place here to relate. We have shown, unless I am mistaken, and the plan of the present undertaking requires nothing further, that unwary youth, exercising little or no judgment in the discernment of truth, occupied indiscriminately in the reading and study of the poets, more often than not suffers a harm, from the contagion of fables and vices, not easily repaired. It would be easy here to transcribe what the most learned of the ancients have written on this subject — Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, and others — but these things are not unknown to the learned. And this is that great preparatory schooling in letters, from whose impure heat very many, still smoking from it, apply their minds to the study of the mysteries of the gospel and of heavenly wisdom. To come to any hope that men of this sort — who would defile her inner sanctuary with such knocking hands, and despise her august oracles — will have divine truth unlocked to them, is nothing but the height of madness. For never will the sacred dignity of theology be cast so far before vain men as to share her secrets with those who are so far from earnestly desiring to experience her heavenly power that they give themselves over, almost entirely, to affections and pursuits which suck out even the blood, sap, and whole vigor of common honesty.

Nor does the herb of philosophy lack its serpent. It is now an old complaint among learned men that not a few of the ancient Christians so put on Christ that they did not sufficiently put off Plato. And indeed it cannot modestly be denied by anyone that they twisted the most recondite mysteries of the gospel into philosophical senses, not without great loss to divine truth and harm to the church. But that calamity to the faith was light and tolerable, since few were guilty of that fault, and very few indulged in such license, compared with the calamity which the faith afterward suffered from the mixture, in the writings of almost everyone on everything, of Peripatetic philosophy. We have shown this elsewhere. What it is, in the common manner of studying philosophy, that rubs off onto the minds of studious youth — through its tortuous windings and its prodigiously stitched-together patchwork, hurrying them on to other vices — I have resolved to state here with one example, or perhaps a second. And here there first present themselves to us the unsound theorems of the common system of ethics. That happiness which we pursue through virtue, whose approach the human mind has long and vainly labored to find, is to be attained in its entirety in this mortal life — this is the base and foundation of the whole structure; for only when a man's fate is fulfilled can he at last be called happy, or so Aristotle declares, pronouncing the contrary "utterly absurd" (παντελῶς ἄτοπον). Yet this same philosopher, rejecting a troubled happiness for which virtue and industry would labor on their own account, makes happiness dependent on "outward prosperity" (τῆς ἐκτὸς εὐημερίας), and thus incapable of bearing the weight of calamities, and liable to be snatched away against one's will and undeservedly — while remaining unsure, meanwhile (as though these things fought against each other), whether to ascribe it to some god or to virtue. He would no doubt have thought our Job wretched, miserable, and unhappy — just as Marcus Tullius says he judged otherwise of his own Regulus. But there is hardly anyone, I think, who does not know how far whatever can be understood of that happiness which he proclaims falls short of that communion with God in which alone the future felicity of the saints here finds its beginning — and how far it falls short of all that the gospel pronounces blessed, except to one from whom the gospel itself is veiled. Further, the rule and prescription he lays down for that virtue which, with a certain reasoning gone mad, he imagines to consist "in a mean between vices" (ἐν κακιῶν μεσότητι) will most certainly ensure that no one ever knows for certain what virtue is, and what vice. For, having rejected the rational soul's own proper motion, and the diligent inquiry that Socrates favored, and having instead referred students to I know not what arbitrary definitions framed by prudent men, he took ample care that they should find nothing firm or stable on which to plant their foot, nothing that would put an end to the perpetual wavering of the human mind. Men will judge that, in seeking to avoid this fault, he fell into a greater one — in repeatedly asserting that a man could be perfectly wise, not realizing that one who is perfectly wise is God. To the limits of modesty, and to a sense of the human lot, that Roman Fabricius seems, without doubt, to have kept himself far more closely — he to whom, when he was an envoy at the court of King Pyrrhus, the speech of Cineas the Thessalian relating that someone among the Greeks had ventured to call himself wise seemed a kind of prodigy. And to pass over countless other things wrongly said about the virtues, whoever assents to his opinion, which confines the exercise of fortitude — most divine of virtues — to feats of war, will find himself compelled to deny that praise not only to the most earnest (σπουδαιοτάτοις) and wisest of the Gentiles, but even to Christ himself and to the holy martyrs. Legal right (δίκαιον νομικόν), set within the discretion of lawgivers and distinguished from natural right (φυσικῷ) — a fiction devised to the contempt of religion and the ruin of it — he sets up as the principle and standard of divine worship, from which men are to learn who God is and how he is to be worshiped. We know, too, how many of this same philosopher's pronouncements on theology — on involuntary actions, on justice, and other matters — are drawn, not unwillingly, by some, to the detriment of heavenly truth. Finally, if we may contemplate the very account of virtue he sets forth, the only one by which access to happiness is obtained, we shall see it to be rather a proud opinion, peddling a mere shadow of virtue, than that disposition of mind which befits the human lot and its dependence upon the Most High God. For it goes splendidly with that virtue, if it is preferred to vice, whose end is not the glory of God, nor grace its beginning; whose rule is neither the nature of things itself, nor the revelation of the divine mind; but which, taking its rise from men, rests solely on their industry as it proceeds, and at last is terminated in themselves. Caught in the net of hypotheses of this kind, the mind of a young man will not easily find how to extricate itself from its coils and snares. The gospel teaches everything otherwise. But it is indeed too laborious a task, and not one for an indolent man, to root out from the bottom the dogmas of persuasion with which the mind has been freshly imbued — especially where there is no one who takes it upon himself to teach that they are false. Nor is it possible for the mind to assent at the same time to mutually conflicting principles and considerations of reason. Hence, wavering back and forth on the tide and flux of various thoughts, uncertain of the truth, and buffeted as if by opposing gusts of wind, minds would be plunged by a doubtful perplexity (δυσωπία ἀμφίβολος) into the shoals of atheism, were it not that — as is the condition of most men — clinging to the outer bark of words on both sides, they never seriously trouble themselves to test the force and substance of the things themselves. For since the most celebrated theorems of moral philosophy and the mysteries of the gospel by no means keep peace with one another, it must be that those who, giving their assent to the former, conform their minds to them, become thereby altogether incapable of the latter. It is, indeed, a wretched sort of comfort, that among so great a crowd of students there are very few who are thoroughly imbued with this moral doctrine. But so it is, learned reader, so indeed it is: the studies of youth are so arranged, in pursuit of the masks of contention or the shadows of dreams, that, full of terms, distinctions, and definitions, they scarcely taste the things themselves, as the saying goes, with the tips of their lips; and those who approach ethics with the aim of themselves becoming prudent, just, sober, and brave, and truly earnest (σπουδαῖοι) —

"are scarce so many in number as the gates of Thebes, or the mouths of the rich Nile."

The moral philosophy of the Gentiles was practical, a grave discipline in honesty of morals, according to the best rules of virtue they knew how to conceive — slippery and most uncertain rules indeed, but the best they were able to devise. For they were not like some among us, who, though we have found wheat, would still rather feed on acorns. "For it is not," says Aristotle, "that we inquire what virtue is that we may know it (Οὐ γὰρ ἵν᾽ εἰδῶμεν τί ἐστιν ἀρετὴ, σκεπτόμεθα), but that we may become good (ἀλλ᾽ ἵν᾽ ἀγαθοὶ γενώμεθα); since otherwise it would be of no use at all. It is necessary to examine the things that concern actions, and how they are to be done." And again: "For we wish at once to know, and ourselves to be such" (ἅμα γὰρ εἰδῆσαι βουλόμεθα, καὶ αὐτοὶ εἶναι τοιοῦτοι). And how many are there, pray, who in their pursuit of that science have this settled with themselves already? A raw youth, inexperienced in affairs, intent on everything else, perhaps full of wine, sleep, and vice, hurries — after the common fashion, making a learned racket in the schools — to run through some course or other of ethics, rapid indeed and headlong, in a year and a half, or even in a single semester. But let us pass over these matters, which are faults in the men themselves; we are dealing with the thing itself. If, then, to those false opinions mentioned above — whose sum agrees perfectly with the native pride of the human mind and with the most foolish self-deification (αὐτοθεϊσμῷ) — anyone at all, ignorant of the recapitulation (ἀνακεφαλαιώσεως) of all things in Christ, should attach his mind, he will scarcely believe the gospel when it instructs him in everything else — that he is nothing, can do nothing, but must, being blind, foolish, depraved, and wretched, receive all light, wisdom, virtue, and happiness from God through Christ. And if he does not embrace these truths by faith, nor take care to order his life by their rule, it would be well for him if, having been diligently occupied with them, he lost nothing more than his labor and his lamp-oil. And so, although I grant that what a number of the ancient philosophers achieved in this moral discipline, with admirable range and versatility of mind and much midnight labor, is of the greatest and finest use to those who "have their senses trained by habit to discern good and evil" (διὰ τὴν ἕξιν τὰ αἰσθητήρια γεγυμνασμένα πρὸς διάκρισιν καλοῦ τε καὶ κακοῦ), yet in my judgment he does not act rightly who drives men — to whom, by God's greatest kindness, it is granted to use the surest and infallible rule of all the virtues, the one rule alone able to engender them in the minds of men — toward uncertain, fluid studies of the emptiest sort of wisdom, when they are seeking a holy and honest way of living for God. Aristotle himself would not tolerate anyone handing down a doctrine of morals except with the intent that the rule of life should at the same time be ordered by it. But I do not wish to say more on these matters here; their consideration will meet us again in the course of our work. Let the discourse move on, then, to other things.

No one, I think, who has even a little insight into these matters, fails to be displeased by the common method of teaching philosophy, so utterly full of contentions and swordfights of argument. With all other ancient philosophy rejected, almost that alone is retained which best suits the circles of wranglers. For after a man beyond all question of genius had set his mind on overturning others' opinions in philosophy, he became excessively cautious and wary in every point of doctrine — lest, that is, he should unwittingly fall into the very snares which he could easily foresee that his own example would lead posterity to construct for him. And so he proceeds cautiously through the whole of philosophy, as though walking over treacherous ashes, and forges definitions with far greater care to make them safe from others' objections, and fortified on every side, than to bring the things themselves, which he undertakes to explain, into the light. Hence very many features of his philosophy are designed to perpetuate battles and lawsuits. This is especially true as it was cultivated by the Arabs, after it had pleased men who, in their own judgment, were extremely sharp-witted, but who through endless swordfighting of argument aimed at nothing but domination in the schools, that all learning, at once entangled in thorny subtleties, should be turned into the material and cause of quarrels and contentions. For the study of philosophy, for several centuries, was nothing other than the most inept apparatus for that futile itch for disputation which reigned in the schools. Yet this empty method of captious wrangling never had Aristotle for its author. He did indeed hand down some theses for his students to defend, as did his successor Theophrastus, so that they might have a contest of eloquence and acumen; but there was nothing in their disputations resembling those contentious word-battles (λογομαχιῶν, "word-battles") and captious circumlocutions by which, as a very learned man puts it, unhappy youth is today trained to a hardened brow. Whatever is still sweated over by many in philosophy is nothing but preparation for a victim to be sacrificed to that art of wrangling. Whether what they read, what they learn, what they teach, is true or false; whether it has any foundation in the nature of things, or is merely the empty speculation of idle men — of this they take no account, provided only it be suited to disputes and (something to be unlearned, if they wish to be wise) increases their skill in wrangling. And if anyone, well practiced at last in sneers, taunts, abuse, and spitting contempt, rises to such a pitch of learning — or rather of impudence — that he never brings an argument to an end, he is reckoned learned, to his own great harm. Many such men one may see every day, whom, from their past life spent in the exercises of disputation, you would suppose overflowing with the precepts of dialectic and philosophy — until, when it comes to serious matters, matters whose handling most needs the skill these sciences claim to give, they fall utterly silent. This is a thing I have very often greatly wondered at, until, among other causes, I discovered that this one too contributed to it: that, while they strove, with thorny subtleties and a heap of futile terms, to nail a cross to themselves and to others, they were themselves wholly and entirely ignorant of the true and sound use of the art of logic, and of all solid philosophy.

From this there also arises another fault in study, and by far the greatest. Students think of themselves as bound not by the limits and bounds which the nature of things itself displays, but by the writings of a few men — men who would themselves never have been any wiser than their followers, had they not availed themselves of the benefit of relying on their own mental judgment, a benefit which their followers, by their own doing, deny themselves. They spend their years learning what others have already perceived; always trusting in others, they never return to themselves, never take counsel with themselves. For to their own very great disadvantage, the corrupted nature of the human mind is so constituted that men most readily trust themselves, rather than him on whose help and assistance they ought in all things to depend; while toward others like themselves — as though they themselves had been furnished with no gifts at all from God — they give themselves wholly over into bondage. By the one of these faults they betray unbelief, by the other folly, and by both an ungrateful mind toward God. It cannot be told how much this fault, and others of this kind that accompany the common method of study — by which many suppose themselves to be preparing themselves for wisdom — actually hinder, in the inquiry after truth, a mind occupied with empty reasonings; and though the vigor of natural talent, industry, and practical experience may break these bars open in some, yet since they are a hindrance to all, they keep the slower and duller sort shut up under the shameful yoke of ignorance, at least at the very threshold of learning.

Let us look, finally, at theology itself. Few there are who set before themselves in its study a legitimate aim and right end. For many devote themselves to this study for no other fruit than to seek wealth, riches, honors, and a certain popular esteem. This, then, is their one desire: to draw from theological books such skill as will make themselves, and others too, reckon them fit to acquire these earthly things. Hence they approach divine matters, and the most hidden mysteries of the gospel, with the same mind and relying on the same resources with which they resolve to acquire a knowledge of the secular sciences; and meanwhile they have no doubt that they are Christians — though nothing could be more alien to the gospel than what such a person harbors in himself. We shall show that theology is a spiritual wisdom occupied with the mysteries of the gospel. Nor was the theology of the Gentiles themselves anything other than a certain wisdom in the mysteries of the religions they professed. It follows, then, that whoever sets before himself in this study any end other than to become wise and spiritually skilled in the mystery of the gospel must necessarily miss the mark. But how many are there who take aim at that goal? I fear there are more who will scorn this, not knowing that by the very same act they insult the gospel. Now where students have not set for themselves a right end, it is impossible that they should not also err in the choice of means. Indeed, even if they should happen upon those means which are in their own nature well suited to that end, since they are nevertheless directed by such students to some other purpose, they cheat themselves of their true use and benefit. But the means that are of all others most necessary they for the most part count as nothing — indeed they spurn them with the utmost contempt. Out of the darkness of these errors there has long since come forth, in place of evangelical theology, an artificial science not unlike those which ordinary philosophy hands down. For theology, so called, is a certain systematic structure of theses, definitions, arguments, objections, answers, and distinctions — a confused hybrid philosophico-theology (μιξοφιλοσοφοθεολογία, "a mixed philosophico-theology"). Nor are its contents delivered "in words that the Holy Spirit teaches," so that we might "compare spiritual things with spiritual"; but rather in terms and notions of distinction which the whole of wisdom, both human and divine, might have done without at no loss whatsoever, had they not, by some chance or other, occurred to Aristotle. Let the most practiced theologians in that science undertake to teach what the gospel is, what faith, regeneration, justification, adoption, and holiness are — at once a definition is forged, not the one best suited to convey spiritual light to the understanding of believers, but one so stitched together, with such great caution and such precisely chosen words, that those of a different opinion will not easily find how, according to the tenets of the philosophy that reigns in the schools, they might be caught within it — for in this alone consists the great artifice of Aristotelian definitions. And so at last they say that philosophy is the handmaid of theology, when in reality she lords it over theology, and wickedly insults her captive. Where indeed she serves the polishing of the mind, and the use, exercise, and strengthening of the intellectual faculties; where she searches out, in the natures of things, the traces of characters impressed there by divine wisdom and power — there she may rightly be called handmaid to all wisdom, and so to theology as well. But the reduction of the thorniest questions about matters that pertain nothing at all to the knowledge of God into the very ends of theology; the pressing-down of spiritual truth, bound in the chains and fetters of subtle terms; the prejudicing of the mind itself, once the habit of the emptiest reasonings has been introduced — these, among countless other evils that accompany its common use, betoken not service but domination. From this it comes about that the most excellent glory and splendid beauty of divine truth is in many ways obscured among very many. We know how thin and dim was that shadow of truth which the philosophers of old revered. Yet we know they conceived so great a love and admiration for it that at times, in contemplating it, they suffered a kind of ecstasy (ἔκστασιν, "a standing outside oneself"), even though they beheld it neither naked nor open — indeed scarcely glimpsed any semblance of the truth at all. For the rays of natural truth which shone upon them stand, compared with the most profound mysteries of all truth which he set forth to us — he who, coming forth from the bosom of the Father, is himself "the way, the life, and the truth" — as the twinkling of the tiniest star by night stands to the noonday rays of the sun. Let us then boldly declare that man a stranger in theology who is not inflamed with love of divine truth. Grant that he has wearied himself long and much in the tossing about of thorny questions — grant even that he has proved the greatest glutton of theological books — that is nonetheless the strongest proof that the native beauty of truth herself has never once shone upon his mind, even in passing, seeing that he does not burn with love for her, is not carried away into admiration of her beauty. But where, I ask, among the nations, is such an affection of soul to be found among students? How many are there who do not seek elsewhere the enticements of their studies? Who is of such a mind, and has this alone settled as his purpose — how he may make truth, lovable, most beautiful, most dear, known to himself and familiar, and conform himself to her? Very many indeed are of quite another mind; they reckon that they take upon their backs a heavy burden in her study, from which they may draw their livelihood; and if some quicker road to wealth and honors should present itself in any way at all, that thankless labor will straightway hear, "Farewell, and farewell forever." Ah, the wretched condition of theology! Driven away from the noble, heavenly, spiritual contemplation of supernatural truth and the mysteries of the gospel, she is forced into a dry, barren, quarrelsome science, and is sought after and cultivated, for the most putrid of reasons, by those who are in reality her bitterest enemies — men who, pursuing other and futile things all their days and years, court her for one reason only, as a procuress of wealth and honors. And when, first fleeing hunger and poverty, and then gaping after riches and vain glory, they knock at the doors of this divine wisdom, they strive to seize only so much as she has in common with the other sciences, in her forecourts and porches, while remaining utterly remote from her inner, divine sanctuary — wholly neglecting whatever pertains to life, to the soul, and to heavenly power (δύναμιν, "power"), the spiritual knowledge of which would be salutary to themselves, and useful to others as well. I will say at last, freely, and without hesitation, what I think: very few of those engaged in theological studies appear to have devoted themselves to her, enticed by the beauty of this daughter not of time but of eternity, or to care to experience her heavenly power and efficacy with a pure heart and sincere mind. And from this it comes that, after long and empty hopes, we reap from most of them "wild grapes" in place of "grapes"; and that those who "ought by reason of the time to be teachers" very often need again to be taught "what are the first elements of the oracles of God." Yet it is from these very men that the faithful Christian people expect that the mysteries of the gospel, and the unsearchable riches of Christ, will be proclaimed to them, piously, soundly, and learnedly, in the words the Holy Spirit teaches, for the conversion, instruction, edification, and consolation of souls; but instead these men foist upon them I know not what empty little declamations, decked out with the most inept rattling of words. Should I call these men theologians — men who neither know how to search out the sense of the Holy Spirit, nor are willing to use his words, nor have their senses trained (αἰσθητήρια γεγυμνασμένα, "senses trained by exercise") in the mysteries of God, but seek with all their wishes for one thing only: how, by some empty jingling of words, wholly removed from any right ordering of human life, they might tickle the frivolity of the unskilled crowd, and of others who oppose with a hostile mind the power of God in the gospel — banishing it, as it were, to the stage? The Lord Jesus will, at the appointed time, demand an account for this defiling of his most holy institutions, and this contempt of the gospel. But I do not wish to add here what a just indignation had all but wrung from me; the reader, I hope, will find these matters considered elsewhere with the utmost composure of mind.

What, then, will you say, reader? Do you set yourself up as equal to the task of uprooting these harmful tares from the Lord's field? Are you attempting some new method of teaching the disciplines, an abolition of the old institutions, a wholesale reformation of studies? Good words, Christian reader; the apostle has taught us to abhor evil surmisings (ὑπονοίας πονηράς, "evil suspicions"). If indeed it pleases you to suspect me, no one can forbid you, since your suspicion does not lie within another's power; you will one day safely render account of it to God, just as I will of these lucubrations, whose plan I am now about to share with you. Only see to it that you judge it fairly and kindly! For that alone is your concern. I am not attempting to move things immovable (ἀκίνητα κινεῖν, "to move the unmovable"); I am not putting forward some new method of study; I am not so deluded with self-conceit (οὐχ οὕτως τετύφωμαι, "I am not so puffed up"). Yet, because I am of no account, and might hide myself under an obscure roof, it does not follow that others do not sin, or do not err, in the investigation of heavenly truth. Nor, so far as I know, is it forbidden to me alone to share my thoughts on the nature and study of theology with the learned and the pious; others have done so, and good men at that. Of the best of things I will say what the orator said of the worst: "When was this not done? When was it censured? When not permitted? When, in short, was it ever the case that what is lawful should not be lawful?" I will therefore, if you will allow it, learned reader, make you acquainted with the whole plan of the work. Cease your ill-suspecting, your ill-speaking; I will tell you the thing itself. When I first set my mind to writing these things, I had resolved on nothing else than to lay before your judgment certain propositions concerning the nature of evangelical theology. What I had meditated to that end you will find cast into the final part of the work. But the matters that had to be premised before setting them forth, which I had at first resolved to dispatch briefly, grew — quite beyond our original design, though I hope not beyond the demands of the subject itself — into that great mass which you now behold. I judge it unnecessary to review the order and whole plan of the work here in detail, point by point; I will sum it all up in a word. Having first premised the general notions pertaining to the name and nature of theology as a whole, we have resolved, in the earlier books, to narrate — attending to the actual sequence of events, which we divide into more solemn periods — the progress that true theology made, from its first origin (which we set forth) through the various stages of divine revelation, together with the many defections from it and the errors that sprang from these, and the variation of the church's worship as constituted according to that revelation's rule, together with the manifold apostasy of that same church and its gracious restoration, down to the final and definitive rejection of the Jewish people. In pursuing this design, very many matters most worthy of consideration presented themselves to us from every side — notably that famous (διαβόητος, "much-talked-of") Ezraic reformation of the Jewish church upon its return from captivity, on whose occasion we found it necessary to discourse at length on the antiquities and rites of that church. Finally,

...we undertake in that place to expound evangelical theology itself. For we show from the Scriptures themselves what it is, in what its nature consists, who are fit for its study, who alone attain to it and by what means, and what chiefly stands in its way — together with the nature, institution, and destinies of the church, on which it rests and is founded; and a dissertation on its study closes the whole work. Whether you will judge that I ought to be dealt with by strict right in these matters, or by equity and fairness, is your own choice, learned reader; for it is all one to me — provided only, mindful of that evangelical instruction (Matthew 7:21), you weigh the matters themselves; for I care nothing for hunters after mere words. But whatever these things may be that, overcome by love of the truth, I bring forward into the open, in these and in all other things I commit myself — a most wretched sinner, wearied by the evils of the age and by my own — to the grace, mercy, and divine forgiveness in Jesus Christ, the one Savior, with all the vows, prayers, sighs, tears, and faith that by his grace I am able; and I willingly submit myself to the judgment and censure of his saints, wherever on earth they are warring. FAREWELL.

Since a few pages here would otherwise stand empty, I was unwilling to withhold from the reader this poem by a most distinguished fellow-minister, offered to me freely and unsolicited (although modesty and a sense of my own slightness forbid me to acknowledge many things of which I am myself the subject), since it sets forth the argument of the work in elegant composition:

ON THE THEOLOGOUMENA OF JOHN OWEN, S.T.D.

Nescia quae rubeas, nunc dic, Purpura, Musas... Sola, suas, utinam contemneret India, Gemmas. ("Purple dye, unknowing why you blush — tell now, O Muses... Would that India alone might scorn her own gems.") — T. G.

Book One

Concerning Theology in General

Chapter 1

The use of ὀνοματολογία ("the naming of terms") — the danger of introducing foreign words into religion, and its twofold occasion — the words θεολογία ("theology") and θεολόγοι ("theologians") are nowhere written in Scripture — the names for theology among the Jews — the origin of the word and its use among the Greeks — who among them first wrote θεολογικά ("theological matters") — the first theology was a fabulous account of θεογονία ("the birth of the gods") — the introduction of the names "theology" and "theologians" among Christians — John the first so called — the title of the Apocalypse — the folly of the Ethiopic version of the New Testament — how the evangelical doctrine is named in the gospel itself — the word "theology" is accepted.

I. Those who undertake descriptions of things, so that the matters they treat may not remain ἀνώνυμα ("nameless"), and so that the fault of ὁμωνυμία ("equivocation"), which often breeds confusion in a subject, may be avoided, begin their web from the very names themselves. Someone rightly said, Πρὸς τὸ ὀρθῶς διδάσκειν, δεῖ πρῶτον ἐξετάζειν τὰ ὀνόματα ("For correct teaching, one must first examine the names"); and another, Ἐπὶ πάντων τῶν ζητουμένων, εἰς λόγον χρὴ μεταλαμβάνεσθαι τοὔνομα ("In every inquiry, the name must be brought into account"), Galen, On the Method of Healing, book 1, chapter 5 — for the words of things are τύποι καὶ μιμήματα ("types and imitations") of the things themselves. But in sacred matters an account must be given of ὀνοματολογία ("naming"), since the name has been imposed by the Holy Spirit. The apostle taught us all to turn away from βέβηλοι κενοφωνίαι ("profane, empty utterances") and λογομαχίαι ("disputes about words"). We know, too, at what great expense of words men have often fought pugnaciously over terms which the arbitrary judgment of uncertain men has brought into our religion. Nor does that confusion which is discerned in the Christian religion owe the smallest part of itself to the introduction of foreign terms into ecclesiastical use, and to the twisting of those terms which it properly has by the dictate of the Holy Spirit into a τεχνικός ("technical") and ἐξωτικός ("exotic, foreign") sense. Hence it is an old complaint that that native simplicity or purity of evangelical doctrine, flowing from the everlasting fountain of all purity, was corrupted from the very first beginnings of the churches — whether painted over with adventitious colors or mixed with dross. That the ages that followed clung to the same reef is better known than to need proof, especially once it came to pass, as is the way of men, that whatever pleased the greater number seemed right, until error grew to such immensity that within Christianity itself one could scarcely find the Christian religion at all. Indeed, that confusion and uncertainty which is to be seen flowing through almost every branch of learning seems to have arisen either from ignorance of the words used by the ancients, or from the boldness that twists them to foreign uses and senses.

Our author refers to the work of Galen, the most celebrated physician, On the Method of Healing.—ED.

II. Further: of the terms whose use, emerging from an almost infinite mass of writers, has come to occupy some prominent place in our religion, and which are not read in so many words in sacred Scripture, there are two kinds: the first, those which necessity brought forth for refuting the importunate ἀντιλογίαι ("contradictions") of heretics; the second, those which men of some distinction in learning, under pretext of illustrating the truth or teaching it more ἀκριβῶς ("precisely"), either invented themselves or, relying on their own ingenuity, took up from others' inventions and put to use. Now, just as you would find precious few, apart from those who wage war upon the truth itself, who would wish these terms banished from the altars and hearths of the church, so to quarrel importunately over retaining them is nothing other than to offer sacrifice to inveterate prejudices and party zeal, in endless litigation.

III. Some stubbornly attack the ὀνοματολογία ("nomenclature") of "theology" and "theologians"; and I have no wish to fight bitterly over it, since both names are a εὕρημα ("invention") of pagan men, and no word in sacred Scripture is exactly ἰσοδυναμοῦσα ("equivalent in force") to them. For just as every honorable — indeed magnificent — name will prejudice the thing it names, when it carries more weight than the thing itself, so, since some names can be defended only by resorting to many arguments, the unlearned will judge that the things themselves stand in no less doubt — especially where there is ἀμετρία ("disproportion") pulling against them. Besides, since among those with whom the right and rule of speaking once lay, and still lies, the custom has so far prevailed that by these words is designated, as it were, a certain art, and a certain class of men trained in it — a notion which the mystery of evangelical simplicity abhors on both counts — the words can hardly seem well suited, either by their origin or by their use, to express the matter now in question. Yet since in every συζήτησις ("joint inquiry") the thing in dispute must have some name: come — with nails and hair pared away, so to speak — let us be content with the one that usage, by the consent of most, has brought in; we shall nonetheless remain entirely free in our inquiry into the nature of the thing itself, which we have undertaken to expound. A few words, however, may be premised concerning how it has been designated by name among others.

IV. The Jews designate theology variously: חכמה האלהית ("divine wisdom"), Buxtorf, Lexicon Talmudicum, p. 752; הידיעה התוריית ("knowledge of the law"), the same, ibid. and p. 984; and תלמוד תורה ("the study of the law"). The theologian they call איש האלהי ("a man of God"). Maimonides, the most learned of their theologians, divides theology into two parts, in the second preface to the More Nebuchim ("Guide for the Perplexed"), and in the preface to the third part of the same work. For it is either מעשה בראשית ("the work of creation"), that is, natural theology, or מעשה מרכבה ("the work of the chariot"), that is, mystical theology — a name drawn from Ezekiel 1 — and he teaches that the former is to be expounded to the common people, the latter to only a few. For the rest, in the Old Testament there is no word which can be rendered by "theology," nor any term ἀνάλογον ("analogous") to it.

Commonly among Greek writers a θεολόγος ("theologian") is one who discourses about God; hence οἱ Δελφῶν θεολόγοι ("the theologians of Delphi") in Plutarch's On the Cessation of Oracles. Θεολογούμενα are "matters disputed concerning God." Suetonius, in his Augustus, mentions the books of Θεολογούμενα by Asclepiades of Mendes, in which he brought to light — and defended — the foul atheism and the monstrous, unlawful union (ἀθέμιτον μίξιν, "unlawful mixture") of the Egyptians of the city of Mendes with the he-goat they worshipped. Nicomachus of Gerasa likewise wrote two books of ἀριθμητικῶν θεολογουμένων ("arithmetical theologoumena"), ἔργον πόῤῥω τῆς ἐπιγραφῆς διεῤῥιμμένον ("a work far removed from what its title promises"), as Photius says, Bibliotheca, cod. clxxxvii — a silly production, evidently. Θεολογία, however, according to the usage of the Greek language, signifies rather "discourse about God" than "the discourse of God"; and so Augustine explains the word, City of God, book 8, chapter 1: "It is," he says, "speech or reasoning about God." Yet examples of the other sense are not wanting either. Θεοπρόπιον is "an oracle of God," or what God declares; and θεοσημεία is "a sign which God exhibits." The most ancient Greek writers, who treated of the gods and the worship of the gods, were the first to be called θεολόγοι, and their learning θεολογία. According to Lactantius, On the Anger of God, chapter 2, these were the poets, and it was they who were accordingly commonly distinguished by that name. Aristotle, Metaphysics 3; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 3; Isidore, book 5 — Pherecydes the Syrian is reported to have been the first among the nations to treat "theological" matters in continuous prose. They affirm that the symbolic and cryptic, or αἰνιγματικήν ("enigmatic"), method later employed by the Pythagoreans was the teaching of this man. He himself was the chief instructor of Pythagoras, and was called "theologian." Diogenes and Hesychius Illustrius attest that Heraclitus wrote works of this "theological" kind — whence he is called σκοτεινός ("the obscure one"). This Pherecydes lived in the age of Cyrus; so far behind were the Greeks in every branch of learning, when compared to the peoples of the East. This was cast in Solon's teeth by the Egyptian priest of Saïs: "Ω Σόλων, Σόλων, "Ελληνες ἀεὶ παῖδες ἐστὲ, γέρων δὲ Ἕλλην οὐκ ἔστιν" ("O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children; there is no such thing as an old Greek"). And when Solon asked how he meant this, the old man is said to have replied, "Νέοι ἐστὲ τὰς ψυχὰς πάντες· οὐδεμίαν γὰρ ἐν αὐταῖς ἔχετε δι᾽ ἀρχαίαν ἀκοὴν παλαιὰν δόξαν, οὐδὲ μάθημα χρόνῳ πολιὸν οὐδέν" ("You are all young in soul; for you have in your souls no ancient opinion handed down by old report, nor any learning hoary with age"), Plato, Timaeus [Owen: Phædo]. For it is well known that theology had attained its splendor — indeed, had already passed its ἀκμή ("prime") — long before the time of Cyrus. See Pliny, Natural History, book 7, chapter 1, "what each man discovered in his lifetime": Τοῦτον φησὶ Θεόπομπος πρῶτον περὶ φύσεως καὶ θεῶν "Ελλησι γράψαι ("Theopompus says that this man was the first to write for the Greeks concerning nature and the gods"), as Diogenes reports in his Life of him. (The most learned of the theologians among the Jews, Maimonides, likewise draws such a division, in the second preface to the More Nebukhim, and in the preface to the third part of that same work: for it is either מעשה בראשית — ma'aseh bereshit ("the work of the beginning," i.e., the account of the creation) — a work... [the source breaks off here at a page turn and does not resume this thought].) This is also apparent from the letter of Thales to the same Pherecydes, which begins thus: "Θαλῆς Φερεκύδει· πυνθάνομαί σε πρῶτον Ιώνων μέλλειν λόγους ἀμφὶ τῶν θείων χρημάτων εἰς τοὺς Ελληνας φαίνειν" ("Thales to Pherecydes: I hear that you are about to be the first of the Ionians to set forth accounts of divine matters to the Greeks"). Hesychius Illustrius, in his Life of him, thinks that Pherecydes was called "Syrius" from the island of Syra: "Εστι μία τῶν Κυκλάδων νήσων, ἡ Σύρα" ("Syra is one of the Cyclades islands"), he says. Others hold that he was a Syrian, which is more probable. He himself, in the proem of his work, affirmed that Musaeus, son of Eumolpus, was πρῶτον θεογονίαν ποιῆσαι ("the first to compose a theogony"). Him the Platonists called τὸν θεολόγον ("the theologian") by way of eminence, and he was always accounted the most distinguished of theologians. But of Homer, Philostratus says, in his Heroicus, that Ὀρφέα ἐν πολλοῖς τῶν κατὰ τὴν θεολογίαν ὑπερῇρε — "he surpassed Orpheus himself in many things pertaining to theology" — and added to what had already been discovered. Now their "theology" consisted in an exposition of theogony, for they supposed that all the gods had been begotten. So Herodotus, of the Persians, in his Clio: "Οὐκ ἀνθρωποφυέας ἐνόμισαν τοὺς θεοὺς καθάπερ οἱ "Ελληνες εἶναι" ("They did not suppose the gods to be of human form, as the Greeks do") — for the Persians worshipped the gods of nature. I speak here of the Greeks after the introduction of Hellenism; for Eusebius proves, in his Preparation for the Gospel, book 1, chapter 9, that the ancient Greeks, after the manner of the other nations, at first worshipped heaven and the stars: "Οὐκ ἄρα τὶς ἦν θεογονίας ̔Ελληνικῆς, ἢ βαρβαρικῆς τοῖς παλαιοτάτοις τῶν ἀνθρώπων λόγος, οὐδὲ ξοάνων ἴδρυσις, οὐδὲ ἡ νῦν πολλὴ φλυαρία τῆς τῶν θεῶν ἀῤῥένων τε καὶ θηλειῶν κατονομασίας," he says — "There was, then, among the most ancient of men, no account at all of a Greek or a barbarian theogony, nor any setting-up of carved images, nor that great nonsense now current of naming the gods as male and female." And long before him, Plato in the Cratylus: "Φαίνονταί μοι οἱ πρῶτοι τῶν ἀνθρώπων περὶ τὴν ̔Ελλάδα τούτους μόνους Θεοὺς ἡγεῖσθαι οὖσπερ νῦν πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ἥλιον καὶ σελήνην, καὶ γῆν, καὶ ἄστρα, καὶ οὐρανόν" ("It seems to me that the earliest men in Greece held only these to be gods, just as many of the barbarians do now — sun and moon, earth, stars, and heaven"). But more on these matters later.

At what time this word was granted citizenship among Christians is uncertain. In the title of the Apocalypse, John is called ὁ θεολόγος ("the theologian"). In the royal copy associated with Montanus it reads: "Ἀποκάλυψις τοῦ ἁγίου ἀποστόλου καὶ εὐαγγελιστοῦ ̓Ιωάννου τοῦ θεολόγου" ("The Apocalypse of the holy apostle and evangelist John the theologian"). In the remaining copies it is simply so styled. The Ethiopic version adds, "which John was bishop of the metropolis of Constantinople when he was about to suffer persecution" — foolishly enough, and just as befitted that translator. As for that superscription — since its origin is most uncertain, and it deservedly carries little weight — it may well have been drawn from a verse in the second [chapter] of the book: "John ἐμαρτύρησε τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ," that is, bore witness to the word of God, not to a discourse concerning God. But the word has another, more usual meaning, as we have shown. And it was not because he testified to λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ ("the word of God"), but because he most clearly expounded λόγον τὸν Θεὸν ("the Word who is God"), that the ancients called John, κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν ("pre-eminently"), "the theologian." The first to do so was Origen. Dionysius the Areopagite mentions "theology" and "theologians" so familiarly, chapter 3 of On the Divine Names, as if those technical terms (ὀνόματα τεχνικά) had by then been in the most frequent use — but almost everyone agrees that this writer is spurious (ὑποβολιμαῖος). These words, then, so far as sacred Scripture is concerned, are ἄγραφα ("unwritten," i.e., nowhere found in it). Indeed, the evangelical doctrine is called λόγος ζωῆς ("the word of life"), Philippians 2:16; ὁ λόγος ὁ τοῦ σταυροῦ ("the word of the cross"), 1 Corinthians 1:18; λόγος τῆς πίστεως ("the word of faith"), 1 Timothy 4:6; ὁ λόγος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ("the word of Christ"), Colossians 3:16; λόγος Θεοῦ ("the word of God"), 1 Thessalonians 2:13; and, having regard to these and similar expressions, we do not reject a sober use of terms of this kind — though we are well aware that their technical sense cannot be retained without prejudice to the truth. Let us, then, with Eusebius, Against Marcellus, call the matter of which we speak θεολογίαν ἐκκλησιαστικήν ("ecclesiastical theology").

Chapter 2

The abstract notion of theology — In what sense the scholastics contend it is a science — Their view rejected — The apostle proves, in 1 Corinthians 2, that theology is alien to all human science — Μυέω, μυστήριον, τελειόω, τέλειος, τέλη — Who is the Pauline theologian — The vain labor of most, in forcing theology into the rules of human arts and sciences — The absurdities and ἀμαθία ("ignorance") of the scholastics.

I. There is no reason why the disputes carried on by so many concerning the "abstract" and "artificial" notion of theology, as they call it, should detain us here, since they have no proper bearing on the exposition of its nature as we intend to present it. Whether it is an art or a science; and if it is to be called a science, whether it is theoretical or practical, or a mixture of both; what its proper and immediate object is; what its genus, what its differentia, what its end — and a great many other things, wholly futile — every sort of theologian, mixing Aristotle's school with Christian simplicity, has disputed variously and subtly about all this; so that in seeking to understand it minutely, they end by understanding nothing. For since Aristotle made mention of θεολογικῆς ἐπιστήμης ("theological science") and taught that it was the most excellent of τῶν θεωρητικῶν ἐπιστημῶν ("the theoretical sciences"), the scholastics — especially those for whom, next to God, Thomas is authority — for whom it was a point of religion to disagree with him, contended that theology is a Christian science, and a speculative one at that. That the name "art" ought to be banished from this business is now, at last, agreed by all. Whether the definitions of "science," which are enunciated as this or that party pleases, have anything in common with theology, will appear presently. Since, then, the things themselves — arts and sciences — and their descriptions and definitions, are uncertain and arbitrary, fashioned variously according to the differing capacities of various men; and since there exists no habit of mind, whether theoretical or practical, which — since every science, on Plato's testimony (Epinomis, appended to the Laws), is μιμητικὴ τὸ πλεῖστον ("for the most part imitative"), that is, an imitation of the things themselves — could, as the ἐκτύπωμα ("copy" or "impression") of any art or science, exhibit the thing we are dealing with — all labor and ingenuity spent in reducing things so disparate to a single order will be in vain. As for the sciences properly so called (σχετικῶς), which look to conclusions drawn from better-known principles and take their name from their proper objects, what is in view is either the doctrine itself, by which the matters it treats are artfully arranged, or the faculty or habit of mind by which we grasp that doctrine. But doctrine, which always rests upon certain foundations and theorems that are not merely consonant with human reason but akin to it — such as every science is — can have no fellowship with a mystery that surpasses every purely ψυχικόν ("natural" or "soulish") or natural capacity. For it is a universal presupposition (πρόληψις) that God cannot rightly be known except through God. The "scientific habit," as they call it, is a conformity of the mind to such doctrine, born from the recurring operation, through discipline, of kindred principles — so that it cannot express that divine power of the mind which is theology, and which rests upon the truthfulness of him who reveals it. And the object of theology, since in some sense it is God himself, is infinitely more remote from the objects of all the sciences than those objects are from mere nothing; so far is it from agreeing, in any respect, with the other arts or sciences.

II. The apostle also, in that place where he treats of these matters deliberately and expressly, gives an account of Christian theology as alien to all human wisdom and science: "My speech," he says, "and my preaching" — that is, both knowledge and teaching — were "οὐκ ἐν πειθοῖς (or πειστοῖς, πιθανοῖς) ἀνθρωπίνης σοφίας λόγοις" ("not in persuasive words of human wisdom" — the very thing in which every art or science commonly so called consists), "ἀλλ᾽ ἐν ἀποδείξει Πνεύματος καὶ δυνάμεως" ("but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" — ἓν διὰ δυοῖν, "one thing said through two"): for as the mathematicians have their own demonstrations, and the dialecticians theirs, so this doctrine of ours likewise consists ἐν ἀποδείξει ("in demonstration") — but a spiritual and powerful demonstration, as far removed from that human wisdom ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ᾽ ἀπὸ γαίας ("as heaven is from earth"). (He then adds the reason and purpose of this distinction:) "ἵνα ἡ πίστις ὑμῶν" ("that your faith" — that is, the assent given to our doctrine) "μὴ ᾖ ἐν σοφίᾳ ἀνθρώπων" ("should not stand in the wisdom of men" — as it would, if theology consisted of the same or similar principles, form, or end as the arts and sciences of the philosophers), "ἀλλ᾽ ἐν δυνάμει Θεοῦ" ("but in the power of God," efficaciously working this wisdom through his own Spirit). "σοφίαν δὲ λαλοῦμεν ἐν τοῖς τελείοις· σοφίαν δὲ οὐ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου" ("yet we speak wisdom among the perfect — a wisdom, however, not of this age," that is, not a wisdom sprung from human learning): "ἀλλὰ λαλοῦμεν σοφίαν Θεοῦ ἐν μυστηρίῳ ἀποκεκρυμμένην" ("but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, hidden"). (But what agreement can there be between the mysterious wisdom of God and any human discipline whatever? That wisdom, rather,) "ἡμῖν ὁ Θεὸς ἀπεκάλυψε διὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος αὐτοῦ" ("God has revealed unto us by his Spirit") — whereas human wisdom teaches its various matters in a different way. — 1 Corinthians 2:4, 5, 6, 10. Whether, then, one considers the origin of theology, or its subject, or its end, or its manner of being learned and taught, or, finally, its whole nature and use, it is apparent that it can in no way be so numbered among the human sciences, speculative or practical, that it should be bound to their rules or methods. Indeed, the very words μέθοδος ("method"), μεθοδεύειν ("to proceed methodically"), τέχνη ("art, craft"), which are proper (οἰκεῖα) to the sciences, have according to Scripture no place here at all; while μυέω ("I initiate") and, from it, μυστήριον ("mystery") — the term the apostle employs in that most holy sense — constantly denote, even among the pagans themselves, something quite foreign to all the other sciences: it is a mystery. Μυέω means "I initiate," or "I instruct in sacred rites"; and μυοῦμαι is its passive. The author of the Etymologicum Magnum puts it a little differently, but to the same effect: "Μύστης" ("an initiate"), he says, "παρὰ τὸ μύω, τὸ καμμύω· μύοντες γὰρ τὰς αἰσθήσεις καὶ ἔξω τῶν σαρκικῶν φροντίδων γινόμενοι, οὕτω τὰς θείας ἀναλάμψεις ἐδέχοντο" — that is, "is derived from μύω, 'to shut,' καμμύω, 'to close the eyes'; for by closing their senses and putting themselves outside all fleshly cares, they thus received the divine illuminations" — as though, in a kind of ecstasy, they received divine irradiations. And Iamblichus, as reported by Photius, cod. 94, says that τὰ μυστήρια ("the mysteries") is derived ἀπὸ τῶν μυῶν ("from mice") — absurdly, as the very etymological reasoning he offers shows.

III. Concerning Pythagoras, who was instructed in the wisdom of almost every nation, Laertius affirms that πάσας ἐμυήθη τάς τε Ἑλληνικὰς, καὶ βαρβαρικὰς τελετάς — "he was initiated into all the rites, both Greek and barbarian." For the wisdom which those ancient philosophers went seeking in their travels was nothing other than a system for the practice of religion, on Lactantius's testimony; indeed, he says, "I am accustomed to marvel that, whereas Pythagoras, and afterward Plato, out of love for the investigation of truth, penetrated even to the Egyptians, the Magi, and the Persians, in order to learn the rites and sacred usages of those peoples (for they suspected that wisdom was bound up with religion), they nevertheless did not approach the Jews" — book 4, On True Wisdom. Hence, when Apollonius wished to be initiated (μυεῖσθαι) at Athens, "ὁ ἱεροφάντης οὐκ ἐβούλετο παρέχειν τὰ ἱερὰ, μὴ γὰρ ἄν ποτε μυῆσαι γόητα, μηδὲ τὴν Ἐλευσῖνα ἀνοῖξαι ἀνθρώπῳ μὴ καθαρῷ τὰ δαιμόνια" — Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, book 4, chapter 6: "The president of the sacred rites refused to admit him, declaring that he would never initiate a sorcerer, nor throw open Eleusis to a man not pure from dealings with demons." Μυεῖσθαι, therefore, means to be instructed in sacred things — which is made even clearer by Apollonius's own reply: "Περὶ τῆς τελετῆς πλεῖον ἢ σὺ γιγνώσκω" — "Concerning the mystery, I know more than you do." And among the Fathers, on Budé's testimony, μεμυημένος ("initiated"), by itself and without qualification, signifies one who is learned in the sacred writings. Μυστήριον in Paul, says Chrysostom, is τὸ ἀπόῤῥητον, καὶ θαυμαστὸν, καὶ ἀγνοούμενον ("that which is unspeakable, wonderful, and unknown") — that is, unknown by nature; others take it as things secret and known to few, not to be shared except with the initiated — that is, "we speak wisdom among the perfect."

IV. Not that sacred things were, among us, secrets which it would be lawful to disclose only after some oath and pledge of silence had first been imposed — since Christ took care that even the most mysterious things (μυστηριότατα) which he himself, in keeping with the nature of his ministry, taught privately, should be openly proclaimed ἐν τῷ φωτὶ, καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν δωμάτων ("in the light, and upon the housetops"), in the sight of men, Matthew 10:27.

V. To publish the mysteries among the common people was indeed reckoned by the ancient pagans a sacrilege: "They consider it unlawful to commit to writing what they teach concerning their sacred rites" — Caesar, of the Druids, Gallic War, book 6. Hence everywhere those being initiated were bound by oath, lest they let anything slip. So Herodotus, speaking of himself, after he had learned the Egyptian sacred rites from the people of Heliopolis: "Τὰ μέν νυν θεῖα τῶν ἀπηγημάτων, οἷα ἤκουον, οὐκ εἰμὶ πρόθυμος ἐξηγέεσθαι, ἔξω ἢ τὰ οὐνόματα αὐτέων μοῦνον· νομίζων πάντας ἀνθρώπους ἴσον περὶ αὐτέων ἐπίστασθαι," book 2 — that is, "As for the divine matters in these accounts, such as I heard them, I am not eager to relate them, except only their names — supposing that all men" (that is, the initiated) "know equally much about them." It is not, then, for any such reason that the evangelical doctrine has been marked with the name "mystery," but because the very things revealed in it exceed every purely natural human capacity, 1 Corinthians 2:7, 14.

VI. In order, therefore, that anyone should receive and understand "the wisdom hidden in a mystery" (σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ ἀποκεκρυμμένην), it is necessary that he himself be μεμυημένος ("initiated") — that is, instructed in the secrets of the divine will by the Holy Spirit. Nor, in Paul, are any τέλειοι ("perfect," i.e. mature) but those instructed by the Holy Spirit, of whom he is speaking. For τελειόω means "I consecrate" and "I initiate"; hence among the ancients baptism itself is also called τελειότης ("perfecting," i.e. consecration). The LXX use it for consecration or dedication, Exodus 29 — τελειῶσαι τὰς χεῖρας αὐτῶν ("to consecrate their hands"), verses 33 and 35; nor does the word seem to require any different explanation in Hebrews 2:10, τὸν ἀρχηγὸν τῆς σωτηρίας διὰ παθημάτων τελειῶσαι ("to perfect/consecrate the author of salvation through sufferings"). And τέλη also means "mysteries," as Budé proves from Plato; τελεταί means sacred rites of every kind; and τετελεσμένοι means those who are initiated and purified by sacrifice, in Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, book 4, chapter 6. He, then, who is τέλειος — instructed by the Spirit by whom we are initiated into the Christian mysteries — and who has been μεμυημένος ("initiated") by him alone who discloses to us τὸ μυστήριον τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ ("the mystery of his will"), and that through πνεῦμα σοφίας καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως ("the spirit of wisdom and revelation"), Ephesians 1:9, 17 — he is the Pauline theologian. Of the use of arts and sciences in learning divine truth, more will be said later. Meanwhile, it did not escape even the pagans themselves that theology is a certain mysterious and divine wisdom, not to be circumscribed within those bounds, nor delivered according to those rules, whose confines all arts and sciences endure. And it is perhaps for no other reason that those who have spent much labor on this business, in order to describe theology, forsooth, ἀκριβῶς ("precisely") according to the rules and methods of the other sciences, wrangle so remarkably among themselves — holding views the most widely divergent — concerning its definition, genus, differentiae, proper object, subject, immediate end, and a great many other such things (about which sacred Scripture does not breathe so much as a syllable, γρύ, "a grunt"). For while they strive to hew the mystery of divine truth, revealed from the bosom of God, into shape by the pliant and arbitrary rules of the human arts and sciences, and hamper it with I know not what philosophical terms — terms which, and whose aid and support, all truth, natural as well as supernatural, could most gladly have done without, had it not seemed otherwise good to Aristotle — terms with which it wishes to have no fellowship — they accomplish nothing but this: that a thing which in itself, and by its own nature, is most certain, most evident, and most fully open to the rational mind, becomes most uncertain, ambiguous, manifold, and obscure. Learned men indeed, relying on the divine revelation in sacred Scripture as upon the place of innate principles, and proceeding much as the other sciences progress — some discovering one thing, others, with easier labor, adding to what has already been found — have built up a certain doctrine, comprehended after the fashion of the other sciences under principles, theorems, theses, and conclusions, which they call "theology." But that doctrine — since, as such, it possesses no αὐτοπιστία ("self-authenticating credibility"), and requires no supernatural faith for its reception, and attains no end of theology, whether theoretical or practical — is not theology properly so called. From the investigation of this doctrine a certain habit of mind is acquired, consonant with the impression received from it, which the scholastics maintain to be neither faith nor natural knowledge. And this is the theology of the schools, of whose nature and use more will be said below. Let us, then, dismiss the countless, laborious disputations on this head — not worth, to tell the truth, so much as a farthing (titivilitium) — provided only we are willing to allow theology to enjoy that liberty into which sacred Scripture, with so free a hand, has set it.

VII. Whatever words, indeed, it has pleased the Holy Spirit to use in setting forth this matter, the scholastics have rendered every one of them, thoroughly and more than thoroughly, threadbare by their disputations. That Scripture calls "knowledge," "prudence," "wisdom," "doctrine" — directing men in the contemplation of God and his works, and in the obedience owed him — that knowledge of himself with which God wills us to be imbued, is agreed on all hands. Hence, carried away by an itch for disputation, as has been said, they contend obstinately whether theology is a science (and, if so, speculative or practical), or prudence, or wisdom. Whatever word they take it into their heads to examine, they at once weigh all its philosophical senses, inquiring subtly whether it can be fitted to theology. Those who wish theology to be wisdom (so that the whole labor of these men may be judged from this one instance) think it their business to fish out of the philosophers' writings everything attributed there to human wisdom, and to show that it fits theology neatly. And whatever this labor amounts to, when, through long circumlocutions, subtle fictions, and the rashest, most inept conclusions, they suppose they have brought it off — as though the matter were well managed, and the opinions of everyone else routed, especially of those who lead or follow some rival school — they conclude that theology is wisdom. And so, being utterly ignorant of the mind of the Holy Spirit in these words — "knowledge," "prudence," "wisdom," "doctrine," and the rest of their kind — they strain every sinew of their wit (being, as most of them are, most ingeniously stupid) and fix their eyes upon this: to transform the wisdom of God hidden in a mystery into that wretched, imperfect, indeed foolish wisdom of this world, and to hem it in with I know not what boundaries — a fiction than which nothing more dangerous, or more diametrically opposed to apostolic doctrine, could ever have been devised. Candidates for sacred wisdom, then, who would not spend their study to no purpose — indeed, who would not go astray — ought to despise these thorny contentions of the scholastics and others, which they heap up in their theological treatises, nailing a cross to their wretched readers; since the very "truth" to be dug out of them by infinite labor is, on account of the ἀλλογενία ("foreignness") of the subject proposed, not truth at all.

Chapter 3

There is a most intimate union between the intellect and the truth — Theology denotes both a habit of mind and truth itself — God's own knowledge cannot properly be called the ἀρχέτυπος ("archetype") of ours — Theology, as doctrine, is from God alone and immediately — In what sense the Word of God is our theology — Divisions of theologians: angels, men — Men are either θεάνθρωπος ("the God-man") or ψιλοί ("mere men") — Mere men are either wayfarers or possessors — Their theology is to be investigated.

I. Having set aside those matters which, though with some writers they fill both sides of the page in the inquiry into the nature of theology, are in reality nothing but an obstacle thrown in the way of those who sincerely search for the truth, let us look more closely at the thing itself, so far as concerns its general nature, upon which we are bestowing this labor. Now since, between any object known and that faculty or δύναμις ("power") of our mind by which we apprehend it — that is, the intellect itself, considered with its σχέσις ("relation") to the thing itself — there exists, by reason of the conformity of truth that intervenes, so close a union and kinship that each communicates its names to the other, so that qualities proper to the one are often ascribed to the other (for a thing or doctrine is often called "certain" from that certainty which is properly an affection of the mind, and our apprehension is called "true" from the truth of the thing we apprehend); hence no small confusion arises in definitions, since it is not easily discerned whether it is the doctrine, or the faculty of mind by which we apprehend that doctrine, by its own proper light, unto its own proper end, that is being defined. Since, then, it is agreed that by "theology" is denoted both the doctrine concerning God, the worship and obedience owed him, and also the power and faculty of our mind — or the habit conformed to it — by which we perceive that doctrine, we must, in order to avoid the confusion arising from ὁμωνυμία ("equivocation"), treat of these two things distinctly.

II. It belongs to God's infinite αὐτάρκεια ("self-sufficiency") that he alone perfectly knows himself: Psalm 147:5, לִתְבוּנָתוֹ אֵין מִסְפָּר ("of his understanding there is no number") — "his understanding is infinite." Therefore that knowledge by which God most perfectly knows himself and all his attributes, being infinite and necessary, is nothing other than God himself, infinitely knowing and wise. This knowledge, then, of the first Truth most perfectly comprehending and loving itself, is called by some, and improperly, "archetypal theology" (θεολογία ἀρχέτυπος). But what they wish to be understood by "archetypal theology," I very much doubt that they themselves understand. For our knowledge of God is not the express image of that infinite divine knowledge (a thing proper to the Son alone, who partakes of the divine nature, Hebrews 1:3), so that it could be called an ἔκτυπος ("copy") with respect to it; nor can we, by the force or power of that knowledge, know anything of God, except by the intervening free counsel of the divine will. Indeed, our mirror is not God himself immediately, but his word, or the gospel, in which, with unveiled face, we behold the glory of the Lord through Christ, 2 Corinthians 3:18. God has, in his own mind, an eternal idea, or concept, of that truth which he wills to be known by us. And upon this all our theology depends — not immediately, indeed, but upon that act of the divine will by which it has pleased him to reveal that truth to us: "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him," John 1:18. The revelation, therefore, of the divine mind and will — that is, the word of God — is the doctrine with which we are dealing, to which all the conceptions of our mind concerning God, his worship, and the obedience owed him, ought to be conformed. And here again theology agrees but little with any science that is an offshoot of human wisdom. For that σύστημα ("system") of principles and conclusions by which any science is handed down is not the norm of the mind's conceptions, or of the acts of the intellect, concerning that science's proper object; rather, since it is posterior to them, and their effect, it ought to be regulated by them. So the most excellent philosopher [Plotinus]: "Αἱ δὲ ἐπιστῆμαι ἐν ψυχῇ λογικῇ οὖσαι, αἱ μὲν τῶν αἰσθητῶν, εἰ δεῖ ἐπιστήμας τούτων λέγειν, πρέπει δὲ αὐταῖς τὸ τῆς δόξης ὄνομα, ὕστεραι τῶν πραγμάτων οὖσαι, εἰκόνες εἰσὶ τούτων," Plotinus, Enneads 5, book 9 — that is: "Accordingly the sciences that exist in the rational soul — those, that is, which pertain to sensible things, if indeed knowledge of these things is to be called 'science' at all, since it would better be called 'opinion' — being, as they are, posterior to the things themselves, are but images of them." The doctrine, however, of which we speak, precedes every conception of our mind concerning its own peculiar and proper object, and is the infallible rule and unchanging norm of all our knowledge and understanding, Psalm 19.

III. Theology, therefore, is that very divine truth itself, as it is revealed by God — namely, the word, the doctrine, the light, that is ἀξιόπιστον ("worthy of belief") and αὐτόπιστον ("self-authenticating"). No one can think or speak worthily of God or of divine things except through God. No one rightly knows God except from his own self-disclosure through the Son; nor does he will to be worshipped except as he himself has prescribed. All our obedience, too, depends purely upon his will. But all theology is occupied with God, with his worship, and with the obedience owed him. That doctrine, therefore, can be from none but God himself. Since theology, then, is the principle and norm of all divine worship, faith, and obedience, it is necessary that it should likewise be of heavenly origin and of infallible certainty — ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ("from heaven"), not ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ("from men"), Matthew 21:25. For divine faith will rest upon no principle that is not, in every respect, divinely αὐτάρκες ("self-sufficient") and ἀξιόπιστον ("worthy of belief"). And the worship of God is so called no less from the divine command than from the divine object. Lest, therefore, the whole human race should be perpetually tossed about in all its obedience, and stumble upon rough ground, God willed that the doctrine which is the norm of all his worship and of our obedience should be from himself alone. In this sense, then, theology is the doctrine of God concerning himself, his works, his will and worship, our obedience in every state, its reward, and the punishment of the disobedient — revealed and expressed for the glory of his own name; that is, it is the very word of God itself. Now since the word of God is either ἐνδιάθετον ("inward") or προφορικόν ("uttered"), and the latter again either ἄγραφον ("unwritten") or ἔγγραφον ("written"), we shall expound in what follows, one by one, how each of these stands in this matter. What, moreover, is to be thought of what are called theological theses, catechisms, confessions, commonplaces, and other such miscellanies of credible propositions, and in what rank they are to be held — matters in the learning, or even the teaching, of which (unless I am mistaken) many suppose theology to consist — will appear below.

IV. Since, then (to add this much here κατὰ πρόληψιν, "by way of anticipation"), the whole word of God, whatever has been committed to writing, is Scripture — that Scripture is our theology in such a way that we ascribe authority to it as a whole, and to every part of it, and to each truth contained in it, not because one proposition is established from another by evident reasoning, nor because the conclusions to which we assent are duly gathered from some set of principles, but because we embrace each truth, or each proposition of truth, considered separately, with a sure faith, on account of its immediate divine revelation, upon which all theology rests. That habit, however, which the scholastics call "discursive," by which we draw conclusions from propositions, one of which is from Scripture and so divinely revealed, while the other shines by its own natural evidence (concerning the nature of which conclusions — whether, that is, they are "of faith," as they put it, or not — they wrangle sharply), insofar as it is a different thing (if indeed it is a different thing) from the gift of interpreting the Scriptures, is foreign to our present undertaking.

V. This point, then, being premised — namely, that theology, "objectively," as they say, and considered in the abstract, is the pure and simple word of God — it remains further to weigh carefully that light of the rational creature's mind which is likewise called by that same name. But in order that we may more easily arrive at the point to which we are tending, some division of the subjects capable of this light must first be set out, and then the relation of that light to the doctrine we have discussed, and its union with it, explored. First, then, with respect to its subject, as they say, theology seems generally able to be divided into that which is of angels, and that which is human. For it belongs to angels and men, since they are endowed with intellectual light, to know God and freely to obey him; and their final end consists in that enjoyment of God to which one comes through obedience. This heavenly doctrine (οὐρανίδης) demands such a nature, state, and condition in all who would either perceive it, or use it toward its own proper end. But what connatural knowledge of God and of his will the angels possessed — τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀρχὴν καὶ τὸ ἴδιον οἰκητήριον ("keeping their own first estate and proper dwelling") — and with what light they were furnished, such that this light was capable of degrees and growth, as regards the mysteries "hidden from the ages in God," at last made manifest ταῖς ἀρχαῖς καὶ ταῖς ἐξουσίαις ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις διὰ τῆς ἐκκλησίας ("to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places through the church"), Ephesians 3:10; and what knowledge they now have through the continual vision of God, especially those already possessed of the reward in Christ — it is not for this place to inquire.

VI. Θεάνθρωπος ("the God-man") is Jesus Christ, and ψιλοὶ ἄνθρωποι ("mere men") comprise the whole rest of the human race. What ought to be said concerning the theology of Jesus Christ — "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," Colossians 2:3 — and concerning that knowledge which he had and has through the personal union, together with the revelations given him by the Father, Revelation 1:1, and how in him dwells all the fullness of the Spirit, John 3:34, whom he did not receive ἐκ μέτρου ("by measure") — since these matters cannot be encompassed within the scope of the discussion presently before us, we have judged it best to omit them here entirely. But those who are mere men either still lead a mortal life, or at least can be considered as such, and are commonly called "wayfarers" ("for there is hope in this whole life," Ecclesiastes 9:4); or, loosed from the frame of the body, are called "possessors." Of these, the theology of those who, having run out the course of faith and obedience appointed by the will of God, have mercifully obtained their end and rest in the enjoyment of God, is (to put it in a word) that light of glory by which, beholding divine things πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον ("face to face"), and God himself καθώς ἐστι ("as he is"), suffused with ineffable joy, they are occupied forever with the praises of God and of the Lamb. And these things had necessarily to be premised, in order that we might arrive at the point to which we are tending.

VII. According to the various states of those who are called wayfarers, their theology also varies; but here it is, generally speaking, twofold — namely, that of unfallen nature, or of creation, and that of the fallen state, or of sin. Further considerations and divisions concerning men fallen into sin are to be applied below. We must treat first of the first man.

Part One: On Natural Theology, or That of the First Man

Chapter 4

The theology of the first man was ἐνδιάθετος ("inward") — Its description — In what sense it was natural — The degrees, force, and efficacy of the connatural light — The περιεργία ("over-elaborate curiosity") of the scholastics, and the error of the Socinians and others — The origin and necessity of natural theology — The obedience of the first man — An exposition of the promised reward, the sin, and the punishment — The corruption of the original theology — The manner of that corruption — The first covenant abolished, and the theology that rested upon it abolished with it.

I. All the theology of all men has regard either to the ἐνδιάθετον ("inward") word, and is called natural (that is, for the greatest part of it, since it was never alone), or to the προφορικόν ("uttered") word, which was brought in to make up for the obliteration, through sin, of that inward word, and is called supernatural, or of revelation. We must treat first of the former. It can, and must, be considered as pure, as corrupted, and as apostate.

II. The state of unfallen nature — that is, of men placed under the law of creation alone — first presents itself to us. In that state theology was ἐνδιάθετος and natural, yet not, in every respect, ἔμφυτος ("innate"). For from the beginning it was augmented by revelation, and was, moreover, to be augmented still further. In that state it is called pure. This light consisted in a saving knowledge of God as creator, lawgiver, ruler, and rewarder. We call it "light," since this term suits all theology, according to the usage of Scripture. This light was implanted in man by God in his very creation, and was at once increased by the revelation, made from without, of the divine will in the sacramental precept, and was to be augmented, day by day, from the contemplation of the works of God. And this was able to render him wise in rendering, according to the covenant of works, the obedience due to God, for his own happiness and for the glory of the divine power, wisdom, goodness, grace, and justice. This was the theology of the first man.

III. This light (or spiritual wisdom) God implanted in the mind of man in his very creation. It was fitting to that condition in which, and to that end for which, he had been made — indeed, altogether necessary, Ecclesiastes 7:29. Although, therefore, in its own nature, and as regards its use and end, it was plainly supernatural (for that man should obey God according to a covenant promising an eternal reward rested upon God's most free ordination), nevertheless, because it was ἐνδιάθετον καὶ ἔμφυτον ("inward and innate"), we say that it was natural to him. That, properly speaking, is called "natural" which necessarily accompanies the nature itself, or takes its rise from the principles of that nature. In that sense it is plain that this light was not natural to man. For it does not necessarily follow human nature in such a way that it cannot be separated from it, nor can it be drawn out of the natural faculties of the soul by their own inherent, native power. But since it pertained to the rectitude of nature in its original, first-born state, and was implanted in man, placed under the law, at his very creation, with respect had to his ultimate end, it cannot be denied that it was natural. But concerning these matters, against the papists, enough and more than enough has been disputed elsewhere.

IV. Concerning this light, or the knowledge of man in the state of uncorrupted nature, as regards its degree and efficacy, there is a certain amount of conflict of opinion. The scholastics extol it magnificently enough, being here, as everywhere, full of empty speculations and of boldness in over-curious determinations. The Socinians, for their part, imagine the first man to have been a mere mushroom and a stock, scarcely possessed of reason, and offer him up, as it were, for mockery — as though he had been ignorant of God, of himself, of his wife, and of the other creatures. They maintain that the only precept laid upon him by God was that concerning not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Whether he possessed a mind, or that thing called conscience, whether he acknowledged any dependence upon God, they do not know, or at least pretend not to know; for a feigned ignorance is very often the guise of the most insolent boast of knowledge. Thus it has seemed good to them to patronize the most foul errors, which they foster, concerning the fall of the first man and the state of sin: "Adam, like an infant or a small child, did not know that he was naked," Smalcius, On the Truth of the Deity of the Son, chapter 7, page 2 — as if he had really been blind before he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and, "He knew his own wife only insofar as she fell under his senses," as the very leader of that flock himself puts it, On the State of the First Man, chapter 4, page 119; "Nor," he says, "did he have any insight into the power of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," page 147 — as if the whole effect of the first sin had arisen from the power of that tree; and again, "though he was mortal, he did not know that he was mortal," chapter 4, page 118: one lie, evidently, must be covered over with more lies, lest the roof let the rain through. That they may prove that Adam lost almost nothing through sin, they affirm that he never had anything — since he could not lose what he never had. A lid worthy of the dish! We, weighing the matter, so far as may be, in an even balance, inclining neither to the περιεργία ("over-elaborate curiosity") of the one party in asserting, nor to the recklessness of the other in denying, shall briefly weigh the theology of the first man.

V. That God, by right of creation, is the supreme Lord of all things, is acknowledged by all creatures. Hence dependence upon God necessarily accompanies the existence of all things, a dependence suited to the principles of nature which he has imparted to each. All creatures, then, as such, each according to the capacity and endowment with which it is furnished, celebrate the Creator and serve him: Psalm 145:10, "All thy works shall praise thee, O Lord"; and accordingly the Psalmist, κατὰ προσωποποιίαν ("by way of personification"), very often exhorts each and all of them to render this office duly. This eternal and unchanging ground of divine worship is affirmed with unanimous consent by the holy choir of the church, whether militant or crowned, Revelation 4:11: "Ἄξιος εἶ, Κύριε, λαβεῖν τὴν δόξαν καὶ τὴν τιμὴν, καὶ τὴν δύναμιν· ὅτι σὺ ἔκτισας τὰ πάντα, καὶ διὰ τὸ θέλημά σου εἰσὶ καὶ ἐκτίσθησαν" ("Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created") — to which the whole assembly of all creatures makes response, chapter 5:13: "Καὶ πᾶν κτίσμα ὅ ἐστιν ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, καὶ ἐν τῇ γῇ, καὶ ὑποκάτω τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης ἅ ἐστι, καὶ τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς πάντα, ἤκουσα λέγοντας· Τῷ καθημένῳ ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου καὶ τῷ ἀρνίῳ ἡ εὐλογία καὶ ἡ τιμὴ καὶ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων" ("And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying: Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever"). For since God has made all things for himself — that is, for his own glory, Proverbs 16:4 — it was fitting that all things should render glory and honor back to him. But as it belongs to that supreme right and dominion of God over all things to assign to each thing its own proper and ultimate end, so it belongs to that same dependence that there should be a law and rule of the operations tending to that end. All creatures, simply because they are creatures, enjoy a fixed end and law of operation; that law, then, was innate to all of them. But the rational creature, since it bears a twofold aspect — as it is a creature, and as, being capable of reason, it is destined for eternity — is allotted a twofold dependence upon God: one common, or natural, of which we have spoken; the other proper, or moral. This latter is the obedience owed to God befitting the state of a creature. In order that this obedience should be exacted of creatures, nothing more is required than that God be set before them as supreme and best. And accordingly he requires fear and worship, since he is אֲדוֹנָי ("Adonai"), the Lord of all: Malachi 1:6, "If I be a Lord, where is my fear?" It was impossible that this should not have been made known from creation itself. For the due rendering of this obedience, that connatural law ought to have sufficed. Thus, at last, both the ultimate end and the creature's dependence upon God are established. Concerning this innate law, two things may be considered: the law itself — that is, the norm of the obedience required — and the knowledge of the law. That this best and greatest Benefactor, this supreme Ruler and Rewarder, is to be loved, worshipped, and feared, as befits the moral order of this dependence — a dependence which, since God the Creator is supremely just and holy, embraces all justice and holiness, and continues until his ultimate end is reached — this is the sum of this law. And this law is that ἐνδιάθετον, ἀξιόπιστον, and altogether infallible word which served, as it were, as doctrine in the theology of the first man. The knowledge of this law, in reality, did not differ from the law itself. It appears, then, that it consisted in a saving light of such a kind that, by its force and guidance, man could duly render the obedience owed to God according to the law, so as to attain his own proper end. And this was the theology of the first man. Established in a state of moral dependence upon God, and subject to God's dominion, and thereby capable of an eternal blessedness in the enjoyment of the Creator, he possessed a connatural and ἔμφυτον ("innate") law of those operations necessary for attaining that end; and, moreover, he was instructed, in the knowledge of God and of all the means of his worship, with such wisdom that, by its force, in accordance with the will and mind of God shining within it, he was able duly to render the obedience prescribed in the law. But since this innate (ἔμφυτος) law, which in this theology fills the place of doctrine — the λόγος ἐνδιάθετος ("inward word") — was connatural to the mind of man, it was not, so far as the thing itself is concerned, or, as they say, "materially" speaking, different from that light, or habit of mind, by which the doctrine concerning God and his worship is savingly perceived; nor was it anything more than the fount and origin of that order of the rational creature's dependence. Yet, with respect to its exercise and to actual obedience — "formally" speaking — it was distinct from it.

VI. Since, therefore, God made man upright, Ecclesiastes 7:29, in his own image, Genesis 1:26–27 — an image consisting in wisdom, righteousness, and holiness, Colossians 3:10, Ephesians 4:23–24 — and commanded him to hold dominion over the other creatures for his own glory (a dominion to which he would have been wholly unequal, had their natures not been thoroughly known to him); and since God exacted from him obedience, under the penalty of eternal death, together with the promise of the reward of a blessed life; it is plain that he was furnished with that wisdom and moral light by which he was able both to know God, and perfectly to understand the innate (ἔμφυτος) law, and the revelation of the properties of God in the creation of all things, and the sacramental νομοθεσία ("legislation"). Furnished with this theology, he lacked absolutely nothing needed either for the right worship of God, or for the leading of a good and blessed life.

VII. And from this an estimate can be made of the obedience of the first man, of the reward set before him, together with the nature of his sin, and also of the threatened punishment. For the obedience to be rendered by force of the covenant had to conform to his connatural light, or theology, as delineated above; and the covenant itself was as innate to Adam as it was known to him, for it is plain that, by force of this theology, he knew both his duty and his reward. The sacramental precept that was superadded did not reveal the covenant, but opened a way for sealing it. The reward set before him consisted in nothing other than the everlasting enjoyment of God. The voice of the law is still, even now, the same: "Do this, and live"; for God never appointed any other reward of obedience to be rendered by force of the covenant. But after what length of time it would have fallen to Adam to enjoy God by way of reward — since God himself never foreknew it as a thing that was to be — is a subtle and dangerous question to debate. That the first man, had he stood fast in his original state, would have obtained the reward, and that this reward was God himself, is plain from the very nature of the covenant; but neither the nature of the thing, nor the sacred page, indicates the time and manner in which it would have fallen to him thus to enjoy God. The obedience of the first man would, then, have been a universal and express pattern of the image of God in all things; the reward, God himself. But it is plain that his first sin, since it was committed against the directing force of this theology, consisted in the total subversion of the order of the moral creature's dependence upon God; and hence the punishment of that sin was an eternal separation from God, together, moreover, with that addition of the sense of punishment which vindicating justice could not but require. After the body and soul of the sinner had, in their separation from each other, undergone the first death, they were to be reunited, by divine power (thereby serving the ends of justice), in order to undergo a second death, consisting in an eternal separation from God under the most grievous punishments; from this condition, indeed, we have been set free through Christ. There was, then, no difference — so far as their substance, if I may so speak, is concerned — between the reward and punishment annexed to the first covenant, and those that follow upon the new covenant. God himself, and separation from God, constitute the nature of both, in each case. Nor can any other reward or punishment be assigned; it may perhaps be said that, by force of the new covenant, both have been increased by the addition of certain degrees. Hence the reward is now called, καθ᾽ ὑπερβολὴν εἰς ὑπερβολὴν αἰώνιον βάρος δόξης ("a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory"), 2 Corinthians 4:17; and the punishment, θάνατος εἰς θάνατον ("death unto death"), chapter 2:16. Concerning the resurrection of Adam, apart from the doctrine of the incarnation, Scripture is indeed silent — for it does not chase after empty things, nor does it discourse curiously upon the supposition of a state that was never to be. But it speaks plainly enough of the state of those who are entirely strangers to the mediation of Christ, since they never believed in him, nor sinned against his grace, of which they never heard anything at all. But to hold that Christ himself merited the resurrection of men from the dead, unto condemnation, for sins committed without the law and without any knowledge of Christ, is impious. Since, then, Adam's immortality, in his original state, in no way depended upon the internal principles of nature, but solely upon the most free good pleasure of God, it was necessary that, that external conserving cause having been removed through sin, Adam should die at some certain time, and, by force of the covenant, be brought forth from the state of natural death unto judgment.

VIII. Let this suffice for what has been said concerning natural theology, considered in its original, native purity; it remains that we survey briefly its ἀφανισμός ("obliteration") through the entrance of sin.

IX. The entrance of sin, and the abolition of the divine covenant through that entrance, are known from elsewhere, and are here presupposed; so that here we must treat only of the removal of this theology thereby.

X. It will be granted that all theology ought to be sufficient for attaining its own proper end. This end consists in the glory of God, and in the eternal happiness of the theologians themselves. Since, therefore, through the entrance of sin the image of God in man was abolished, that innate (ἔμφυτος) law of θεογνωσία ("the knowledge of God"), of which...

is utterly stripped of the nature and use of theology, so that the whole human race must rightly be judged to have been cut off, through sin, from all true theology: and this is what must now be shown. There was so close a union between that original doctrine and the disposition of the mind that, once torn apart, they could not maintain their footing. For that saving light, by which we have shown the proper form of this primeval theology to have been constituted, was extinguished by sin; and so theology itself suffered a vanishing away (ἀφανισμόν, "a disappearance, an obliteration"). Moreover, no doctrine can properly be called theology which does not rest upon some divine covenant, by whose power the theologians themselves might be able to please God, and at last to enjoy him. For all the theology of pilgrims directs men to the knowledge of God, and spurs them on to render the obedience due according to the rule of the covenant which God was pleased to enter into with them. But that covenant, which was the foundation of this primeval theology, was, as I have said, abolished. For what could it now do? Since, although it prescribes all things well, there is no one who is able to obey it. The doctrine of that covenant is indeed still perfectly true: "for he who does the things of the law shall live by them." But the covenant itself, after the entrance of sin, retained no power to bring men to God by that means. Nor are men, because they are compelled to bear the rule of its commandments, to be called covenanted, since they are bound by its tie only by the supreme right and dominion of God, from which he cannot abdicate. Indeed, so far has the entrance of sin brought men into misery, that the very doctrine set forth in the law of nature, however much it was once accompanied by that primeval light, would nonetheless not be sufficient to direct sinners in the way of life; nor, however greatly it might wish to, could it save sinners outright. For to know God, and to obey him as Creator, Ruler, and Rewarder, is not sufficient for anyone's salvation after the entrance of sin, unless he is besides instructed in the knowledge of God's grace and mercy through Jesus Christ. Therefore that innate and inborn light (ἐνδιάθετον, "indwelling, inherent") lost, through sin, the ends of true theology, its saving use, and its power effectually to direct theologians in the way of life.

XI. And this is the reason why, from the apostasy of the [first] theologians, theology itself was also utterly abolished — a thing we shall not find to have happened afterward. For since all theology, as we have said, is founded upon a covenant, when the covenant was destroyed, theology itself necessarily collapsed. Now this covenant made with Adam rested upon an absolutely universal moral dependence upon God. It could therefore in no way happen except that it should be rendered void by the first sin. The case stands in the same way with the new covenant. The theology of the covenanted rests upon the covenant. Whether any of the covenanted can fall away from, or be cast out of, that covenant, we do not now dispute. The covenant itself cannot be abolished, because it is ratified in and with Christ the Mediator; and therefore the theology resting upon it cannot be shaken. However often, then, theologians may have departed from its doctrine, as we shall often see, yet theology itself has remained wholly stable and unchangeable, the nature of the covenant requiring this. So much, then, for this theology: and it may suffice to have treated it briefly, since it lasted but a short time, and its doctrine is elicited from only the very fewest passages of Scripture.

Chapter 5

How far natural theology survives after the entrance of sin — Its remains (λείψανα, "remnants"), what they are and of what kind, are proved — Concerning the law of nature: what it is; its force, Romans 2:14–15 — The force of conscience — Atheists — It is shown that God can be known from his works.

I. That primeval and native light of which we have hitherto treated was, as we have said, extinguished by sin. Hence all men are called blind — indeed, are called darkness itself; for that indwelling doctrine (ἐνδιάθετος, "inward, inherent"), together with the helps by which it was to be enlarged with respect to its object, was no longer able to attain its own proper end. Whether that original theology, however corrupted and however laboring under its own defect, still survives, we shall now see.

II. That a sense of God as Creator, Ruler, and Judge is still implanted in the hearts of men, together with some indelible knowledge of good and evil in relation to God's governance, and of the distinction between the honorable and the base, is something almost all men confess, and which we too shall prove. The apostle expounds it at Romans 2:14–15. Moreover, sinners who retain the use of reason still enjoy the benefit of considering the works of God. For it is not humanly credible that the nature of man has been so overwhelmed as to have utterly shaken off the law of dependence and subjection which the Creator inscribed upon its heart. We do not say that men are born already furnished with some actual knowledge of God — they have none at all. But we do say they are born with a power of knowing him; nor do they thereby naturally know and perceive it. There is no reason for us to suppose — since we perceive otherwise — that each and every man retains, of himself, such an implanted power of knowing God, spurring him on in some way toward rendering worship to him, that it spontaneously puts itself forth in every adult possessed of reason, no less certainly and necessarily than reasoning itself does.

III. Yet these things must be proved, since theologians have for a long time now taught us to distrust what we ourselves see and feel. We shall show, first, that a great deal of the remains (λείψανα, "remnants") of natural theology still survives in the minds of sinners; and then, whatever these remains may be, that they do not constitute true theology.

IV. We say, therefore, that human nature, however greatly it has been wrecked by the devastation of sin, and however much it has been reduced almost solely to what is left of itself, is still furnished with remnants of this theology. That God exists, and that he is such as the very nature of truth requires him to be — namely, supremely good on account of his virtue, and supremely great on account of his benefits — human nature does not fail to recognize. It owes this knowledge to itself, under God the Creator. There still thrives in our nature that law and reason which teaches, which proclaims, this truth. That there is some law of nature is the voice of nature itself: that is, nature bears witness of itself. But wherever there is a law, there must be recognized some lawgiver; and the giver of the law of nature can be none other than the author of nature. For that law differs from nature itself only in its relation to a certain object. This law, then, teaches that God exists, and that he is to be worshiped, and that right and justice are to be observed among men, as Scripture also testifies: Psalm 145:15, Psalm 141:7–9; Job 12:7–10, 37–39; Isaiah 40:12; Matthew 6:26; Acts 17:26–28. Its first pronouncement concerning God is, Romans 1:19, Τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ φανερόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς ("that which may be known of God is manifest in them") — that is, in the Gentiles, given over to the discipline of nature alone. Now it is manifest that this "knowable of God" exists not only among some of them — namely, the philosophers — but in all of them, through an inborn knowledge of God (ἔμφυτον θεογνωσίαν, "an inborn knowledge of God"). The same apostle also holds all men guilty, because they hold the truth (ἀλήθειαν, concerning the nature and attributes of God) in unrighteousness (ἐν ἀδικίᾳ), verse 18. But those who unjustly suppress some divine truth must, in fact, possess it. Further, this law is said to be so engraved upon the hearts of all men, victorious over every vice and prejudice, that it affirms that God's judgment upon sinners does not escape the notice even of the most wicked and depraved of all bipeds (verse 32). But those who recognize God's right to punish sins cannot, at the same time, fail to know that same right of his which demands obedience, nor fail to know God himself. Secondly: this same law demands of all men the moral obedience due to God. Having shown that God exists, it teaches that he is to be worshiped: Romans 2:14–15 — "Ὅταν γὰρ ἔθνη τὰ μὴ νόμον ἔχοντα" ("For when the Gentiles, which have not the law" — that is, the written law, as it was given to the Jews) "φύσει" ("yet by nature" — that is, by force of the law inscribed on their hearts) "τὰ τοῦ νόμου ποιῇ" ("do the things contained in the law" — namely, what the written moral law commands), "οὗτοι νόμον μὴ ἔχοντες" ("these, not having the law" — that is, the written law, or one immediately revealed by God in any other way), "ἑαυτοῖς εἰσι νόμος" ("are a law unto themselves" — because, namely, they have that law innate within them); "οἵτινες ἐνδείκνυνται τὸ ἔργον τοῦ νόμου γραπτὸν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις αὐτῶν" ("who show the work of the law written in their hearts"). "The work of the law" — that is, what the law produces, an effect resembling its cause — this they show they have written, or engraved, upon their hearts; that is, they have the law implanted in them, a copy (ἐκτύπωμα, "an impression, a transcript") of the written law, which must correspond exactly to it. Now we know what the written law teaches, and in whose name and by whose authority. To it, this natural law — which belongs to those who lack the written law — stands as its counterpart (ἀντίστροφος, "a corresponding counterpart"). Since, then, absolutely all men have this law — as being a law of nature, common by nature equally to all — and since this law expresses that divinely revealed law which commands and forbids in God's name, it is apparent that all those who can in no way live a life exempt from the rule of this law cannot but have some knowledge of God, and cannot but recognize the moral obedience due to him.

V. Of this truth, too, conscience is (as they say) a thousand witnesses. Hence the apostle, going on to complete the rest of his argument, says: Συμμαρτυρούσης αὐτῶν τῆς συνειδήσεως, καὶ μεταξὺ ἀλλήλων τῶν λογισμῶν κατηγορούντων ἢ καὶ ἀπολογουμένων ("their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another"). The thing itself proclaims that conscience is men's judgment concerning themselves, made with respect to the judgment of a superior; hence "conscience is a god to all mortals" (βροτοῖς ἅπασι συνείδησις Θεός), as it is in Menander. But he who has such preeminence (ὑπεροχῇ) as to hold dominion and to be able to exercise judgment over the hearts of men, is God. This natural accusation (κατηγορία) or defense (ἀπολογία), then, which is carried on in every man by the working of conscience, has regard to none but God. But it is utterly impossible for anyone to snatch away all power from this judge, who discharges his office among all men in the name of God. At what price would Cains, Judases, Neros, Caligulas — and even lesser monsters of crime — purchase freedom from his scourges? It must be confessed that this condition of human nature is placed altogether outside the reach of our own counsel and will. None of the wise reckon conscience among the things that are "in our power" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). Those who would too eagerly have man be entirely his own supreme lord turned conscience into the Furies, the Avenging Spirits, the Eumenides — tormentors subject to no authority but their own. Sinners may be secure from the judgment of men as to their condition, or untroubled, in the ferocity of their spirit, about present things; they may despise even the final crises of life and the sum of all temporal goods, to the point of bringing extreme punishment upon themselves of their own accord — yet, while they stand manifestly guilty of crime, they cannot flee this tribunal. But we have treated this argument elsewhere.

VI. But let the matter speak for itself. Do we not all find by experience that the human mind is so prone to give its assent to this truth — namely, that God exists — indeed, so ready to rush into its embrace (without which it would not only be cast down from its dignity and honor and thrown into the lowest rank, but would even be ignorant of itself), that once the terms of which this proposition consists are set out plainly, it is not lawful to withhold assent from it? Whether this comes about by a certain impulse and instinct of nature — of which reason itself is proof enough, and is sufficient warrant of itself — or whether the mind employs the swiftest possible train of reasoning, and does not perceive itself to have reasoned at all until it has already yielded, with its whole soul, to the proposition set before it — experience testifies that the human mind rests immovably in this truth. Plotinus speaks superbly of this, Enneads 3.7, discoursing on eternity, which he does not distinguish from God himself: Τὸν ἀιῶνα καὶ τὸν χρόνον ἕτερον λέγοντες ἑκάτερον εἶναι, καὶ τὸν μὲν περὶ τὸν ἀΐδιον εἶναι φύσιν, τὸν δὲ χρόνον περὶ τὸ γινόμενον· καὶ τὸ δὲ τὸ πᾶν αὐτόθεν μὲν καὶ ὥσπερ ταῖς τῆς ἐννοίας ἀμφοτέραις ἐπιβολαῖς ἐναργές τε παρ' αὐτοῖς περὶ αὐτῶν ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς ἔχειν πάθος νομίζομεν λέγοντές τε ἀεὶ καὶ παρὰ πάντα ὀνομάζομεν ("When we say that eternity and time are distinct from one another — the one pertaining to the everlasting nature, the other to that which comes to be — and suppose that this whole matter turns upon those two, we have, as it were spontaneously, by a natural impulse and a sudden intuition of the understanding, a manifest instinct concerning these things deeply implanted in our minds — in that we are forever speaking of them, and everywhere calling them, in the same terms"). Granted — there are impious men who would all too readily wish that God did not exist; indeed, who have dared openly to profess that they believe God does not exist. But since this supreme impiety and wickedness never walks abroad without being accompanied by every other kind of crime, who will persuade me that those filthy scoundrels, who boldly presume to slander human nature — against the testimony of everything that partakes of it — are not also shamelessly lying about themselves? Whatever the case, what madness would it be to give credence to three or four disgraces of human nature, against not only the voice of all good men, but the constant and unanimous voice of nature herself? "He alone perceived that the gods exist first of all, because nature herself impressed a notion of them upon the minds of all. For what nation, or what kind of men, is there that does not have, without any teaching, a certain preconception of the gods? — which Epicurus calls πρόληψιν ("a preconception"), that is, a kind of picture of a thing already formed beforehand in the mind, without which nothing can be understood, inquired into, or discussed," says Velleius, in Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 16. And Seneca, Epistle 17: "We infer, among other things, that gods exist, because a belief in gods is innate in all men, and there is nowhere any nation so cast off from law and custom as not to believe in some god." That some god exists is, Δόξαν καὶ ἐπίνοιαν κοινὴν τοῦ σύμπαντος ἀνθρωπίνου γένους ὁμοίως μὲν Ἑλλήνων, ὁμοίως δὲ βαρβάρων ἀναγκαίαν καὶ ἔμφυτον ἐν παντὶ τῷ λόγῳ γινομένην κατὰ φύσιν ("a common opinion and conception of the whole human race, alike of Greeks and of barbarians, arising necessarily and by nature, innate in every rational being"), says Dio of Prusa, in his Oration. And hence Aristotle forbids that any dispute be entered into with those who doubt whether the gods ought to be worshiped, since this ought to be placed beyond controversy by the dictate of right reason. "Οἱ μὴν ἀποροῦντες πότερον δεῖ τοὺς Θεοὺς τιμᾷν, καὶ τοὺς γονεῖς ἀγαπᾶν ἢ οὐ, κολάσεως δέονται" ("Those who are in doubt whether the gods ought to be honored, and parents loved, or not, are in need of punishment"), Topics 1.9 — they are to be coerced by penalties, not convinced by arguments. The whole chorus of the wise, all of them, are of one and the same mind in this matter. The philosopher joins together the worship of God and the love of parents, which is agreed to come from nature. Justin, in his Second Apology, calls these notions "seeds of truth" (σπέρματα ἀληθείας) present in all men. "No soul is without fault, because none is without the seed of good," says Tertullian, in On the Soul; and as for the fact that men for the most part name many gods, assenting to polytheism (πολυθεότητι), this must be ascribed to corrupted traditions and to prejudices that have gained the upper hand over the native character of human nature. So Lactantius: "What pardon can they hope for their impiety, who do not acknowledge the worship of him whom it is not lawful for a man to be wholly ignorant of? For both when they swear, and when they make wishes, and when they give thanks, they name not Jupiter, nor many gods, but God — so does the truth itself, under nature's compulsion, burst forth from unwilling hearts." And it is most true that, in the very midst of idolatries, this native and primeval light of reason has put itself forth so effectually as to have compelled most men to confess one supreme and greatest God — even those who were most given over to a madness for idols: "Διὰ τοῦτο καὶ τὰ μάλιστα ὁ πρῶτος καὶ μέγιστος ἐκεῖνος Θεὸς ὁ τεκτηνάμενος ἡμᾶς" ("because of this, above all, that first and greatest God who fashioned us..."), in Dio [Cassius], History, book 56, [the speech of] Tiberius Caesar. Aristotle, in On the Cosmos, adds the reason for God's having many names (Πολυωνυμίας): "Εἷς δὲ ὢν, πολυώνυμός ἐστι, κατωνομαζόμενος τοῖς πάθεσι πᾶσιν ἅπερ αὐτὸς νεοχμεῖ" ("Being one, he is called by many names, being named after all the various states which he himself brings about anew"). Julian bears illustrious testimony to this natural preconception (προλήψει) that mankind has of God, and of his worship: "Πάντες ἀδιδάκτους εἶναι θεῖόν τι πεπείσμεθα, καὶ πρὸς τοῦτο ἀφορᾶν, ἐπ' αὐτό τε οἶμαι σπεύδειν· οὕτω διατιθέμενοι τὰς ψυχὰς πρὸς αὐτὸ ὥσπερ οἶμαι πρὸς τὸ φῶς τὰ βλέποντα" ("We are all persuaded, without being taught, that there is something divine, and, I think, we look toward it and hasten toward it — our souls being disposed toward it, I think, just as things endowed with sight are disposed toward the light"): "We are all, before any instruction, persuaded that some deity exists; that toward it we ought to look, and to it hasten: and I believe that our minds are disposed toward God just as eyes furnished with sight are disposed toward the light." Hence that old formula, customary among those placed in peril and danger, of appealing to the gods against the wrongs of others. It was the voice of nature crying out to the God of nature: "while each man, for himself, cries aloud that the gods exist, and do not neglect human affairs" (Livy, book 3). And: "there is a heavenly power — thou art great, O Jupiter" (the same, book 8). So too it was done by Sulla, when he feared the plots of Bocchus's son Volux, as recorded in Sallust's Jugurthine War; and in Plautus's Captivi: "There is indeed a God, who both hears and sees what we do." Cyprian says excellently, in On the Vanity of Idols: "This is the sum of the offense — to be unwilling to acknowledge him whom you cannot fail to know." Eusebius likewise sets out this view excellently, in Preparation for the Gospel, book 2, chapter 9: Φύσει μὲν οὖν καὶ αὐτοδιδάκτοις ἐννοίαις μᾶλλον δὲ θεοδιδάκτοις, καλόν τε καὶ ὠφέλιμον τυγχάνειν τὸ σημαῖνον τὴν τοῦ Θεοῦ προσηγορίαν τε καὶ οὐσίαν, πάντες γὰρ ἄνθρωποι κοινοῖς λογισμοῖς προειλήφεσαν τοῦ τῶν ὅλων Δημιουργοῦ, τοῦτο πάσῃ λογικῇ καὶ νοερᾷ ψυχῇ φυσικαῖς ἐννοίας ὑποσπείραντος ("By nature, then, and by self-taught notions — or rather, notions taught by God — it is a fine and supremely useful thing to possess that which signifies both the name and the essence of God; for all men, by a common process of reasoning, have anticipated the Maker of all things, since he who fashioned all things has sown these natural conceptions into every rational and intelligent soul"): "That is a choice and especially useful thing which signifies the name and essence of God — a thing led forth from nature herself, and impressed upon the soul by notions belonging to it, or rather divinely inspired, which everyone understands; for all peoples have grasped this by a certain common sense of reason, since this universal Artificer has implanted it, by certain natural thoughts, in every soul endowed with reason and understanding" — so he says. And Tertullian, Against Marcion: "We hold that God is first to be known by nature, and then acknowledged anew by teaching." And in the Apology: "Would you have us prove it from the testimony of the soul itself" (that God exists, and is one), "which, though pressed down by the prison of the body, though hedged about by depraved institutions, though enervated by lusts and desires, though enslaved to false gods, yet, when it comes to itself — as out of a drunken stupor, as out of sleep, as out of some sickness — and recovers its health, it names God; by this name alone, because he is properly the one true God, good and great; and what God has granted is the word on everyone's lips. It calls him Judge as well. 'God sees'; 'I commend it to God'; 'God will repay me.' O testimony of a soul that is by nature Christian! In pronouncing these things, finally, it looks not toward the Capitol, but toward heaven. For it knows the seat of the living God, from whom, and from which, it has come down."

VII. And just as most of the wise had noted these common notions (κοινὰς ἐννοίας) or preconceptions (προλήψεις), so too they had come to know that force of conscience which we have described. Menander: "conscience is a god to all mortals" (Βροτοῖς ἅπασι συνείδησις Θεός). Cornelius Tacitus, speaking of Tiberius, Annals 6.6: "So thoroughly had his own crimes and infamies turned themselves into his punishment. Nor was it in vain that the most eminent of the wise used to affirm that, if the minds of tyrants were laid open, one might see the lacerations and blows within; for as the body is torn by scourging, so is the soul by cruelty, lust, and evil designs; indeed, it was neither fortune nor solitude that protected Tiberius, but rather he himself confessed the torments of his breast and his own punishments." Cicero calls the fear that arises from a guilty conscience "the most savage master"; and "the wicked," he says, "are driven and hounded by furies, not with blazing torches, as in the old tales, but by the anguish of conscience and the torment of their own guilt" (On the Laws, book 1). Tortured by this unceasing anguish — having spurned every remedy, whether fresh crimes, or withdrawal from the sight of men, or the fear of vengeance — Tiberius could not restrain himself; weary of himself, he publicly confessed, in a letter to the senate, the torments he suffered in his breast. "What," he says, "am I to write to you, conscript fathers, or how am I to write it, or what am I altogether not to write, at this time? May the gods and goddesses destroy me more miserably than I feel myself perishing daily, if I know [what to write]" (Suetonius, Tiberius, ch. 61). Otho, too, after murdering Galba by an unspeakable crime, was so terrified that he attempted, by every kind of expiatory rite, to appease Galba's ghost — on the same authority. The Satirist puts it excellently. The historian [Sallust] sets out an outstanding example in Jugurtha, after his countless crimes had been committed. "Never after that time," he says, "did Jugurtha have a quiet day or night; he trusted no place, no mortal, and no season enough. He feared citizens and enemies alike; he looked about him at everything and was terrified at every noise; again and again, contrary to royal dignity, he would take his rest by night in one place after another, and sometimes, roused from sleep, he would seize his weapons and raise an alarm — so was he driven by a kind of dread and derangement of mind." And this is the first foundation, or first part, of natural theology in its corrupt and sinful state; wherefore he who has not ceased to be a man cannot cease altogether to be a theologian.

VIII. Further, this remaining knowledge of God can be nourished and increased, day by day, from the consideration of the works of God — both of creation and of providence; for this theology, whatever sort it may be, rests not only upon human nature, but upon the whole of the world as well.

IX. First, nothing more eloquent can be said on this matter than what the Psalmist has, Psalm 19:1–7: "The heavens declare the glory of the mighty God, and their expanse shows the work of his hands. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night shows knowledge," etc. This Psalm celebrates a twofold principle — or rather, medium — of God's revelation, namely, his works and his word. Comparing these two, it prefers the latter to the former in respect of saving effects (which, indeed, it ascribes to the word alone). But it proves that the former declares the glory of God throughout the whole world. The thing revealed, of which mention is made here, is the glory of God, and also the power which he displayed in the creation of all things — that is, as the apostle puts it, his "eternal power and Godhead" (Ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης, Romans 1:20). The medium of this revelation is the heaven and the sun, and the days and nights that succeed one another as they are carried round in their circuit. The manner of this revelation is expressed variously: the heavens are said to declare, to show, to utter, to display, to speak. All this, indeed, is metaphorical, but sufficiently indicates its efficacy toward its intended end. It is added, as a circumstance, that this revelation is catholic — that is, extended to every extremity of the habitable world. The Psalmist does indeed add that this doctrine of the works of creation and of God's providence is not sufficient for anyone to know God rightly and to worship him in holiness, since he claims those saving effects wholly for God's word, or for the doctrine contained in Holy Scripture. Yet meanwhile he expressly affirms that the essence, glory, and power of God are so revealed through it, that all the inhabitants of the world may learn from it both that God exists, and that he is infinitely separate from all the idols of the Gentiles.

X. The apostle confirms this same truth no less clearly at Romans 1:18–20: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For his invisible things, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made — namely, his eternal power and Godhead — so that they are without excuse." I do not wish to entangle myself deeply in the controversies over these words that lie outside our present purpose. The foul contrivance of the Socinians, who twist the words of verse 20 to fit the doctrine of the gospel, has long since been exploded. As for the rest: the thing revealed is called, in general, "that which is known of God" (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ); specifically, his eternal power, his Godhead, and his wrath, or avenging justice. The media of revelation are the works of God — the things he has made, namely, of creation, which have existed from the founding of the world, and of providence, which still operates from heaven. The manner, however, is by means of a certain disclosure of these things, native to them, and of the consideration of the mind which they indelibly impose. Now this revelation attains, through these media, such a degree that it is said to be, in those to whom it is made, a manifestation of the things revealed. Its end is the removal of all excuse (ἀναπολογησία, "the leaving without excuse") — not indeed absolutely, but only so far as concerns the use of the benefit of this revelation. Now whether "that which is known of God" be rendered as "that which can be known of God," or "that which ought to be known," it comes to the same thing; for it is not spoken absolutely, but with respect to that manifestation which comes through the works of God's creation and providence: for from these it can be known that God exists, that he is eternally powerful and just; and this is what ought to be known from them, for the apostle does not extend "that which is known of God" any further here. Indeed, whatever things are natural to God, and, once their object is posited, necessary in respect of their exercise, fall exactly under this manifestation no less than those of which explicit (κατὰ λέξιν, "according to the letter") mention is made. But of those things whose exercise, once every object is posited, depends on the most free will of God — such as grace, and mercy toward sinners — the case is different. For of these there is no revelation except in Christ, as we have demonstrated more fully elsewhere.

Chapter 6

The sufficiency of natural theology unto salvation is treated; it is proved by various arguments to be insufficient — The doctrine of this theology is imperfect, and so too the habit of it — A digression on universal grace, and on the will of God to save those who lack the word.

I. Since this has been the knowledge of God, resting on those means, which flourished — and still flourishes — among sinful men destitute of supernatural revelation, let us go on to see whether by its force and help those who were imbued with it were able, or are able, to attain their ultimate end, so that it might still seem to deserve the name of true theology. The sufficiency of any doctrine can be twofold, with respect to God and his supreme judgment upon men: one directed toward leaving men without excuse (ἀναπολογησία, "inexcusableness"), the other toward salvation. The apostle ascribes the former to this knowledge, Romans 1:20; we assert that it is unequal to the latter. For: 1. All those ages in which the greater part of mortals lived destitute of heavenly revelation are called "times of ignorance" (χρόνοι ἀγνοίας), Acts 17:30 — which God, as it were, winked at and passed over, permitting the nations to walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16, not proclaiming to them that they should repent. By reason of that ignorance they were, every one of them, "alienated from the life of God" (ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι τῆς ζωῆς τοῦ Θεοῦ), Ephesians 4:18. So that, as far as concerns special grace and love, no communication passed between them and God. 2. Furthermore, all that knowledge of which men were able to become partakers in that state pertained to the law; but the law itself is not sufficient for this, nor can the knowledge of the law suffice — especially an imperfect knowledge of it — and, with respect to that end, an imperfect knowledge of the most absolute and perfect law profits not a whit. But that the law itself is unequal to this matter — namely, that by it a man should be pleasing to God — the apostle shows at length, Romans 3 and 4. 3. Likewise, "without faith it is impossible to please him" (χωρὶς πίστεως ἀδύνατον εὐαρεστῆσαι), Hebrews 11:6; but "faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God" (ἡ πίστις ἐξ ἀκοῆς, ἡ δὲ ἀκοὴ διὰ ῥήματος Θεοῦ), Romans 10:17. 4. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ αἰώνιος ζωή, ἵνα γινώσκωσι ... πατέρα τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν Θεόν, καὶ ὃν ἀπέστειλεν Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν), John 17:3. "And there is salvation in none other" (καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν ἄλλῳ οὐδενὶ ἡ σωτηρία), Acts 4:12. But since the promise of Christ was made only after the fall — by which God's mercy toward the human race first appeared — while all the knowledge of God that men have without special revelation is only that portion which our first parents possessed in the state of integrity, it is utterly impossible that any knowledge of Christ, all knowledge of whom comes ἐξ ἀκοῆς ("by hearing"), should thence emanate. 5. This entire body of knowledge, whatever it amounted to, served only the covenant of works; hence, that covenant having been made void by sin, it could direct men to no obedience except one arising from fear of punishment. But when someone keeps a commandment "from fear of punishment, not from love of righteousness, he does not do in his heart what he does in outward act, and is therefore inwardly guilty of sin, however innocent he may seem to himself" — as Augustine aptly says.

II. There are, accordingly, two things in the theology of fallen man: 1. The internal light still remaining, which is, as it were, the faculty of theology, or its δύναμις ("power, capacity"); and 2. The revelation of God through the works of creation and providence, which is, as it were, theology considered objectively, or its doctrine. But we dare not ascribe to either of these, with respect to the ultimate end, an efficacy unto salvation. For, as to the first, we must charge it with imperfection both in respect of the doctrine it reveals — which, not exceeding the compass of the law, as we have said, contains nothing akin to the knowledge of Christ — and also in respect of the manner of perceiving divine things, by which its efficacy is circumscribed; for since men's minds are utterly beset with darkness and blindness, that manner cannot be spiritual. To the other likewise we bring the same charge, since it neither exhibits a ὑποτύπωσις ("outline, pattern") of the whole doctrine that is absolutely necessary, nor puts itself forth with that efficacy by which saving light might be infused into a blind understanding; for Christ alone has brought life and immortality to light, and that through the gospel, 2 Timothy 1:10.

III. Those who maintain that the revelation of the divine mind — and so of our obedience — through the works of creation and providence rests upon a general will of God to save all men are forced, besides ascribing to God useless desires, imperfect purposes, and an ineffectual intention which he either will not or cannot render effectual — a mercy that never, nowhere puts itself forth — also to make use of such distinctions, and to confine their assertion within such limits, that they are obliged to confess that this revelation neither has been nor could have been of saving use to any mortal whatsoever. For just as that separation of this revelation from the illusions by which the prince of darkness has in wondrous ways made sport of wretched little men bound to himself — a separation they themselves contend to be necessary — cannot come about without the light of the word, so too that removal of darkness, blindness, and prejudices from men's minds, without which every revelation must necessarily come to nothing, cannot be procured without the special aid of the Holy Spirit.

Digression

On Universal Grace, or, A Dissertation on the Sufficiency of Natural Theology in the State of Sin unto Salvation.

I. Since, however, not all hold the same opinion about these matters, it seems good to go back a little further, and to submit to examination, as in passing (ὡς ἐν παρόδῳ), the opinion of certain very learned men. That this manifestation of God is not only sufficient for salvation to sinful men, but that sinners themselves are endowed with such power that they can so use that manifestation as at length actually to obtain salvation, was formerly maintained by the Pelagians; and almost the whole nation of the Arminians has gone over to their opinion. It is not my present purpose to engage with them; they have enough to occupy themselves with, at sufficient length, in the writings of the ancients and the moderns. But some part of that controversy has of late begun to be agitated among the brethren. It has pleased some to call it the firebrand of "universal grace." And in this dispute the hinge on which things turn seems to be, not only a matter of truth, but also, among some, of brotherly charity. For it is thus, indeed, that Christians live forgetful of gentleness, nay, of human frailty itself. Neither the duty required by the nature of evangelical grace, nor the mercy owed to the weakness of the human condition, does anything to make us bear with equanimity those who differ from us in trifling matters of opinion. We confess that even the best of men know only ἐκ μέρους ("in part"); we are unwilling to allow that any of the saints are so perfectly transformed, through the renewal of the mind, into the light of God that they are overspread with no remnants of darkness and liable to no errors. Yet everyone supposes this ought to be said of all others, but not of himself in the same way. For when it comes to the matter itself and to examination, there is no man who does not so conduct himself as if he were a possessor of the best faith and of all truth to such a degree that it is scarcely fair for anyone to enjoy this common light who dares to dissent from him. Now there is this difference between the μόρφωσις ("outward form") of truth and its δύναμις ("power"): the former only illumines the mind with the knowledge of what is true, and, as it were, compels an assent to evangelical doctrine; the latter, besides this, also impresses its own stamp upon the whole soul, and renders the mind itself conformable to it in all things.

II. That certain learned men in Belgium, along with some of better repute in France, have not so long ago fallen into quarrels and feuds over this matter, is hidden from no learned man who cares to know the affairs of religion and of the churches of Christ. To narrate the occasions, origin, and progress of that controversy, as it has been agitated between them for some years back, would be nothing but wasted labor, since these things have already been made only too public through the exercitations, animadversions, apologies, and vindications published on all sides. For no one can spend his effort more uselessly than in bringing to light what is already too well known of itself, and what it would have been desirable had never been known at all. I have not, indeed, grown so weary of peace, or of brotherly charity, as to wish to thrust myself importunately and rashly into the midst of a battle that is waged, by various movements of the mind, from causes that are truly ἔξω τοῦ πράγματος ("outside the matter itself"); I have other business to attend to. But if I candidly set forth, without any desire of contradicting anyone, what I myself think concerning that part of this controversy which is not foreign to our present undertaking — indeed is so bound up with it that, unless the doubt about it be removed, I can scarcely proceed safely on the path I have set out upon — I hope it will be burdensome or troublesome to no one.

III. I could indeed have wished that these most learned men had entered upon this contest with greater gentleness and a greater regard for Christian meekness, and with less arrogance (if I may be pardoned the word) and φαντασία ("ostentation"). For I fear that, before fair judges free from partisan zeal, those excuses will hardly suffice which they will perhaps offer, as ones by which they might have kept clear of the least loss either to the opinion they hold to be true, or to their own reputation. For what does it matter, after all, with what design or disposition of mind we approach the handling of sacred things? Are we to believe that the Holy Spirit — without whose special aid and guidance we can neither piously begin nor happily complete anything at all (for whatever we seem to accomplish by our own strength is in reality nothing) — is willing to involve himself with minds whose affections are exacerbated, or which are hampered by anger, hatred, revenge, or desire for fame, by which he is most grievously burdened? Ought we not to strive with all our might that, in proclaiming the truth to others, we ourselves may not, as far as its δύναμις ("power") is concerned, prove ἀδόκιμοι ("disqualified, unapproved")? Since it is also most certain that no one can ever rightly perceive divine truth as it is in Jesus, except one who has denied himself from the bottom of his heart, and laid aside, to the best of his power, all arrogance and all prejudices — how can it be expected that others will be taught that truth by us, whose power we ourselves do not so experience in ourselves as to have been delivered over into its τύπος ("mold, pattern")? For such is the character of all evangelical doctrine, when it pours its native light into our minds, that it renders us gentle and humble, and as like as possible to its author; for the wisdom that is from above is, "first pure, then peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy," James 3:17.

IV. But as for those who, on the other side, would wish to bring brethren who differ from them into peril of peace, or of reputation, with their churches — let them do so without me as their partner. To deprive learned and pious men, ministers of churches, rectors of schools, of the freedom of their own judgment in controversies of this kind, and to wish to bring them, in the whole exercise of their office, under the yoke of someone else's fixed opinions, would be nothing other than to bring an intolerable tyranny into the church of Christ. Nor indeed would I expect from this any notable progress of the truth, or any building up in love (οἰκοδομὴ ἐν ἀγάπῃ) of those who profess it, where the dispensers of the divine word are compelled, like abject slaves, to be, in the whole of their work, subject to another's will. Neither the rationale of the institution of the evangelical ministry, nor the nature of the gospel or of faith itself, nor the distinctions among the gifts of the Holy Spirit, nor brotherly charity, nor the edification of the church, nor the condition of that light of which we have been made partakers in this life, nor the countless divine precepts, nor the leading of grace which we experience, will bear the imposition of a burden of this kind. But with how great a disaster this opinion of men aspiring to lordship over the brethren has almost everywhere long since afflicted the Christian cause — namely, that no divergence of judgment ought to be tolerated in matters that do not pertain immediately to the foundation of the faith — is too well known to need our relating.

V. These things being premised, let us submit to consideration that thesis which some oppose to our position on the total insufficiency of corrupted natural theology unto salvation. It is this: that God wills that adults who lack his word should be saved. Whether those who weigh with due reverence what it is to be saved, and what it is to lack the word of God, will readily give their assent to this proposition, I for my part greatly doubt. Let partisan zeal be set aside for a little; let consideration of the connection that this thesis has with other opinions be dismissed; and the matter will be plain. Let disputants only take care not to drown out, with their syllogisms, that communion which they themselves have graciously obtained with God through Jesus Christ in the things of eternal salvation, and perhaps these contests will come to rest.

VI. Now the will of God concerning the salvation of those to be saved either respects the end and outcome, and is called his intention, purpose, or decree; or it respects the means which those who would wish to be saved ought to use, and is called his precept. But in what sense God can be said to will the salvation of those who in fact will never be saved — whom he willingly allows to walk in their own ways, in which it is utterly impossible that they should be saved; whom he does not call to repentance through that means, nor wills to call, through which alone it is possible for anyone to be called to true repentance — this, I confess, is beyond my dullness to understand. For whoever grants only those means of salvation which can reveal neither who is the author of salvation, nor through whom it is to be obtained, nor what that salvation is, would seem rather to be said not to will, than to will, the salvation of those to whom he grants them. If this dispute were referred for decision to those who, being furnished with spiritual αἴσθησις ("perception, discernment"), and relying on the help and aid of all the saving means — even of the Holy Spirit himself, poured out πλουσίως ("richly") through Jesus Christ — know what it is to serve God in the midst of temptations, so as at length, by the ineffable benefit of his grace, to obtain salvation, and who stand outside the cords of this contention, an easy judgment of it would result.

VII. Whoever should wish to survey in his mind those parts of the world that even now lack the word, and to consider what is the condition, with respect to eternal salvation, of the wretched men who spend their lives there, will doubtless remain suspended in mind before that will of God which certain learned men proclaim. I know they will contend that the most wretched condition of these peoples is to be ascribed to malice alone; nor do I absolutely deny that this must be so. But I deny that their malice exceeds that with which all those are naturally imbued to whom, because he wills them to be saved, God has granted his word. In what sense, then, God is to be said to will the salvation of those who will never be saved, and to whom he is unwilling to supply the means necessary for salvation, is a matter too entangled, and one that rejects any easy explanation.

VIII. Some assert that "the word could be preached to them, but that this does not happen through our negligence and sloth." That the gospel could be preached even to those to whom it is not preached, no one doubts; for what contradiction could seem to arise from the matter itself? But that this could come to pass with respect to the actual outcome — which God has willed from eternity should not come to pass — has not yet been proved. That it is in fact not preached to the greater number, and was not preached of old, Scripture ascribes to the will of God: Psalm 147:19-20; Matthew 11:26; Acts 16:6-7. It does not appear that this comes about through our negligence and sloth — though even if it did, the difficulty would not thereby be removed, for no one doubts that God, if he willed, could take that sloth away from us. But negligence and sloth have no place except where there is a duty; and every duty of ours depends on the will of God calling us to that duty. But how will they show that we are called by God to the duty of preaching the gospel to those who up to now, in various parts of the world, have lacked it? Let us grant the learned that no ecclesiastical mission is needed for the discharge of that task — for who is furnished with such catholic authority as to send others out in that way? But I should like to know what providence of God there is that makes us so certain of his will that we could undertake that work in faith; or who they are that are furnished with gifts for rightly accomplishing it. I confess indeed that we are all too negligent and slothful in administering that province of the work of the gospel which God has graciously committed to us — and who is sufficient for these things (καὶ πρὸς ταῦτα τίς ἱκανός)? But that the guilt of our sloth extends so far that even the failure to preach the gospel to the inhabitants of America is to be imputed to it, is, to me at least — free as I am from every heat of controversy — simply not credible.

IX. But it is fitting to look thoroughly into the opinion of these most learned men. First, then, they grant that no pagan has ever, apart from the preaching of the word, so used — or been able to use — the teachings of God set before him by nature or by the works of providence, as to repent and obtain salvation. So speak certain most celebrated men; and in this they show themselves to think very differently on this matter from all the Pelagians, from most of the Arminians, and even from certain unruly railers among us here. And why, indeed, should not the entire estimate of this dispute be made here? Have we nothing better and greater to do with ourselves than to wear away our time disputing whether that could come to pass, or not, which neither ever was nor ever will be — nay, which God has purposed within himself should never come to pass at all? But the matter stands otherwise, as we shall see.

X. They add, accordingly, that "aids of this sort are given to pagans, which lead, in and of themselves, to some degree of saving knowledge." So speaks a most learned man, of great name in theology. But every degree of saving knowledge is itself saving. Now all saving knowledge consists in the knowledge of the covenant of grace. Unless, then, that degree of saving knowledge which can be procured through these aids is set forth more plainly, I may be permitted to profess that I neither grasp nor understand that degree. Even the smallest degree of saving knowledge requires a saving renewal of the mind. That there should be, in a blind mind, some degree of saving knowledge is impossible; for the renewal of the mind consists precisely in saving knowledge. But where there is renewal of the mind, there is the Holy Spirit, who alone works and effects it. Those aids, then, which lead to some degree of saving knowledge, lead also to the obtaining of the Holy Spirit himself, to the renewal of the mind, and to true faith. But that this is the peculiar work of the gospel, the gospel itself teaches everywhere. But if by "saving knowledge" is meant only saving doctrine, and not the renewal of the mind, then the sense of that statement is that these aids lead sinful men to the doctrine of the gospel, or at least to some degree of it. Whether this is true, we shall see afterward.

XI. We are indeed already in that state in which, unless we know Jesus Christ, whom God has sent, and God in him reconciling the world to himself, we cannot obtain eternal life. But all that knowledge of God which sinful men can acquire, without the word, from the works of creation and providence, is only the knowledge of God as creator and governor of all things; concerning redemption there is the deepest silence. But they retort: "If these things are correct, it follows that a man, even supposing — though this is impossible — that he conducts himself well and dutifully in the school of nature, and directs the whole force of his understanding to weighing and learning what he there hears or sees, can nevertheless draw from these teachings nothing else but this one thing: that God is someone most holy, most just, most powerful, and most wise, who founded this universe and governs it; but that he himself is a sinner, guilty of having violated the divine law, and therefore liable to heavenly wrath, and most certainly to be visited with death and the curse without any hope of pardon. Thus it is necessary that God set all these things before men with the intent that they should learn that they are most certainly and infallibly damned, and that no place at all is left them, either for salvation or for a repentance that might help them." But this argument errs in many ways, as commonly happens when a matter is handled out of partisan zeal rather than fairly and honestly. For if these learned men are allowed to suppose whatever they wish, whether possible or impossible, and then to infer from it whatever they please, no one can stop them. And if I refuse to grant suppositions that plainly ought not to be granted, because they include a tacit begging of the question (τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ, "the thing at issue"), their whole argument at once collapses. Furthermore, who has ever said that this one thing alone is taught through the works of God? Many things can be taught, yet in such a way that Christ is not taught; his works teach that this God is to be loved and worshipped in the highest degree, precisely because they teach that he is God. There are also other heads of corrupted natural theology, as we shall show. Further, those who affirm that God reveals himself through his works so that men may know him as creator, ruler, and governor of all things, most powerful, most holy, most just, do not say — nor, if they wish to be consistent, can they say — that he sets before men all these teachings in the works of nature and providence with the intent that they should learn that they are certainly damned. But you will say, on their view, that as far as their eternal salvation is concerned, sinful men can learn nothing else. Granted! You will not quickly show that any evil arises from this view. For what of it? Shall anyone bring a lawsuit against God because he is just, and cannot but be just? Shall an accusation be brought against him because men are sinners, and cannot be ignorant of his right — namely, that those who have committed sins are worthy of death — because they have wickedly fallen away from that state from which they could have perceived his saving revelation? But does he not, in fact, fail to display his sparing mercy (that is, mercy as it exists in the covenant of grace) through the works of creation and providence? What then? Does the law of God itself, which contains a far clearer manifestation of God than those other aids and teachings we are speaking of, declare that mercy? Will any mortal dare to charge that upon the law of God, for this reason? Does not the apostle argue everywhere that through the law comes the knowledge of sin, but not of the remedy? Suppose, then, that a man discharged his duty rightly and diligently in the school of the law: he could learn nothing else there than that he is a sinner, and certainly to be damned. Is the law, then, sin? Is God unjust for having given it? Μὴ γένοιτο ("By no means!") — and yet as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse.

XII. They will say, indeed, that "God grants this manifestation of himself to men with the intent and will, not that it should be despised, but that they might rightly use it unto the knowledge of sin, repentance, and the worship of God, according to the measure of these things." That the thought should ever have occurred, even in a dream, to any mortal that God sets his teachings before men with the intent and will that they be despised, I greatly doubt. But that he should propose the works of his providence to those who lack the word with the intent and will that they rightly use them unto repentance — when he knows full well that they will never do so, a fact known also to the learned men with whom we are dealing — will scarcely gain credence among those who, by God's kindness, do not lack the word. Nor would these learned men themselves so unwisely arrange their own rules. Furthermore, they do not explain with sufficient accuracy what they understand by the "intent and will" of God in this question; of this, however, more later.

XIII. Some assert that the hinge of this controversy is placed in this: "whether, namely, in the works of nature and providence, some gentleness and placability of God toward sinful men has been made manifest." But, with their leave, I would say that the case stands far otherwise. We know that some gentleness of God toward sinful men is manifested through the works of providence: "for with much long-suffering he endures the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." But that gentleness is not the same as that which consists in sparing mercy, whose effect is the remission of sins. Yet without knowledge of this, it is impossible for anyone to arrive at saving repentance. Furthermore, there is here no mention at all of the will of God, whereas the question concerns that alone, not the nature of the things themselves, nor whether some degree of saving knowledge can be procured from this manifestation — though it would not displease me to treat of these matters as well. But I am almost astonished that pious and learned men, translated out of darkness into the wonderful light of Christ, who have purified their souls by obeying the truth through the Spirit, can speak so thinly and languidly about the saving knowledge of God's sparing mercy. But in examining the words of these learned men, there is no need for me to trouble them any further. I know that in this cause I have not been carried away by any partisan zeal, nor sworn into the words of any master or synod; I shall therefore, with what fidelity I can, set forth the state of the controversy — first proposing those points on which the parties agree, and then the points in dispute. I shall perhaps state the whole matter more briefly than so great a subject deserves, but, for our present purpose, clearly enough, I hope; for it does not please me to speak amply and loftily on a matter concerning which I feel only humbly and lowly.

XIV. It is granted, therefore:

1. That there is some natural knowledge of God, or innate θεογνωσίαν ἔμφυτον ("innate knowledge of God"), which we explained above.
2. That through the works of creation and providence a revelation has been made of the eternal power and deity of God the creator and ruler of all things.
3. That whatever men know of God, or can know by virtue of the revelation granted to them, they ought to use entirely to this end: that they worship him, love him, glorify him as God, and show themselves obedient to him in all things.
4. That none of the pagans, on account of their native blindness and malice, and the cunning of the devil ensnaring them on every side with wicked superstitions and abominable idolatries, submitted themselves to God's rule or conformed to it according to the measure of the knowledge which they had, or could have had, of him — and that therefore they were all utterly without excuse.
5. That Christ the mediator is not revealed by these means — not, at least, to such an extent that he could be savingly apprehended by those who possessed only these means.
6. That the revelation of Christ the mediator through the gospel is absolutely necessary for obtaining salvation.
7. That, besides every external revelation of God and his will made by whatever means, there is need of the efficacious power of the Holy Spirit flooding the mind with saving light, so that a man may understand spiritual things spiritually, to the glory of God and his own eternal salvation.
8. That God did not purpose within himself from eternity that any of those to whom he grants no other means of salvation besides the works of nature and providence should be saved. Concerning all these points there is scarcely any question among the orthodox.

XV. The hinge of the whole controversy, therefore, seems to turn on these two questions. For it is asked: First, "Whether that manifestation of God which he grants, through the works of nature and providence, to sinners destitute of the word, contains in itself any degree of truly saving knowledge, by whose guidance they might arrive at true repentance acceptable to God, and obtain eternal salvation." Second, "Whether God grants this manifestation of himself with that mind and will" (that is, purpose and intention) "that those to whom it is granted" (as it is granted to absolutely all men) "should come to true repentance acceptable to God, and so obtain eternal salvation, even though destitute of the word." That is: both the sufficiency of the means, and the intention of God, with respect to the salvation of those who lack the word, fall under controversy.

XVI. It seemed good, however, briefly to submit to examination some arguments drawn from Scripture which occur in the writings of certain authors on this dispute. The first is deduced from the words of Paul which we cited earlier, from Acts 17:24-26, to which they add some words from chapter 14:16. From these passages, they say, it is established that "God performs all his works in nature and in the government of nature with this intent: that sinful men should seek him and find him"; and they affirm that Paul testifies to this most explicitly. But this affirmation scarcely touches the state of the controversy, let alone settles it. It remains for us to see what it is by which they attempt, from these passages, to lay the groundwork for their opinion, and then how they weave together their proofs.

XVII. First, then, having laid the groundwork that God administered these aids to men destitute of the word with the intent that they should seek him and find him, they conclude that in these aids is contained everything necessary to be known in order that God be sought and found. "To seek God," they say, "is not to investigate whether he exists, but to take refuge in faith in him, and to seek the aid of his grace. And to find God is to obtain and secure the aid one has sought, and to experience his most holy majesty as propitious and benevolent." Response: To take refuge in faith in God is to trust in God; and those who do this are blessed, Psalm 2:12. To seek the aid of God's grace involves self-denial and surrender into the grace of God, which always issue in justification, Luke 18:13-14. And this is to experience the most holy majesty of God as propitious and benevolent — which has never befallen anyone except in the remission of sins. And so, by these interpretations of Paul's words, they seem to intend a saving belief in God, by a living faith effectual unto salvation.

XVIII. But how immensely they enlarge the thesis proposed here! Those who argue in this way seem to sense that they have made more progress than they hoped in their argumentation, so that they cannot restrain themselves within the limits of the question as it is commonly proposed even by themselves. For what then? Is the manifestation of God through the works of providence to be reckoned, in the judgment of these eminent men, as containing everything necessary to be known so that sinful men might flee to God with the whole confidence of the mind, experience him as propitious, worship him, and believe in him? Why then do these same learned men deny that those works of providence reveal Christ? Or why do they assert that the knowledge of Christ is necessary for obtaining living faith and salvation? Indeed, if the matter stands thus, what need is there of the word? Or in what sense shall we say that Christ, through the gospel, has brought life and incorruption to light?

XIX. Since, however, the matter has come to this point, let us see how they attempt to establish this opinion from this passage. The whole force of the argument these learned men use depends on the construction of the apostolic passage (περιοχῆς, "context"), and on the sense of the words "seeking" and "finding" — that is, seeking and finding God. They prove the mind and design of God from this verbal construction: namely, Paul said ζητεῖν τὸν κύριον ("to seek the Lord") for ἕνεκα τοῦ ζητεῖν ("for the sake of seeking") — surely so as to proclaim the mind of God in setting his works before sinful men, by a manner of expression, as they affirm, familiar to the Greeks. They prove that "to seek God" ought to be understood in no other sense than the one they have expounded, by adducing all the passages of the Old Testament in which mention is made of seeking and finding God.

XX. And thus indeed these most learned men plead their case. But whether they have grasped the mind of the Holy Spirit, or the force of Paul's argument, a brief account of the occasion and sense of the apostle's words will show. When Paul, then, was at Athens, his spirit was provoked because he saw that city full of idols, Acts 17:16, and he could not restrain himself from immediately — contrary, it seems, to what he had first intended — publicly setting forth and proclaiming the living God, in opposition to all those vain idols (τὰ μάταια, "the empty things") by whose worship that most superstitious city was held bound. Since this, then, was his purpose, he uses an argument both most ready and most powerful, drawn from the creation and government of all things. And in order to bind the idolaters themselves more tightly, he teaches them that they are utterly without any excuse in their worship of idols, since these very works of God, which were daily set before them, clearly pointed to their author: that God exists, and that he is supreme, good, wise, powerful, and everywhere present — so that it would be nothing but the height of madness to wish not to know him whom they could not possibly fail to know. Indeed, he says, this living God, the Creator and ruler of all things, sets his works of nature and providence before the consideration of all with this intent: that they might seek out the author of these things, if perhaps by feeling about for him they might find him — since, having abandoned him, or cast him aside into the last place as though unknown, though he alone both exists and can be known, they betake themselves religiously to things which either do not exist, and never existed at all, or are vain and foolish, they cannot but be both ἀναπολόγητοι ("without excuse") and αὐτοκατάκριτοι ("self-condemned").

XXI. The apostle therefore proves that the gods of the Gentiles are vain idols, but that the true and living God, the sole creator and ruler of this world, had revealed himself to them in such a way that they could know him most easily, and without any difficulty, from a sure consideration of his works, which he set before them daily. If, therefore, they had turned their minds to it, and had sought God from the aids to knowledge which he supplied them abundantly — as it was fitting for them to do, and as they could not deny that he was — they would certainly have found him, since he was not far from them, and would not have turned themselves to mute and vain idols. For the apostle's words are not to be extended beyond the subject matter and the occasion of his preaching.

XXII. Let us see further what these apostolic words mean — "that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps, feeling about for him, they might find him" — as they seem to bear on the counsel and will of God. Since, however, those with whom the apostle was dealing were most superstitious idolaters, it is apparent that the actual outcome is not what is intended by these words, nor any purpose of the divine will with respect to them — since God is destitute neither of power nor of wisdom for carrying out his purposes. It is certain that these words denote the very nature and character of the things themselves; and accordingly, that counsel of the divine mind by which he willed to set these things before all men in such a way that they were sufficient external means — that is, sufficient in their own kind — for attaining that proposed end, namely, that they should seek and find the creator and ruler of all things. God, therefore, sets before men destitute of the word the works of nature and providence with this mind and will: that, following their guidance, they should seek and find him as their author and the ruler of all things, having left behind the false gods and that whole Lernaean hydra of idolatry which the blindness of the human mind and the cunning of the devil had brought into the world; and nothing further, it seems, can be extracted from these passages. Indeed, the apostle says nothing at all, in reality, about God's will and counsel in founding and governing the world. He proves that the Gentiles could attain to that knowledge of him which we set forth above, through the bare consideration of the works set before them. But concerning God's placability, the remission of sins, the bosom of mercy, invocation and prayer, saving repentance, and the pursuit of a holy and righteous life — none of which anyone can have without faith — and other things of this kind, which certain learned men labor to extract from these passages, there is deep silence.

XXIII. Let us see, however, how these learned men strive to prove their thesis from these words of the apostle. First, then, they affirm that Paul said ζητεῖν τὸν Κύριον for ἕνεκα τοῦ ζητεῖν. But since no necessity or reason compels this interpretation of the apostolic speech, it must be reckoned as asserted gratuitously. But there is no need at all for us to raise a dispute about this phrase; let us therefore grant these learned men the right to detach these words from their proper place, which they occupy in the apostolic discourse, Acts 17:27, and to apply them to other words of the same apostle found in chapter 14:16 — if indeed they have the power to do this. Let us grant also that τὸ ζητεῖν ("the seeking") ought to be taken in the same sense in which κατοικεῖν ("to dwell") is used in the preceding verse, and that to that extent it denotes God's design in creating and governing the world, namely insofar as this world is by its nature fitted to manifest him. What, then, seems further to follow? Namely, that εἰ ἄραγε ψηλαφήσειαν αὐτὸν καὶ εὕροιεν ("if perhaps they might feel about for him and find him") ought to be expounded in the same manner, and thus to denote the same intention or will of God. But why so, I ask? Only if ἄρα and εἴπως are taken for ἵνα and ὅπως ("in order that" and "so that"). But does this always happen, or only sometimes? I do not think these learned men will say it always happens so, since they can produce only a single example where εἴπως seems capable of being taken this way; about εἰ ἄραγε they are silent. Εἰ ἄραγε perhaps occurs in this one place only in the whole New Testament; εἴγε and εἰ ἄρα occur more often — examples may be found at Acts 7:1, 8:30, 2 Corinthians 5:3, Galatians 3:4, Ephesians 3:2, 4:21, Colossians 1:23. Let the reader try whether he can wring from any one of these passages that sense and use of these particles. As for εἴπως, there is no need for us to be anxious about it, nor to inquire anxiously what Eustathius has explained about its use, since it does not occur in our text. But it is hard to believe that the apostle expressed the mind, counsel, and will of God in words that denote the utmost uncertainty. The judgment of this passage, then, is that God, in founding and governing the world, gave such proofs of his power and divinity that men might thereby be stirred up to seek the creator of all things, and to test their powers of finding him and distinguishing him from all idols. For the incorporeal and invisible God has left, as it were, traces of himself in these works, such that, by cleaving to them, he might be found.

XXIV. But some think they have found a firmer support for their cause in the sense of the words "seeking" and "finding." It cannot be denied that those means of the knowledge of God of which we are speaking are sufficient, in some respect at least, for seeking God — and perhaps finding him — in the way of which the apostle speaks; for otherwise the apostle would have to be judged unjust, for demanding this of those who had no other means. But they affirm that to seek God and find him is not simply to investigate whether God exists and what he is (although these words seem to express nothing else), "but to take refuge in faith in him, to rest in him, to worship him with invocation and prayers, to embrace him with the whole confidence of the mind, and to experience him as propitious; and that accordingly those means, supplied to all, are sufficient for these ends, and were appointed by God to be sufficient in this way" — namely, for men destitute of the word. Since, however, these words, if they are not to be used in any other sense than that in which they are employed in holy Scripture (nor indeed does it become a theologian to use any such words in a sense that departs from our one rule and norm for thinking and speaking about sacred things), would complete the whole work of saving faith, and thus would make these means equal, as far as the matter itself is concerned, to the very word of God, which he has "magnified above all his name" — they will doubtless grant that they need the strongest arguments and proofs to establish so paradoxical (παράδοξον) a claim. To confirm, then, this interpretation of theirs of these words, some adduce all the passages of the Old Testament in which mention is made of seeking and finding God, and affirm that in those passages the words cannot be taken in any sense other than the one they have expounded. They assert further that it is not to be doubted that the sense of these words is the same in this passage. That it is not to be doubted is easy to say; but I not only doubt it, I judge it plainly most false, nor can I sufficiently wonder how it could occur to anyone to assert such a thing.

XXV. For in all those passages holy Scripture speaks of the covenanted people of God; but here, of those only who were strangers to the promises of the covenants. In those passages, of those who were, at least by profession, actually believers; here, of idolaters. In those passages, of those who knew God in his word and abominated idols; here, of those to whom he was wholly unknown. In those passages the matter concerns the seeking and finding of the favor of a God already known, through Christ; here, the seeking of God through the works of nature and providence, that he might be known. In those passages the matter concerns a God already known, but for a time, because of sin, turned away in his outward dealings, and to be found propitious in Christ through the promise; but here, of an unknown God being sought, and being distinguished from idols. Shall we then think that these words are used in the same sense of these and of those — that is, of those who, being the covenanted people of God, believers, justified in Christ, instructed by the word, resting on the evangelical promises, needed to seek the face and favor of God; and of those who, destitute of the word and of every revelation of Christ, strangers to the divine covenant, ἄθεοι ("without God") in the world, had before them only the works of nature and providence, that they might know that God exists and that their vain idols were by nature (φύσει) not God? Far, very far indeed, be even the slightest suspicion of such a thing from every pious mind.

XXVI. Nor, moreover, is it said absolutely of those whom the apostle charges with negligence and sloth for not considering God's works, that they should seek God, but that they should seek him in this manner: namely, if only, "by feeling about, they might find him." Whether this can be said of those saints mentioned in the Old Testament, who, resting on the most certain promises of God in Christ, were accustomed to draw near to him, I leave to the reader to judge. It is, then, an altogether different thing to seek the favor and grace of God as revealed by his word, by virtue of his promises in Christ, and to seek an unknown God in the works of nature and providence, in case perhaps "he might be found by feeling about."

XXVII. Since, however, all the theologians who follow the so-called new method think that the firmest support of their cause lies in a certain placability of God, which they assert is manifest in the works of providence, it will perhaps not be useless if, pursuing this matter a little more deeply, I briefly set forth what ought to be thought about this placability — which occupies nearly every other page of this whole dispute — and also what the Gentiles themselves, destitute of the word, perceived about this matter. Also, since this "placability" meets us everywhere in the arguments of these most illustrious men, whatever I shall say, in summary, to remove it from its place, may be counted as gain.

XXVIII. We have described above the state and condition of sinful men destitute of the word, so far as concerns the knowledge of God. We have also shown what natural δύναμις ("power, faculty") of knowing God — spontaneously exercising itself in adults — and what προλήψεις, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι ("preconceptions," "common notions"), they retained in that condition. We have likewise shown, at greater length, that these innate notions of God could be fostered, increased, and drawn out through consideration of the works of providence. And indeed, this manner of knowing God would have abundantly sufficed for men in the state of integrity to render all due obedience and to obtain the reward of obedience. But through the entrance of sin it was so disturbed that sinners hang in doubt of mind because of it, and thus can have no settled and clear manner of worshiping God. On the one hand they could not but apprehend God as good, generous, patient, and mild, and as akin to man; on the other hand, being tightly bound by the consciousness of sin and the sense of divine anger and indignation, or of avenging justice, distracted by doubtful care and various thoughts, they were necessarily tossed about here and there in utmost uncertainty. For if on the one hand some hope at times shone upon them, so that they seemed to themselves to have some assurance of what they might expect from God's goodness and generosity, on the other hand a despair mingled with horror immediately rendered all their previously conceived plans uncertain again, so that, all hope utterly given up (convicted by their own hearts), they were consumed, Hebrews 2:15.

XXIX. To such presumptions, warring as it were in diametrical opposition within the minds of sinners, the works of providence set before them served as a hostile aid, so to speak, to each contrary side. For while they weighed the rains and the appointed seasons for bringing forth fruits, given from heaven, and other benefits for which they solemnly called upon the supreme deity, they were accustomed, with confident mind, to call everything good, to celebrate their author, and to adorn him wonderfully with words. But when they also saw the wrath of God against the impiety and injustice of men revealing itself from heaven, they could not but feel that all that hope with which they had falsely flattered themselves was at once undone.

XXX. Nor am I speaking only of what is wont to happen in such a state, when it could not happen otherwise; for this knowledge of God, of which we are speaking, concerns his natural attributes. So the apostle teaches us everywhere. Free acts of the divine will do not pertain to it, as we shall see. For these attributes are known partly from innate notions, partly from effects. Of any free act of the divine will there is no natural notion or presumption. Goodness, indeed, on the one hand, and what it necessarily entails, and avenging justice on the other, are natural to God. Of these there is in all men a certain πρόληψις ("preconception"). But the external effects of these are diverse and contrary. All the works of providence seem to be referable, respectively, to these two sources. No one destitute of special revelation can refer them elsewhere. Of those effects whose issuing forth, once the objects are posited, is not necessary, the account is different. It depends on the most free decision of God that goodness and justice, with respect to their effects, should meet and, as it were, kiss one another — unless one supposes that God must be said to punish sin, and also to remit it, out of a necessity of nature. To this belongs, it appears, the placability of which we speak, which in God is altogether arbitrary — that is, a most free act of his will, if indeed anything of this sort can be assigned to God at all; for it properly expresses neither any attribute of the divine nature nor any act of his will. Agitated, then, by these contrary blasts, as it were of winds, men were driven now this way, now that, according as one or the other notion prevailed in their minds.

XXXI. For some, turning the goodness of God into a certain perpetual mildness — which is either a vice, or at least borders on vice, and is unworthy of the supreme ruler — utterly cast off all thoughts of God's wrath and severity, charging the foulest crime of superstition upon those who were touched by any care or concern for such things. Scripture testifies that a great many of the wicked have been of this mind, Psalm 50:21, and most of the wise walked this path, as will be shown hereafter. Others, meanwhile, wasted away continually with fear and a certain foreboding of God's wrath and vengeance — men whom Plutarch most wittily lampoons in his little book On Superstition. Sacred Scripture also depicts them, Micah 6:6-7. There were also some who, relying on ancient traditions, suspected that the idols they worshiped were placable, and could be appeased by sacrifices — men, however, at whom the whole chorus of philosophers laughed. That the works of providence suggested to them any such placability of the deity is not a matter from which the slightest suspicion could arise; if anyone wishes to suspect it, we cannot forbid him, since suspicion lies within everyone's own power — but in this matter it is wholly without proof. It is certain that the custom of sacrificing among the Gentiles is to be traced partly to inveterate traditions, emanating from God's own institutions, and partly to the pride and cunning of the ancient serpent, wickedly drawing to himself the worship due to God. For the wisest of the Gentiles themselves handed down no other origin for it. We have shown before that the origin of sacrifices is to be assigned solely to the will and most free decision of God, so that it is impossible that the knowledge and observance of them should have flowed to the Gentiles, destitute of supernatural revelation, from any other source than the one we have indicated.

XXXII. There were, moreover, some who, in order to extricate themselves from the snares in which they felt themselves entangled by these contrary notions of God and his nature, conceived from the diverse effects enumerated above, invented for themselves two ultimate principles, two gods — one good, and the author of all goodness, the other perverse, and powerful in evils and punishments. And this handed-down persuasion still endures among a great part of the common people of the Americas. Hence the Tlaxcalans, when the Spaniard Cortés terrified them with the horror of his engines of war, sent envoys to inquire which was the god — the good one, who gives fruits, or the evil one, who delights in human blood — so that they might know how he ought to be received. Nor is this a persuasion of recent origin; indeed it is very ancient. "Labeo," who is proclaimed most expert in matters of this kind, "distinguishes the good deities from the evil deities by a difference of worship: he asserts that the evil gods are propitiated by slaughters and mournful supplications, but the good ones by joyful and pleasant observances" — as is found in Augustine, City of God, book 2, chapter 11.

XXXIII. Nor does it seem unworthy of notice that, among the ancient idolaters, those who seemed to venerate the deity with a certain devotion beyond other mortals, relying on the deepest persuasion of his wrath and vengeance, always entered upon a horrible method of appeasing the gods — namely, human sacrifices (ἀνθρωποθυσίας). Let the Carthaginians serve as an example, whom Plautus, among the heathen, suggests strongly to have been led by the greatest reverence for the deity, since he attributes to the Carthaginian character he brought onto the stage no other speech than one that seems to savor of an unusual sense of religion. Yet "Punic faith" is a Roman proverb; which, if Hannibal had known not only how to conquer but also how to use his victory, would have had no place — or else, on the other hand, would have stained the very Roman name with no less disgrace. The abominable sacrifices of these same people are very well known.

XXXIV. And indeed, among the Gentiles, so the matter stood. For since from the works of nature nothing at all could be manifest concerning placability toward sinners — inasmuch as these works were established, prior to any consideration of sin, absolutely, and consigned to a quite different end — and since the works of providence, whatever they made manifest of goodness or patience, offset it with a revelation of wrath and indignation; and since the practice of sacrifice was introduced only from a detestable tradition, because most foully corrupted, or by the cunning of Satan — whatever may be said of that placability, it appears that the Gentiles, destitute of the word of God, were condemned to darkness as regards all knowledge of a mercy that spares, and that leads to saving repentance.

XXXV. Furthermore: every revelation of God pertains to some covenant. There are two covenants between God and men: one of works, the other of grace. The means of revelation of which we are speaking must belong to one of these. If they belong to the former, that of works, how can they manifest any placability in God? By the tenor of that covenant, God is not placable. If they are to be referred to the latter, and the works of providence are to be reckoned means of administering the covenant of grace, then they ought to proclaim not a placable God, but a God placated, reconciled, and reconciling the world to himself — if indeed they are to be thought to preach the truth itself at all. The revelation of placability in God, therefore, belongs neither to the covenant of works nor to the covenant of grace. That is, there is none at all. They can indeed reveal the goodness of God, and his patience and longsuffering, which God exercises even toward the vessels of wrath; but not his placability. Let these distinguished men, then, consider in what sense they have so often attached this placability to God, which — since it cannot in any respect be said to exist in God — surely can be revealed by no means whatsoever. If once the heat of disputation has cooled, and a pious soul has seriously weighed with itself what it is to deal with God in Christ concerning the remission of sins, reasonings of this sort will be found to vanish sooner than words can tell.

XXXVI. Let us proceed to the consideration of the other passage in the same book, namely Acts 14:16-17 — though we have already carried over into the preceding argument all the force it might seem to have in this cause. The words of the apostles to the Lystrans run thus: "Men, why do you do these things? We also are men, subject to the same passions as you, bringing you good tidings, that you should turn from these vain things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them; who in past generations allowed all nations to walk in their own ways. Yet he did not leave himself without witness, in that he did good, giving us rains and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."

XXXVII. After they had proclaimed the living and true God, the apostles show what his disposition was toward the Gentiles destitute of the word in past generations — that is, throughout all that time in which he left them without any special revelation of himself, before the preaching of the gospel: namely, that "he allowed them to walk in their own ways." Then they set forth the manner and end of the divine dispensations toward those thus left to themselves: for "he did not leave himself without witness." From both parts of this apostolic speech, but especially from the last, these learned men labor to fortify their opinion. First, they contend that God allowed the Gentiles to walk in their own ways only to the extent that he did not, by the preaching of any prophet or apostle, intervene against their corruption; then, that the testimony which the apostles affirm God bore to himself in the works of providence testifies concerning God not merely that he exists, nor merely that he is powerful and wise, but also that he is supremely good — and indeed toward sinners, with that kind of goodness and kindness which is called mercy, Luke 6:35-36. From this it follows, they say, that by this testimony of God concerning himself, his placability and goodness toward sinful men was also to some extent made manifest — without which a sinful man cannot be brought to true repentance and true worship of God.

XXXVIII. But from what we have granted above on the one hand, and proved on the other — that unless they were to introduce, by no legitimate consequence, mention of the true worship of God, of repentance, of placability, at this point, our opponents could extract nothing at all from this passage that would seem to favor their cause — any fair reader would easily perceive. But such a method of arguing from the testimonies of Scripture does not please us; it does not seem that valid arguments can be drawn from words considered in strict isolation, with the occasion of the whole discourse and the scope of the passage set aside. We shall consider both briefly.

XXXIX. When, therefore, the crowd of Lystrans, astonished at the miracle of the healing of the man who had been lame from his mother's womb, had supposed Paul and Barnabas to be gods — Jupiter and Mercury, namely — and had driven the priests to sacrifice to them, the apostles, scarcely less troubled by that idol-madness of the people than they had been stirred by the divine power that had accompanied them, "tore their garments and rushed into the crowd, crying out and saying, Men, why do you do these things?"

XL. Since the crowd was entangled and caught up in a double error, both most pernicious — one, that Jupiter and Mercury were gods with power to work miraculous healings; the other, that Paul and Barnabas were that same Mercury and Jupiter in disguise — the apostles address both. First, indeed, to free themselves at once from this false belief, they cry out that they are men, subject to the same passions as themselves; then they teach that Jupiter and Mercury, and all that worship which the astonished crowd wished to pay them under those names, are τὰ μάταια ("vain things") — empty, fictitious, impious — but that they themselves proclaim that living God who made heaven and earth. Since it would have been easy for the crowd to object to them: "If there is such a God as you proclaim, and he alone, so that our deities have no place at all before him, how has it come about that we have never until now heard anything of him? And why has he taken no care to be proclaimed either to us or to our forefathers in past ages?" — in order to meet this deep-rooted prejudice of the whole world of that time, by which the cause of truth was everywhere condemned unheard, the apostles teach that this living God, according to that dominion which he has over all, allowed the nations in past ages — of which these Lystrans were a part — to walk in their own ways, that is, in the vanities of idolatry, and did not call them to the knowledge and true worship of himself. And thus they hint at the οἰκονομία ("dispensation") of the New Testament (which they also knew they must immediately contend for against the Jews), by which, the dividing wall having been broken down, and every distinction of nations, peoples, and families removed, God calls all men without distinction to repentance. But lest by this speech they should seem to have given the Lystrans occasion to excuse themselves for having thus far worshiped those idols, on the ground that this true God had not been revealed to them, and that they could not be obligated to worship one whom they were wholly ignorant of, they add that correction (ἐπανόρθωσις) by which they show that the Lystrans were entirely without excuse (ἀναπολόγητοι) in their idolatry, on account of a certain revelation of the true God granted to them through his works. For although (they say) it pleased him to allow the nations to walk in their own ways, and not to call them to repentance through his word, yet he always, to that extent, made himself manifest to them through the works of his providence, and by this bore such testimony to himself that it was not without grave sin and notable folly that they, and other nations, turned themselves to idols when he had thus revealed himself — especially since these very works by which he bore testimony to himself were of such a kind that all the good things of which the nations were made partakers proceeded from them.

XLI. Since, then, this is the scope and purpose of the apostolic discourse — namely, to show that God revealed himself through the works of providence to this extent: that in those times in which he allowed the nations to walk in their own ways, they betook themselves to vain idols, having abandoned him, without any cause and not without most grievous sin — let us see what these learned men attempt to extract from this in aid of their cause. They say, first, that "these proofs set before the Gentiles testify concerning God not only that he is wise and powerful, but also that he is supremely good." Granted, certainly; from whomever we receive any benefits, we reckon him good and beneficent; from whom we receive all things, supremely good. Nor have we ever said that all the Gentiles were so utterly brutish as not to acknowledge the supreme giver of benefits as good. The orator testifies to the contrary: "You, O Capitoline," he says, "whom the Roman people, because of your benefits, have named the Best" — Pro Domo Sua, 57.

XLII. But, they say, these proofs show that God is good even toward sinners; and let this too be granted. For it is not to this point to inquire how far the Gentiles acknowledged themselves to be sinners against God. Since the apostle himself would not have known sin, "had not the law said, You shall not covet," Romans 7:7, it is certain that those destitute of that law labored under a fairly gross ignorance of the nature of sin. But let us grant that the Gentiles knew themselves to be sinners; let us grant that God was good toward them, convicted of sin — what, then, seems further to follow? Namely, that God is good, mild, and merciful toward sinners; for Christ affirms that this goodness toward sinners is mercy, Luke 6:35-36: for after saying, "The Most High is kind to the unthankful and the evil," he immediately adds, "Be merciful, therefore, as your Father is merciful." Therefore God is merciful toward sinners — who denies it? Even toward the ungrateful — who will deny it? But even toward those who will perish — why not? Since we know that he "endures with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction," Romans 9:22. For although he is provoked by them daily, he does not immediately consign them to Tartarus (ταρταροῖ), but heaps upon them many benefits also, to be repaid at an appointed time, Hosea 2:9. This mercy, however — this kindness of God — is spoken of broadly and improperly, taken for any disposition to do good whatsoever; thus he is called merciful not only toward men, but toward all his works — the sheep, and the oxen, and the rest of the beasts of the field, Psalm 145:9, 15-16. But that this mercy or kindness, exercising itself in earthly or worldly (βιωτικοῖς) things — which are, for the most part, occasions and enticements to sin — is the foundation of true and saving repentance, the apostles neither say, nor is it true, nor can it be proved from their words by any legitimate consequence. Of that special mercy from which the remission of sins flows, not a single word is ever spoken in the whole of Scripture where the condition of those destitute of the word of God is set forth; for that mercy is in Christ alone. But our opponents (οἱ ἐξ ἐναντίας) deny that Christ is revealed through the works of providence.

XLIII. Since, then, it is only that mercy which Jesus Christ set forth from the bosom of the Father that is the foundation of saving faith and repentance, we can grant, without the slightest prejudice to our cause, that some knowledge of that other mercy was set forth through the works of providence; indeed, since we have no cause but the truth alone, we grant it most willingly. As for what may be added concerning that apostolic qualification, "Yet he did not leave himself without witness" — all of this can be granted in a sound sense; for God did not allow the nations to walk in their own ways in such a way that he cast off all care and rule over them. Indeed, the apostles say, he always bore such witness to himself through his works that it was in no way free for the nations to repudiate the knowledge of him and give themselves over to idols.

XLIV. From this, however, they proceed thus: "What Paul said — that God had formerly allowed the nations to walk in their own ways — signifies nothing else but this one thing: that God had not, until then, by the preaching of any prophet or apostle, intervened against the corruption of the nations; that he had not honored the nations with any vocal testimony concerning himself and his affairs, with which honor he had favored the one nation of the Jews." But this one thing is a great matter. All the external saving means of repentance and salvation are contained uniquely in that one thing with which God did not favor the nations, Psalm 19:4, 9-11; 147:19-20. That any saving knowledge of God, any call to repentance, or saving faith, could be had from any other source than that one means, has not yet been proved. But they proceed: "The following words," they say, "signify altogether that God always bore witness among those very nations, by the daily proofs of nature and providence themselves, of what men ought to think concerning him, and by what manner they ought both to worship his deity and to order the rest of their life. By the works of nature, the works of creation are meant." What these could teach sinners concerning God that would lead them to repentance — since they teach, and can teach, nothing other than what was fit to teach in the state of integrity — has not yet been established; let us therefore pass over this in the present dispute. All hope is placed in the works of providence. We admit that these taught the nations what they ought to think concerning God, so far as God revealed himself to them through them. But by what manner they might have learned, from these same teachers, to worship his deity and order the rest of their life — how will this be proved? Six hundred things of this sort can be said gratuitously. Moreover, even these statements are made too loosely. Whoever wishes to set forth that manner of worshiping God and ordering one's life by which the nations could have approached God savingly will be doing a worthwhile work. That God exists; that he is the creator, ruler, powerful, wise, and munificent giver of temporal benefits of all things — and therefore that idols are vain, and all worship of them foolish, inept, and insane — the apostles prove by testimony drawn from these works of God. But concerning the true worship of God, and the right ordering of life, there is, among them, deep silence. Some add, "since the nations passed by all these warnings with a deaf ear, and cast off, with horrible ingratitude, all worship and care of their creator and ruler, both good and great," the apostle signifies, they say, "that God now, more sharply and with a clearer voice, recalls them from empty and pestilent institutions by the ministry of his apostles." But the apostles are so far from instituting any comparison between that calling which comes through the gospel and that other calling through the works of providence, that they are utterly silent about the gospel and all its doctrine. Nor indeed is the preaching of the gospel to be so reduced to the same order as those proofs which God sets before men from the works of nature, that it should be called merely a sharper calling, made with a clearer voice, of the same kind as the other. For that calling which comes through the revelation of that mystery which was hidden from ages and generations, and by which God made known what are the riches of that glorious mystery, is immeasurably distant from that testimony which he bore to himself, as the ruler and munificent giver of all things, through the works of providence. That other calling is rightly said to be sharper, and made with a clearer voice, which is indeed of the same kind and nature as the first, but differs from it only in degree, or in the manner of its proposal. But since the whole foundation of the evangelical calling is laid in the manifestation of God the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit, and almost its whole force lies in the declaration of the remission, reconciliation, and forgiveness of sins through the blood of the mediator, the God-man (Θεάνθρωπος), and the efficacious dispensation of the Spirit — all of which, and other things of this kind that make up that calling, were utterly hidden in the bosom of God from the ages and generations in which he allowed men, as being destitute of his word, to walk in their own ways — it is in no sense to be equated with the proofs set before men through the works of providence, or placed in the same series with them. And I somewhat marvel that men who know what it is to repent unto salvation, and what it is to believe in God, can speak in this way.

XLV. They continue, and in concluding this argument finish it thus: "Since, then, that testimony of God which sounds everywhere throughout the earth contains what pertains to recalling the nations from their ways, and leading them from idolatry to the worship of the one true God, and from crimes and wickedness to justice and honesty — it is altogether necessary that by that testimony of God there was also made manifest, to some extent, his placability and mildness toward sinful men, without which it cannot come about that a sinful man should be brought to true repentance and the true worship of God." But this speech is guilty of various non-sequiturs (ἀνακολουθησίᾳ, "incoherence"). For concerning the recalling of the nations from their ways, by that testimony of God sounding everywhere throughout the earth, there is no mention at all in the apostles; indeed, they testify that God permitted them to walk in those ways. The apostle indicates clearly enough at this point — and teaches openly elsewhere, Acts 17:18; Ephesians 1:10, 3:9-11 — that the nations could be recalled from those ways only through the gospel. It is one thing that God did not leave himself without witness (ἀμάρτυρος) among the nations; another, that he recalled them from idolatry to his true worship. Concerning the true worship of the true God, in that widely-sounding testimony, there is not a word, because there is nothing of Christ, in whom alone we can approach God, Ephesians 2:12-15, 18. Further, whence does it appear that God cannot bear such testimony to himself, rendering the idolaters inexcusable, unless he should also make manifest his placability?

XLVI. For what has this placability to do with convicting idolaters of error, madness, and crime? "But because God bestows all good things on sinners, it appears that he is placable, and that he shows himself placable to them through these good things." Since all these good things are understood in one category only, namely worldly (βιωτικῶν) or temporal things, we deny this proposition; God often bestows these good things on those whom he hates, toward whom he is disposed with an unchangeable purpose to punish, whom he has devoted to destruction, whom he has pronounced to be destroyed and tormented with eternal punishments, Psalm 73:4-12, 18-20. Those things, moreover, from which no one can discern love or hatred, cannot reveal that God is placable, Ecclesiastes 9:1-2. When God heaps benefits upon wicked men, in order to fatten them with his own fat, so to speak, and make them plump for the day of slaughter, is he to be reckoned as bestowing these things with the intent of showing that he is placable? That God certainly knew that the nations, destitute of the word, would make the worst use of these temporal benefits, and could not use them rightly to his glory, is admitted. He even makes these benefits witnesses of his patience and wisdom, Job 38:25-26. And he very often uses their accumulation to blind men in their sins. How, then, will these show him to be placable — especially since there are mingled with their administration countless certain signs of wrath and of the divine righteousness (δικαιώματος) against sinners? But let us grant — what the apostle does not affirm, and what cannot be drawn from his words by any legitimate consequence — namely, that the nations could gather from the works of God some placability of his toward sinners; are we therefore to think that they were called to true repentance? For since these same nations acknowledged his right — namely, that those who had sinned deserved death — and could not understand whether any way were possible of actually appeasing and reconciling him, on account of that right of his, which they suspected him to be only to some extent placable in view of, how, I ask, are they to be thought to have been called back to true repentance by such knowledge? Indeed, it is certain that saving repentance cannot exist without faith, since it is pleasing to God, which cannot happen without faith, Hebrews 11:6. But faith in God can exist only through Christ — I mean that kind of faith which is the foundation and companion of saving repentance. But the works of providence do not reveal Christ. Nor is God revealed in Christ as placable, but as placated, and reconciling the world to himself, 2 Corinthians 5:19. There is, therefore, no placability; nor, if there were, could it be revealed through the works of providence; nor, if it were revealed, would it be a foundation for any sinner's faith or repentance.

XLVII. Certain nations did indeed imagine some of their idols to be placable. And why should they not readily imagine as favorable and accessible to themselves that deity which they themselves had made? For since man had of his own accord cast away that image of himself in which the true God had created him, and had thereby cut off every point of communion with that true God, his creator, he himself attempted to fabricate, and as it were create, new fictitious gods, in that corrupted image into which he had been constituted by his apostasy from the true God; and, wrapped up in his own vices, as he indulged himself in them, he daily fashioned for himself a deity formed to his own likeness, and more agreeable to himself. Hence there was nothing that he experienced in his own nature which he did not immediately suppose to hold a place also in those gods whom he had fashioned for himself as he pleased. Hence he imagined them irascible, placable, easy-going, or gloomy, according to each man's own temperament and disposition. But what has all this to do with our God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ — "whom no one has seen; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him"?

XLVIII. There remains still one argument, which I have deliberately reserved for this last place because, had I not found that it pleased certain learned men — carried away, I fear, by party zeal — I should have judged it a puerile sophism, unworthy of any place in this cause. It is wrung from the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, verses 21-22. "Since," say some, "men did not use τῷ γνωστῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ ("that which is known of God") as they ought to have, they were made inexcusable" — that is, since they defiled themselves with the crime of idolatry, of which the apostle treats in that passage, although God had made manifest to them his eternal power and truth through the works of creation. What then? "If they had used it well, they would not have been inexcusable; if they had not been inexcusable, they would have been excusable; if they had been excusable, they would have been excused." Response: If it had indeed been equally easy for men destitute of the word to use τῷ γνωστῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ well as to use it badly, this reasoning would have some plausibility. But this is assumed gratuitously, and is a begging of the question (ἐν ἀρχῇ). Yet this whole argument depends on it. Because it is most certain that men can use, and did in fact use, that which is known of God badly, as the apostle shows, it is therefore supposed — but most falsely — that they could have used it rightly.

XLIX. Furthermore, if they had used it rightly — in that very kind of use of which the apostle speaks — to what extent would they have been excused? Would it have been so far as to be saved? But concerning their salvation, the apostle says nothing at all; indeed, he deliberately proves that no one could ever obtain salvation by the use of those means granted to the Gentiles, apart from the saving grace of God in Christ. They could, indeed, have abstained from the most foul crime of idolatry to such an extent that it could not justly have been charged against them in the manner in which the apostle here charges it. Of this enthymeme, then — "because they did not use τῷ γνωστῷ τοῦ Θεοῦ well, they were made inexcusable; therefore, if they had used it well, they would have been excused" — if the consequence is reckoned legitimate (which nevertheless is most false, since the reason is not the same for the bad and the right use of the means of salvation, or of saving knowledge of God), the meaning is no other than that "they would not have defiled themselves with the crime of idolatry"; for these words, "excusable" and "excused," must necessarily be restricted to the subject matter which the apostle is treating — which is true throughout. But they continue their argument: "They would not have been excused," they say, "unless they had fled for refuge to the mercy of God; but they would not have fled to him unless that manifestation, under which they lived, taught that refuge should be sought there." Response: They would have been "excused" only to the extent that the apostle is dealing with them at that point, even though they had not fled to the divine mercy. That they could have used that "known thing" further than this remains to be proved.

L. And these may suffice as a sample, at least so that we may see of what kind are the arguments that learned men everywhere employ in this cause. Both the design of the present work, and the recently published labors of others on this very subject, stand in the way of pursuing this further.

On Natural Theology, Part Three: Concerning Its Total Corruption, by Which It Became Apostate

Chapter 7

The uselessness (ἀνωφέλεια) of natural theology in the state of sin — the means of its total corruption — the fatal superstition substituted in its place — what the knowledge of God was like among the nations destitute of the word — the corruption of theology through philosophy — the origin of philosophy — the two parts of natural theology — the first utterly corrupted through metaphysics and ethics — the origin, abuse, use, and restoration of ethics, and likewise of metaphysics — then of astronomy and natural philosophy — by which natural theology was corrupted.

I. Since such was the condition of natural theology, vitiated by sin and considered in itself, that nothing good in a spiritual sense could ever be expected from it, let us see further how, through the cunning of the devil and the vanity of the human mind, it was further corrupted — intending to treat, in the next place, of the new theology, and of those whom God, by his own power, enrolled as his peculiar people. Here we have determined to treat only the chief heads of the matter, reserving the investigation of the origin and progress of idolatry for another place. Everyone knows that natural theology was corrupted, and all but lost among the greater part of mortals, and that in its place, from the earliest records and memory of mankind, a fatal superstition was substituted. By what way, and by what means, that fatal and universal transformation was introduced into the world, we shall now briefly relate.

II. We have shown and proved that some knowledge of God flourished among the nations destitute of the light of the divine word, from that twofold source of which we spoke — namely, the internal natural light, and that revelation of God made through his works. That the actual outcome corresponded to these principles has long since been made plain, from the testimonies gathered from every quarter in the writings of learned men among them — Josephus, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius, Theophilus of Alexandria, Chrysostom, Eusebius, Theodoret, Tertullian, Lactantius, Arnobius, Augustine, and others among the ancients. Thomas, Eugubinus, Raymond Sebond, Louis Vives, Mornay, Charron, Fotherby, Vossius, Stuckius, Giraldi of Ferrara, Grotius, and writers of every kind in later ages, have shown the same. The still-extant works of Orpheus, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Plutarch, Epictetus, Arrian, Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Philostratus, and others prove the same thing clearly. The monuments and histories of all ages, peoples, and nations agree. For let us grant that the common people (τοὺς πολλούς) were always so hedged about with a veil of ignorance and darkness that they never even thought about the supreme deity, or the obedience owed to him according to right reason; and let it be granted that the elegant and refined (οἱ χαρίεντες) were so empty of divine things that they held them in contempt — yet the case is different with the wise (σοφῶν) and the contemplative (θεωρητικῶν), who took care to investigate the natures of things a little more deeply, and to advance the common notions (κοινὰς ἐννοίας). It is well known that these men, while the first effort of struggling nature was still under way, set forth much, splendidly and elegantly, concerning God and his worship, the obedience owed to him, and the ultimate end and happiness of men. Let us see, then, by what means this theology was utterly corrupted, until it ceased in a horrible and total apostasy from God, in the monstrous Lernaean hydra of idolatry and the foulest vanities. This evil of defection and human misery seems to have flowed from a twofold source. For men, left to themselves and to their own ways, either strove to advance the remnants of natural theology, and by that very effort, through their native blindness, corrupted them the more; or else they set out deliberately to corrupt them still further. That both attempts succeeded, perniciously enough, is evident from the outcome. The first attempt, however, was the nobler, and more worthy of creatures endowed with reason. We shall therefore treat of it first.

III. We have proved that sinful men, destitute of all supernatural revelation, retain some natural power of knowing God, spontaneously exercising itself in adults. We have also ascribed to them earlier a general knowledge, distinguishing the honorable from the base in relation to God and his government, and a decisive judgment upon it, of which they could not be entirely deprived without the destruction of the practical intellect. But from the perpetual unrest and fluctuation of conscience by which they were oppressed, and which those common notions (κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι) themselves produced, they easily perceived that this knowledge, or theology, was not sufficient for them to attain their ultimate end. Instructed, then, by the benefit of that revelation of the eternal power and divinity of God through the works of creation and providence, which we have shown was also left to them, they strove with all their might to advance these innate principles. That they were themselves, for the most part, ignorant of what they were doing in this is evident from the outcome. Equipped with the means of the operations of the intellect, they attempted, as it were by groping, to prove what could be produced from them. And this is the origin of philosophy. Philosophy is, I say, the effect — and as it were the offshoot — of that remaining theology which the first man possessed, connatural to him in the state of unimpaired nature, amplified by the aforesaid revelation through the works of God. "To seek God by feeling about for him, who is not far from each one of us," to search out the "testimonies" in his works, of which he did not leave himself without witness, and to weigh in the mind the natures of all things, by which the "invisible things" of God might be perceived — with the knowledge of all of which the first man was filled, as necessary for the worship of God the creator — this, in short, is to philosophize. In this way those who are called the σοφοί ("wise men") of earlier ages strove to elucidate and advance these aforementioned principles, so that by them the mind of man might rise up to the origin and primeval state of those principles.

IV. It is certain that philosophy had no other origin, and no other end, than this. The Greeks, as though they had been the first to cultivate it, have always boasted of it most grandly — but without doubt, foolishly. Diogenes Laertius, in the proem of his work, mocks those who dared to say that τὸ τῆς φιλοσοφίας ἔργον ἀπὸ βαρβάρων ἄρξαι ("the work of philosophy began among the barbarians"): Λανθάνουσι αὐτοὺς τὰ τῶν Ἑλλήνων κατορθώματα, ἀφ' ὧν μὴ ὅτιγε φιλοσοφία, ἀλλὰ καὶ γένος ἀνθρώπων ἦρξε, βαρβάροις προσάπτοντες — that is, "These men, indeed, through their own ignorance, attach to the barbarians the achievements of the Greeks, from whom not only philosophy but the human race itself took its beginning." Equally, without doubt, this too is false.

V. Tatian, Clement, Theophilus, Eusebius, and others prove the contrary more clearly than light itself. Manifest traces of the theft are even still extant. For they took over everything from the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Indians, Magi, Syrians, and Jews. Yet it cannot be denied that the ancient Greeks greatly advanced the study of philosophy devised by others. What they had received by report, what they had filched from the records of the East, what they had learned from living teachers on long journeys undertaken for that very purpose, and what they themselves, guided and accompanied by nature, had observed as common notions (κοινὰς ἐννοίας) concerning God and his works, and concerning the base and the honorable — many of them labored to hawk about, first by word of mouth, under the title of "wisdom," and then in writings marked with the name of "philosophy." But I know not what Iliad of evils accompanied the effort of these men from its very cradle. For the philosophers themselves, as they wished to be called, were for the most part rascals of notorious licentiousness — especially so servilely and openly desirous of empty glory, and such ostentatious show-offs, that they were themselves a laughingstock and a byword to the common people.

VI. "They ceased to be honest men when they became learned," says Seneca. And by Timon they are all, to a man, called:

Κενεῆς οἰήσεως ἔμπλεοι ἀσκοί ("Wineskins full of empty conceit," or of arrogant self-esteem).

And Euripides:

Μισῶ σοφιστὴν ὅστις οὐδ' αὑτῶ σοφός ("I hate the sophist who is not wise even for himself") — Fragment of an unknown play.

Scarcely one out of many gave, in the whole of his life, any example of true wisdom. In agreement with this is that saying of Anaxippus the comic poet, in Athenaeus.

VII. Foolishly, then, and with arrogance and insolence toward God, does Epictetus boast concerning these slaves of vainglory (κενοδοξίας), saying, Φιλοσόφου στάσις καὶ χαρακτὴρ πᾶσαν ὠφέλειαν καὶ βλάβην ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ προσδοκᾶν — "The state and defining mark of the philosopher is to expect all benefit and harm from himself." As if he would have every philosopher be a god! Even the Brahmins among the Indians openly boasted that they were gods. When Apollonius asked what opinion they held of themselves, their chief, Iarchas, replied that "they thought themselves to be gods." But in vain. For in what place and estimation they ought to be, and were, more rightly judged Amithocrates, king of the Indians, who — as Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, book 14, testifies — requested by letter from King Antiochus that sweet wine, dried figs, and a sophist be sent to him, all to be bought with his own money.

VIII. It is shameful to relate what the same Athenaeus records concerning Plato himself, book 11 — let them expect all things from themselves, if they please, while others expect nothing from them. But whatever sort of men they were, it is evident from the outcome that they either lost or corrupted the true use and end of the common notions concerning God, and concerning the true and the honorable. That these should be the rule and standard of human life, with respect to the obedience owed to God and the natural worship of him — that these should be the means of obtaining a blessed condition in the enjoyment of God himself — does not appear ever to have entered their minds. Hence, from that obscure and thin report or knowledge which they retained concerning the immortal state, little or no efficacy flowed toward ordering life according to right reason. These, then, were the men by whom all the remnants of natural wisdom were turned into an empty sophistry. The attempt of certain Platonists, after the preaching of the Christian religion, to restore philosophy to its former place — as we shall see hereafter — is another matter.

IX. Philosophy, then, from its very beginning (ἀπ' ἀρχῆς), had no other end than the restoration of that primeval theology which had collapsed and been lost through the entrance of sin. And by this way the human race set about restoring theology.

X. It has been shown above that this primeval theology had two parts: the natural knowledge of God, and of his will concerning the obedience and worship owed to him in that original state of things; and the knowledge of the works of God, directing and spurring on theologians to the right worship of God, the supreme creator of all things. These two made up that theology.

XI. Since, then, philosophy raised itself up out of the fallen ruins of theology, for the same ends which that theology had set before itself, it strives to perform, on behalf of sinful men, a vicarious service — or else it does nothing at all. For, first, the contemplative men (θεωρητικοί) who first labored to erect and polish it thought that this task was given to them: to foster, draw out, and stir up the common notions and preconceptions (προλήψεις) concerning God and his will, together with the innate dictate concerning the differing accounts of good and evil, so that, under their guidance, men might, if possible, enjoy God.

XII. That the first attempt of those who philosophized was of this kind, among nations destitute of divine revelation, and directed to that end we have mentioned, appears not only from the nature of the case, but from every trace of their design and purpose that occurs anywhere. All that ancient wisdom which Pythagoras and others sought out through Egypt and the eastern regions of the world consisted in the method of instituting religious rites and in the ceremonies of divine worship. Hence its priests were held to be its foremost teachers. So, when Telesinus asked him what his wisdom or philosophy was, Apollonius — a follower of ancient wisdom — answered, as Philostratus records, book 4, chapter 13: θειασμός, καὶ ὡς ἄν τις εὔχοιτο καὶ θύοι ("that which proceeds from divine inspiration, and teaches in what way one ought to pray to the gods and to sacrifice to them"). Philosophers who were not priests were first produced by Greece, after that new corruption of philosophy which we shall soon treat. I confess that this whole philosophy savored of idolatrous superstition; yet it retained certain obscure images and traces of the truth.

XIII. This noble endeavor, however, did not meet with the outcome it deserved. By its power and under its auspices natural theology was not restored, but rather corrupted the more. Whatever philosophy survives anywhere, drawn from the monuments of the most ancient writers, bears witness to this. For the innate vanity of the human mind led the natural light — or what remains of it — astray in manifold ways in its search for truth, until, plunged into the shoals and swamps of empty curiosities, endless wrangling, and useless speculations, it was all but extinguished.

XIV. For after certain sharp-witted men of subtle genius, setting aside all consideration of this philosophy's primary end, chose to bind universal knowledge of things and the rational ground of the obedience owed to the Godhead artificially to certain methods of teaching, and to confine it rather within the snares, fetters, and manacles of particular sciences or τέχναι ("arts, crafts"), and to load it down with chains of empty notions, subtle terms, and arbitrary significations — art thus swiftly twisting nature away from its original design — this knowledge gradually degenerated into a kind of ethics, or methodical doctrine of virtues and vices, and into metaphysics. A few words must be said about each.

XV. Now since both these disciplines — ethics, which Cicero calls that part of philosophy pertaining to morals, and metaphysics, which some call natural theology (though it presents a much fainter shadow of it than ethics does) — have been shaped to the pattern of Aristotle's teaching, and have gained such dominion everywhere over the judgment of learned men that they have not only occupied a conspicuous place in Christian schools for some centuries now, but have thoroughly intermingled themselves with the theology publicly taught in them, this subject must be approached by me only gently, and almost in "silken words" (ῥήμασι βυσσίνοις). For I have no wish to stir up a swarm of learned hornets, or to rouse against myself fiery, perpetual disputants; I have long since grown weary of controversies of every kind, and I fear above all lest I should run into those who have such a ready stock of wit that they can produce fifty or a hundred arguments (most of them worthless) on any subject at any hour, and are turned almost wholly into syllogisms. And theirs is an irritable tribe. Yet nothing, so far as I know, prevents me from thinking myself free to state briefly my own view of those arts, and of the place they hold in the schools. I shall therefore submit ethics first, and then metaphysics, to examination.

XVI. Ethics is the science of morals. It was once a part of natural theology — that part, namely, which prescribed the manner of living to God according to the rule of the law of creation, and the mode and standard of rendering one's duties toward him and toward others. It has been shown that remnants of this knowledge clung to the human mind even after the entrance of sin. To rouse these remnants, bring them forward, elucidate them by reasoning, and distribute them into various classes was the labor and task of the philosophers in ethics. Aristotle — that supreme and admirable craftsman at compiling general notions into a systematic body — brought together, collected, and (with the dexterity of genius that was his) amplified what had been brought forward, and reduced it into a disciplined science. But since he himself, and others who preceded him in that work, were utterly ignorant of the true God and of the reverence owed to him, they removed from its place the whole rational faculty that distinguishes the honorable from the base, which consisted in the remnants of natural theology, and twisted it to a purpose quite different from that for which God originally instituted it. For what philosopher ever undertook to treat or teach the doctrine of virtue and vice, of the base and the honorable, for the purpose that it should be the rule of living to God, or the means by which men might at last enjoy him eternally in a blessed condition? Indeed, that the knowledge of virtue and of moral duties should hold exactly the place, value, and rank it did — so as to have the same end in theology which it had in the state of unfallen nature — was both impossible, and was itself denied by God in the compact of the new covenant. Since, then, this doctrine concerning morals, or ethics, as cultivated by Aristotle, seems at length to have been received back into the church as if by a kind of postliminium (right of return), let us consider briefly what place it ought to hold, or what use or end we may assign to it.

XVII. 1. We have already shown that the end for which this teaching — which in the state of unfallen nature was ἐνδιάθετος ("inborn, indwelling") — was appointed was none other than to be the directing principle of men's minds in the worship and obedience owed to God, so that, walking before him according to the law of creation, they might at last live blessedly with him. If anyone is willing to acknowledge that man was made for the glory of God, and capable of moral dependence upon him, he will not, I think, deny that this was the end of the knowledge of right and wrong. But which of the philosophers can we suppose ever had this in mind? Indeed, what Christian either ought, or has dared, to teach ethics to this end? For would this not be to reduce wretched sinners once more under the dominion of the covenant of nature, where they must of necessity perish eternally? Therefore:

XVIII. 2. Let us grant that those who either learn or teach Aristotelian ethics do not intend that end; well then, tell me, what other end do they have in view? The end of moral science can be nothing but practice. But the end of the practice of moral duties can be nothing but the glory of God, and our own enjoyment of him. Let that, then, be the end of ethics; what follows? Nothing but that we wretched little men should, by its help and benefit, be reduced once more under the law of creation, as was said before. But we are greatly mistaken; another end will be offered — namely, that, instructed by this teaching, we may lead a political life rightly and usefully here in the midst of the human race. Is that so, indeed? But who is invested with the authority to pervert, at his own command, to another end a doctrine which God instituted for one end alone? Besides, there is no other end here either; for no one ought to lead a pious, sober, and useful life among men except so as thereby to obey God, and live to him. Insofar, then, as this ethics has departed from theology and is preparing its return into the church, it belongs to the covenant of works.

XIX. 3. But indeed, what need is there, after all, of this — whether theology or philosophy? No Christian will deny that a true, solid, sincere knowledge of virtue, of vice, of the base and the honorable, and of all moral duties, is revealed and delivered more plainly and more fully in the sacred Scriptures than is contained in all the writings of all the philosophers, or even in their archetype — the remnants, that is, of the ἐνδιάθετος ("inborn") theology. I mean the things themselves: for the ἀκρίβεια ("precision") of notions, and the grasp of the harmony of terms by which knowledge of things is delivered τεχνικῶς ("technically, artfully"), count for nothing with me — except insofar as I judge they ought to be reckoned among the greatest impediments to true wisdom. One may see, almost daily, countless men who, though they have all the definitions, divisions, distinctions, terms, and notions by which some science is taught — indeed the whole system of a doctrine — at their fingertips, so that they never triumph more earnestly than when a dispute is reached, are nevertheless in reality untutored in the things themselves, and are learnedly stupid. They are learned, indeed, in the manner in which Philostratus relates that Euxenus, the teacher of Apollonius, was instructed in the Pythagorean philosophy: Τὰς Πυθαγόρου δόξας ἐγίνωσκεν, ὥσπερ οἱ ὄρνιθες μανθάνουσι παρὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων· τὸ γὰρ χαῖρε, καὶ τὸ εὖ πράττε, καὶ Ζεὺς ἵλεως, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα οἱ ὄρνιθες εὔχονται οὔτε εἰδότες ὅ τι λέγουσιν, οὔτε διακείμενοι πρὸς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, ἀλλὰ ἐῤῥυθμισμένοι τὴν γλώτταν ("He knew the opinions of Pythagoras just as birds, sometimes taught by men, speak human words: for they utter now and then such words as 'hail,' 'fare well,' and 'Jupiter be gracious,' and the like, neither knowing what they say, nor speaking them in a manner fitted to men, but merely moving their tongue to a measured rhythm"). And indeed very many seem to be wise from their training in the sciences in no other way. Nowhere does this vanity of the human mind appear more than when it is occupied with this moral science. The unjust, the rapacious, the drunken, the wrathful, the cowardly — all are imbued, or may be imbued, with this science; for it is not virtue but the shadow of virtue, not duties but the mask of moral duties, that fill both its pages. I would dare to say that not one true virtue is truly and certainly taught in all the Aristotelian books to Nicomachus; nor will anyone ever, from their teaching, become just, good, or truly σπουδαῖος ("earnest, virtuous"), but only a hypocrite wearing a mask.

XX. 4. I shall therefore say what the matter really is. God has placed the whole doctrine of duties, of virtue, and of the observance of right reason, under the covenant of grace, in another place and another order than that in which it was arranged under the law of nature. But those natural notions from which ethics was born and emerged regard only that first, now-abolished order described above. There is now no virtue except that which is graciously granted to believers by the power of the new covenant. No moral act is good and profitable to the one who performs it unless it proceeds from a new principle, or spiritual habit, graciously infused into the heart. And the reason is that God has made all moral duties, of whatever kind, and all abstinence from vice, a part of the obedience which he requires under the new covenant. Nor are virtues to be taught seriously in any other way (the school is but a game) if we wish to be Christians. That anyone should be instructed in the knowledge of the general nature of virtue without being instructed at the same time in the knowledge of supernatural grace and of its relation to Christ the mediator; or that anyone should be stirred up to elicit acts of virtue without being taught at the same time whence he must expect strength to perform them — this I judge truly impious. Moral duties are to be performed; acts of virtue are to be exercised; we must be just, sober, temperate, brave; but only under the aspect of the obedience which God demands of us in the covenant of grace. The nature of virtue is to be taught, all moral duties are to be explained, their practice is to be constantly urged, the knowledge of sin and the hatred of vice are to be earnestly inculcated — but that all these should have regard to Christ the mediator, to the Holy Spirit, to the covenant of grace, and should be the obedience owed to God, must on no account be omitted. But whoever, in expounding that doctrine of morals which now holds sway in the schools, were to insert any mention of these or similar things, would be thought absurd. What darkness, what wavering, what uncertainty, what confusion of things and notions, a doctrine so at odds with itself on the very same subject and the very same matters can, and habitually does, generate in men's minds, anyone may readily conjecture.

XXI. 5. Further, the teaching of this moral philosophy — especially as it now for the most part prevails everywhere, shaped by its author's genius and method — is in many respects false, corrupt, uncertain, wholly useless, indeed even pernicious. For: (1) It confines the end of virtue within the limits of this earthly life, which is nothing other than to destroy the whole nature of virtue, indeed to root out virtue itself, and to bind all its devotees to the horror and despair of the great Brutus, who cried out, Ὦ τλήμων ἀρετὴ, ὡς σὺ μηδὲν ἄλλο εἶ πλὴν ὄνομα ("O wretched virtue, thou art nothing but a name!"). (2) It teaches that a sufficiency of moral strength, for the whole exercise of virtue necessary to attain its proper end, lies within every man's own power — an opinion that contains an open denial of the whole gospel. (3) It teaches man to trust in himself, and to expect all blessedness from himself, which is also the very height of Epictetus's wisdom, and the utmost contempt of God. (4) It asserts that virtue is a certain mean between extremes, than which nothing more inept can be conceived. (5) It proposes and acknowledges no fixed, stable, universal rule of virtue: virtue is whatever pleases the majority, whatever pleases the wise, whatever most appeals to those who guess uncertainly. (6) It discharges moral duties with no regard whatsoever to grace, justice, or divine providence. (7) It denies that friendship can exist between God and men. (8) It knows nothing of eternal reward and punishment.

XXII. But I have no wish to plunge myself into the midst of the controversies of learned men; I will only add this: if this moral philosophy should still seem to good and learned men worth retaining in its place — though for my own part I cannot but wish it banished beyond the bounds of the church — then I earnestly desire that two evils in particular be carefully guarded against: the one, that the minds of the young not be preoccupied with prejudices against purity, simplicity, and indeed the whole mystery of the gospel — how this can be avoided, when they are handed over to be shaped by this teaching, I confess I do not know; the other, that the principles on which it rests not gradually creep into the theology of the schools — unless these words are thought to come too late.

XXIII. For my own part, I look with favor upon the efforts of those who have busied themselves with forging new hypotheses in this moral science. For it must be granted that they have given occasion to those enslaved to Peripatetic philosophy to inquire further into the nature of these matters. Whether they have themselves attained to the truth, let others judge. Nor indeed should those who reject an opinion, plainly set before the human understanding, be said to have thereby embraced it the more, merely because of the obscure use of one or two little words in Aristotle. A certain learned man, in a book he published on duties, contends that the end of moral philosophy is that man should live in tranquillity and joy of mind, without the stings of conscience. But we know — and that learned man himself knows — that such a state of mind can by no means be attained through the performance of duties, however diligent. For we are sinners, and can become partakers of no true tranquillity or joy except through the blood of Christ. Since the entrance of sin, no other way to peace or tranquillity has been set before us. Furthermore, to attain this end, the same learned man bids each man diligently observe the laws and dictates of his own nature. But all Christians know that this means is by no means sufficient to reach that end; we agree with the learned man that there is indeed some law of nature. But since human nature itself has been so thoroughly corrupted and vitiated by sin that it is unable either to understand its own fault or to correct it, we must of necessity deny that a law which holds only within it is fit for the use that is claimed for it.

XXIV. There are very few things I wish to add separately about metaphysics. Everything we have said about the origin and corruption of ethics applies equally to it; there is no need to repeat it. This science I judge to be wholly useless in human life — indeed harmful. For if one first removes what properly and necessarily belongs to logic on the one hand, and what belongs to theology on the other, what remains will be nothing but a laborious and useless jumble of terms, notions, words, and abstractions, which will never make any man better, more learned, wiser, or more fit for his duty toward God or toward others. Let those who seem most exercised in it consult the closets of their own hearts, and say honestly whether any piety, honesty, wisdom, prudence, or any true learning has ever come to them by its help and benefit. What need, then, is there to further afflict wretched little men — who daily complain that life is short and art is long — with this thorny jumble of useless and tangled notions, which, if they wish to be wise, ought most speedily to be consigned to oblivion?

XXV. Furthermore, the mixture of this science with supernatural theology — at the contemplation of which Scotus once exclaimed that "the doctors of theology have mixed philosophy with theology to the greatest profit" — has all but brought ruin upon evangelical truth. Spiritual things do not take kindly to the fetters and chains of metaphysical notions and terms; and the liberty and breadth of that spiritual understanding which God freely gives us for the right understanding of the mystery of the gospel likewise perishes, while it is ensnared in the nets of this secular wisdom (for such it is, if it deserves to be called wisdom at all). The noble, sublime, spiritual, heavenly evangelical truth, full of a certain divine savor — once bound to the rules of this science and delivered up in the words it teaches — is rendered sterile, dry, thorny, meager, scrawny, and merely philosophical, and is cast down from its heavenly beauty and spiritual sweetness. The mystery of the gospel, and that teaching which is according to godliness, has in itself something too high, too great, too divine, to be confined within the bars of human wisdom. Were I therefore wishing to perpetuate theological quarrels, and to lead men's souls away from the simplicity of the gospel, I would not hesitate to recommend this as a cause, matter, and instrument for such wrangling to students. What Prudentius once sang of certain ancient philosophers in his Apotheosis fits no less aptly those countless theologians puffed up with this vain wisdom:

XXVI. But we must return to our path. We have traced the origin, progress, and abuse of ethics and metaphysics. Contemplative men indeed set out to use the remnants of ἐνδιάθετος theology for their original end, and accordingly to rouse, examine, and advance them. From this flowed all the teaching of the nations concerning vices and virtues, and their contemplations concerning the nature and perfections of God. But men trained in sophistry and sharp-witted, forgetting the origin, end, and aim of these contemplations, produced those arts which we cultivate under those names; and these are in themselves indeed a kind of mask of wisdom, but when mixed with supernatural theology, pernicious.

XXVII. Furthermore, since the works of God make manifest his τὸ γνωστόν ("that which may be known"), sinners sought, by diligently and accurately examining their natures, to find by groping after him the Lord and Creator of them all. This was the second part of natural theology. To cultivate this too, human ingenuity — laboring under its native defect — made its attempt. To seek God himself from the works of both creation and providence was the inward impulse that perpetually drove them on. But the matter fell out the same way. For as the vanity of mind under which they labored throughout gained strength in natural philosophy and astronomy, this endeavor too gradually vanished, learnedly enough, into nothing.

XXVIII. This, I say, was the origin of astronomy, and of that vanity called astrology. The contemplation and knowledge of the beauty, order, and course of the heavens, the stars, and all celestial bodies was a part of natural theology. From it all men ought to have learned the magnitude, the infinite power, the wisdom, and the goodness of the Creator, and so been stirred up to his natural worship. After the entrance of sin, and the catholic apostasy of the human race from the true God, this contemplation gradually everywhere fell into disuse, and the science born from it vanished. For most men, wise only in earthly things, cast off all care for what was above them. Others, by Satan's cunning, were enticed into the worship of the stars. Indeed, the crude and dull contemplation of the order, course, and beauty of the heavens — such as strikes the outward senses — became, for those who had cast off the knowledge and discipline of the living God, an incitement to idolatry, as will be shown more fully hereafter. Thus at length, among many, the sky itself became, if not the sole god, at least the first. And the very name Θεός ("God") seems to have been derived from nowhere else than ἀπὸ τοῦ θεῖν ("from running"), from the course of the stars. Amid these extremes, there arose at last certain theoretical men who devoted themselves to the contemplation of the celestial bodies for quite other ends. For they had it in mind neither to pursue that contemplation with religious worship, nor to search out the living God from the knowledge of them and obey him; rather, they seem to have taken it upon themselves to satisfy the innate desire of knowing the causes and natures of things. For when they observed that the celestial bodies presented themselves to the eyes with an incredible variety and change of appearances, they investigated what order they observed among themselves, and what were the hidden causes and explanations of these τὰ φαινόμενα ("appearances"). From the observations and conjectures of men of this sort, applying to the explanation of them certain terms that were fictitious and of arbitrary meaning (for most of what it rests upon is fictitious), which they attempted, however they could, to apply to the things themselves, there arose that art which we call astronomy — "gold," as it were, "was thrown into the fire, and out came this calf." As for the contemplation of the heavens, the stars, and all celestial bodies, and the investigation of their nature, order, course, influence, and the law implanted in them by the Creator of all things, I judge this labor to be most excellently spent. For the bare and common sight of these things, which strike the eyes of all at once, immediately overwhelms the minds of men with a certain silent wonder at God's infinite wisdom and power. Far more effective is that contemplation joined with serious meditation and diligent inquiry. And it would be desirable that the knowledge of the celestial bodies and of the perpetual law by which they are governed — so far as anything certain can be known of it — should be communicated to more people than is done in these days. Yet, without giving offense, I hope, to anyone, I must add a few things, adhering to my proposed plan; I shall say it briefly. As it is now taught, and as it has held the right of a science among the learned for some centuries now, astronomy has lost almost all its proper place, order, and usefulness. With natural theology removed, how, I ask, could astronomy maintain its place with respect to the end of true theology? What part of it was it, if we are men created for the glory of God? Either, then, it is restored, through Christ (in whom all things are to be restored), to another place under the new covenant, or it must be utterly cast aside. Indeed, no one deserves to be called a Christian who would deny that the whole encyclopedia of the sciences, directed to a new end by new means, ought to be made subordinate to the glory of God in Christ. But what sort of restoration of this science, or knowledge of natural things — that is, of the works of creation — for the use of men who sincerely worship God in Christ, has been made and ought to be made; and what place all such science should hold in supernatural or revealed theology, especially this expertise concerning the stars and their courses, is too long a history for me to have leisure to narrate, or perhaps competence to expound.

XXIX. In this way, then, by a truly vain endeavor, the human race strove, however it could, to restore that primeval theology we discussed above, and in restoring it, lost it instead. This was the struggle of the rational creature to free itself from the curse of ignorance and blindness lying upon it because of sin; by which it accomplished nothing else than to become still more wretchedly entangled. For since we are renewed to the image of God only in Christ, and that theology was an illustrious part of that image, it is clear that, apart from that renewal, every attempt to restore it is entirely in vain. Hence it came about that those who, having no share in that renewal, and not knowing what place they ought to occupy in that philosophy, nevertheless undertook to polish and teach it, twisting it from its proper end and use, accomplished scarcely more than to afflict themselves and others with a thorny jumble of useless questions and disputes. And so, from this first attempt, natural theology, already corrupted, seems not so much to have been further corrupted as to have been lost altogether. Its total corruption, therefore, and how it came at length to issue in heathenism, must be investigated further. Let us now see what sinners, by deliberate effort, did amiss.

Chapter 8

Of traditions: their origin, use, and corruption — the attempts and success of the poets in corrupting natural theology — the horrible calamity of the human race arising from ignorance of the true God — Κρόνος ("Cronus"), Χρόνος ("Time"), and Noah — the origin of human sacrifice — of lawgivers — political theology — philosophers — physical theology — of superstition — the contempt of all religions among the wise — the total destruction of the theology of the Gentiles.

I. I have set forth how philosophy played its part in corrupting natural theology, or rather how it was itself corrupted. There were also other causes of the total ἀποστασία ("apostasy") from all true knowledge of God. It has seemed good to relate these briefly here, although they properly belong to the corruption of religious worship, which must be treated later in the investigation of the origin of idolatry. And here, by deliberate effort, the human race fell away from natural theology. For whatever help God granted to sinners for obtaining knowledge of themselves, of what is right, and of the truth, the blindness of the human heart twisted, every bit of it, to its own ruin.

II. It is agreed that the knowledge which the most ancient mortals had of God was increased and heaped up by the traditions of those revelations which some of them had received from God through their forebears. For since that age was cut short by the flood, for half of whose span the common parent and teacher of all was present, no one can doubt that no small report of divine things, and knowledge of God, flowed down from Noah and his sons to their grandchildren, and to those born from them. How far the efficacy of that knowledge extended, while the traditions still flowed unmuddied from their source, is not for this place to inquire.

III. It is certain that a knowledge of many things pertaining to religion flowed down into the human race from ancient times by way of tradition. But the wise themselves confessed that, among the nations, the knowledge of ancient matters pertaining to sacred things was exceedingly obscure and uncertain. So Virgil, in the Aeneid (7:641, 645–646).

IV. We shall nevertheless see that they possessed some knowledge. "Whether everything excellent that is said about divine matters among the ancient philosophers was drawn from the writings of the Jews, I myself gravely doubt" — Scaliger. Eusebius indeed contends that all knowledge of divine matters among the Greeks flowed from the Hebrews. Julius Scaliger writes, in his Exercitationes 61, that Plato too scraped together much from the theology of the Phoenicians, which he himself did not understand — whether rightly or not, I do not know. That they retained something by the power of a catholic tradition, whose fame had invaded the whole world from the very first origin of things, can be unknown to no one who has so much as glanced at their writings from the threshold. Let us review a few examples, by way of specimen. Very many, without adducing any arguments to establish their belief, acknowledged a founder of all things: Ἦν ποτέ τοι χρόνος οὗτος ἐν ᾧ ἅμα πάντ᾽ ἐπεφύκει ("There was once a time when all things came into being together") — this is ascribed to Linus, the most ancient composer of songs among the Greeks. There is no poet who does not celebrate this same origin of things. What Ovid wrote at the beginning of his work, even schoolboys know. Horace assents, Satires 1.3.99–104: "When living creatures first crept forth upon the young earth" (to which Diodorus Siculus, Histories book 1, has genuine parallels), describing in his own way the origin of the human race. And Juvenal, Satire 6:11–13: "or fashioned from clay, they had no parents." And his contemporary (σύγχρονος) Papinius [Statius], in the Thebaid 4:275–281: "The ancient Arcadians, older than the stars and the moon."

V. Concerning the Brahmins, Strabo, Geography 15: Περὶ πολλῶν δὲ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ὁμοδοξεῖν· ὅτι γὰρ γενητὸς ὁ κόσμος, καὶ φθαρτὸς, λέγειν κἀκείνους· ὅτι διοικῶν αὐτὸν, καὶ ποιῶν θεὸς δι᾽ ὅλου διαπεφοίτηκεν αὐτοῦ ("That on many points they agree with the Greeks: for they too say that the world came into being and is perishable, and that God, who governs and made it, pervades it entirely"). He is authority for the claim that the Greeks and the barbarians agree on this point — that the world was made by God — evidently from a most ancient tradition. Aristotle doubts it, in the Topics 19 and On the Heavens 1.10, but he is almost alone in this. It would be easy to show that Hesiod, Orpheus, Apollonius, Aristophanes, Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, Numenius, Anaxagoras, and Megasthenes all gave credence to the same tradition. Of Plato there is no question at all. Eusebius, in the Praeparatio Evangelica 1.7, shows that Thales, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, Empedocles, and Metrodorus held that the world had some sort of origin. I pass over the traditions concerning particular matters — Noah, the flood, Abraham — which Philo of Byblos, Lucian, Strabo, and others mention. Together with the belief that the world was created, the notion of a judgment to be exercised upon men after this life obtained a catholic reputation. This persuasion was also accompanied by the presumption of the immortality of the soul, which, although it also rests on reason, nevertheless — since it has always chiefly prevailed among the common people rather than among the σοφοί ("wise") — is to be attributed only to tradition. Thales of Miletus defined the soul as φύσιν ἀεὶ κίνητον ἢ αὐτοκίνητον ("a nature always in motion, or self-moved"). And Diogenes [Laertius] says of him, Ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ αὐτὸν πρῶτον εἰπεῖν ἀθανάτους τὰς ψυχάς ("and some say that he was the first to declare that souls are immortal") — that is, he was the first to discourse philosophically on the ἀθανασία ("immortality") of the soul. Most give that honor by consensus to Pherecydes. "One thing," it is said, in the treatise on the transmigration of souls, chapter 2, "flows out among the common people from what the Druids teach, namely that souls are eternal." And Caesar, concerning the same people, in the Gallic War 6.14: "Above all, they wish to persuade men of this, that souls do not perish." And Valerius [Maximus], book 2, chapter 6.10: "That ancient custom of the Gauls occurs to mind, of whom it is recorded that they were accustomed to lend out money, to be repaid to them in the world below, because they were persuaded that the souls of men are immortal." As for Plato, no man's own house is better known to him than this doctrine was to him. The Phaedo is witness to it.

VI. Even the most barbarous nations hold the same persuasion. Throughout all of America there was scarcely anyone, before the Europeans landed on those shores, who doubted it. Some also received report of a resurrection (ἀνάστασις). Θεόπομπος καὶ ἀναβιώσεσθαι κατὰ τοὺς μάγους φησὶ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους καὶ ἔσεσθαι ἀθανάτους ("Theopompus says that, according to the doctrine of the Magi, men will live again and become immortal"), says Diogenes Laertius in the preface to his work. "Theopompus," he says, "declares that men will live again, according to the opinion of the magi, and will be immortal." The great Plato agrees, in the Phaedo, chapter 17; for he says: Ἀλλ᾽ ἔστι καὶ τῷ ὄντι καὶ τὸ ἀναβιώσκεσθαι, καὶ ἐκ τῶν τεθνεώτων τοὺς ζῶντας γίγνεσθαι, καὶ τὰς τῶν τεθνεώτων ψυχὰς εἶναι· καὶ ταῖς μὲν ἀγαθαῖς ἄμεινον εἶναι, ταῖς κακαῖς κάκιον — that is: "And in truth there is such a thing as coming to life again, and the living are born from the dead, and the souls of the dead exist; and for the good it is better, but for the wicked, worse."

VII. And these men, as we have said, believed that some future judgment awaited mankind, to be exercised according to what they had done in this mortal life, worthy or unworthy by right reason. Whence the same Plato, Epistle 7: Πείθεσθαι δὲ ὄντως ἀεὶ χρὴ τοῖς παλαιοῖς τε καὶ ἱεροῖς λόγοις (that is, the most ancient traditions), οἱ δὲ μηνύουσιν ἡμῖν ἀθάνατον ψυχὴν εἶναι, δικαστάς τε ἴσχειν καὶ τίνειν τὰς μεγίστας τιμωρίας, ὅταν τις ἀπαλλαχθῇ τοῦ σώματος — that is: "One must always truly give credence to the ancient and sacred accounts, which declare to us that the soul is immortal, and has judges, and pays the greatest penalties, according to its decrees, whenever one is released from the body."

VIII. So firmly did this opinion prevail among most men, and was reckoned of such weight for restraining the minds of the wicked, that Cato — wisest of the heathen — did not hesitate, in the very senate, in order to stir up ill will against Caesar, to ascribe to him the contrary opinion; for so he speaks in Sallust, Catiline's War 52: "Gaius Caesar argued this, holding, I suppose, that what is related about the underworld is false — that by a different road the wicked are separated from the good, and inhabit places foul, uncultivated, filthy, and dreadful." The most learned of the poets painted this belief in the Aeneid, book 6, in imitation of Homer's Odyssey (book 11, the Nekyia) — whence it is well known what the papists drew. The common people, too, were utterly imbued with this persuasion. Hence, the things said to occur in the underworld have even now, in those places where they worship the Roman pontiff, and elsewhere, been entrusted to painters to depict. Plautus, Captivi 5.4.1. They thought that men could be kept to their duty, and drawn back from crimes, by these things. "They think that men are most powerfully roused to virtue by disregard of the fear of death" — Caesar, of the Gauls, as cited above. And Lucan, book 1, line 469: "Felices errore suo, quos ille timorum" ("Happy in their own delusion are those whom that dread..."). And concerning the Germans, Appian, in his Celtica: "The Germans have the fiercest customs, remarkable boldness in attack, and the utmost contempt of death, because of their hope of living again." The Britons held the same view, since Caesar testifies that the teaching of the Druids proceeded from them. The English report that the inhabitants of New England, like all Americans, are persuaded that industrious, active, and temperate men, when they die, go to the southern regions of the world, where they believe the supreme God dwells — since in springtime they feel winds blowing from there that drive away the cold and all scarcity — but that all the idle and slothful go to the northern regions, places horrid and dreadful. Seneca speaks admirably: "Then our soul will have cause to congratulate itself, when, released from the darkness in which it is now immersed, it shall look upon what is bright not with a dim gaze, but shall let in the full light of day, and shall be restored to heaven; when it shall regain the place which it occupied by the lot of its birth." This he says in his own manner — splendidly, elegantly, magnificently.

IX. But since they were utterly ignorant of the one way to true happiness, although they greatly preferred the good to the wicked, they nevertheless reckoned the condition even of the best men in the underworld to be uncertain and well-nigh wretched; and so they were, in the apostle's words, "through fear of death subject to bondage all their lifetime" (Hebrews 2:15). Thus Achilles, though ruling far and wide over the dead, laments his lot to Ulysses (Homer, Odyssey 11:487–490).

X. It is agreed that all these things — some, or rather most of them — flowed down into the whole human race from most ancient tradition. I know indeed that among the wise there are found very many to whom all this talk of a future judgment, and of the varied, eternal lot of men, was a matter of ridicule; nor is the Epicurean Lucretius alone in crying out: "Et metus ille foras præceps Acherontis agendus, / Funditus humanam qui vitam turbat" ("And that headlong terror of Acheron must be driven forth, which utterly confounds human life") — book 3, lines 37–38.

XI. Cicero himself, too, mocks these things: "Tell me, I pray," he says, "are you terrified by those things — three-headed Cerberus in the underworld, the roaring of Cocytus, the crossing of Acheron, Tantalus parched with thirst though the water reaches his chin? Or by that — 'Sisyphus rolling his rock, sweating with effort, yet making no progress at all'? Perhaps, too, by the inexorable judges Minos and Rhadamanthus, before whom neither Lucius Crassus nor Marcus Antonius will defend you; nor — since the case will be tried before Greek judges — will you be able to employ Demosthenes: you yourself, in your own person, will have to plead your cause before that vast assembly. Perhaps you fear these things, and therefore reckon death to be an eternal evil." A. "Do you really think me so mad as to believe such things?" M. "Then you do not believe them?" A. "No, indeed." M. "Then, by Hercules, you speak badly." A. "Why, I ask?" M. "Because I could be eloquent, if I argued against them." — Tusculan Disputations 1.5. Now if Cicero had merely attacked the most idle inventions of the poets, he would have acted according to the rule of right reason; but, as becomes plain from the discussion that follows, he set himself against the whole tradition, and thus against the very truth of the matter itself. And, expressing the view of others, Seneca, in the Trojan Women, act 1: "You ask in what place you will lie after death..." — "...nor sparing the soul."

XII. But let us grant that Cicero merely wished to argue probably on both sides, without settling anything; and that Seneca wrote whatever he pleased, poetically, at his own discretion. Pliny, however, not only rejects this common persuasion but even attempts to refute it with arguments, book 7, chapter 56: "For all men," he says, "after their last day, things are as they were before their first, and death brings no more sensation, either to body or soul, than there was before birth. For the same vanity extends itself even into the future, and lies to itself about life even in the very time of death — now granting the soul immortality, now transformation, now sensation in the underworld, worshipping the shades, and making a god of one who has already ceased even to be a man. Yet in what respect does man's manner of breathing differ at all from that of other animals? Or are not many creatures found to be longer-lived, to which no one attributes a comparable immortality? But what body does the soul have by itself? What matter? Where is its thought? How does it see, hear, or act? What use has it? Or what good is there without these things? And then, what dwelling-place, and what a multitude of souls, like shadows, through so many ages? These are the inventions of childish ravings, and of a mortality greedy never to cease." And whatever of this was received among men, Strabo openly calls fables, book 15: Παραπλέκουσι δὲ καὶ μύθους ὥσπερ καὶ Πλάτων περί τε ἀφθαρσίας ψυχῆς, καὶ τῶν καθ᾽ ᾅδου κρίσεων ("And they weave in fables too, just as Plato does, concerning the imperishability of the soul, and the judgments that take place in Hades") — he is speaking of the Brahmins. "They too," he says, "have woven fables, just as Plato did, about the immortality of the soul, and about the judgments that stand in the underworld." Very many of the wise, without doubt, agreed with Pliny and Strabo.

XIII. Relying, however, on this persuasion, men also exhorted one another to the commission of every kind of wickedness. Hence it passed into a proverb, φάγωμεν καὶ πίωμεν· αὔριον γὰρ ἀποθνήσκομεν ("let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die"), which the apostle recalls, 1 Corinthians 15:32. Nothing occurs more often in the poets. Catullus, poem 5. And Horace, Odes 1.4.15: "Vitæ summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam. / Jam te premet nox, fabulæque Manes, / Et domus exilis Plutonia: quo simul mearis, / Nec regna vini sortiere talis / Nec tenerum Lycidam mirabere" ("The brief sum of life forbids us to begin any long hope. Soon night will press upon you, and the fabled shades, and the meager house of Pluto; and once you have gone there, you will no longer draw lots by dice for the kingship of the wine, nor gaze in wonder at tender Lycidas"). And Persius himself, though mocking it, Satire 5.151: "Indulge genio: carpamus dulcia; nostrum est / Quod vivis: cinis, et manes, et fabula fies" ("Indulge your spirit: let us seize what is sweet; what you live is your own — you will become ash, and a shade, and a tale"). The Greeks come nearer still to the very words recalled by the apostle. So Strato. Yet the common people could never be persuaded to abandon that opinion which they had drawn from most ancient tradition.

XIV. It would be easy to enumerate what other particles of divine truth the traditions likewise hinted at. It was the duty of all men, I say, to make use of their benefit in advancing the remnants of the natural light. But it appears that these very traditions were themselves corrupted almost from the very first; and thus the very remedy for the disease (and the antidote against eternal death) was turned into a lethal poison. For we have shown that this πατροπαράδοτος ("handed down from the fathers") doctrine brought no small aid to the natural light in seeking God; but once it was itself at length corrupted, it gradually corrupted and overturned that remaining light as well, and all the human mind's προλήψεις ("preconceptions") concerning God. How this came about, we shall set forth briefly.

XV. It is natural for traditions to fly here and there through the mouths of men. In that state of affairs which we have described, each man made use of them according to the portion of which he had been made a partaker. Those who first dared to fix, gather, and set them forth — scattered and wandering hither and thither as they were — were the poets. They first took up their task by tuning melodies in hymns and little songs to catch the ears of men; then they adorned it in writings crammed, beyond all telling, with every kind of fable. Tradition was the foundation of the whole structure. But gradually they corrupted, to its very depths, that whole knowledge of God which mortal mankind had drawn from ancient traditions. We speak here chiefly of Hellenism; for this mode of ἀποστασία ("apostasy") eventually spread to become universal. Accordingly, in that they either twisted what they had heard into strange and fabulous senses, or embellished it with cunning inventions, or fabricated other things resembling what they had heard, or, by ingeniously devised allegories, made use of these to interpret matters which they themselves had received only by obscure report from their forefathers and did not understand in the least, they left nothing sound, solid, or true, nothing that was not vain, fictitious, idolatrous, and destructive, in the whole of natural religion.

XVI. Indeed, they confused everything to such a degree that it is utterly impossible to determine, even by conjecture, what, whence, from whom, by what report, tradition, occasion, or reasoning they were led to embrace the many, indeed the very many, things they embraced. It is evident that they mingled traditions interpolated with fables, natural theology, moral theology, and the worship of devils and of dead men. What each man drew from corrupted natural theology, what from perverted traditions, what from diabolical oracles, what from popular custom, and what from his own brain, is altogether impossible to investigate accurately. Indeed, very often they presented, in the same words and with the same bundle of fictions, some obscure divine tradition, some excellent part of natural theology, the most inept fables, and Satanic worship all together. The same figure was the Sun, Noah, Saturn, even Jupiter, a planet, a hero, the sky, the aether, and Satan himself, as we shall see more fully hereafter.

XVII. Now the human mind, laboring under native blindness, is greedy for fables and errors, and tenacious of them. Once, therefore, it had become imbued with δεισιδαιμονία ("superstition") and polytheism, the natural light itself, unequal to the task of removing these prejudices, wholly gave way, and could never extricate itself from the swamp of fables. This confusion may be set before the eyes by a single example. Bacchus is the same as Adonis, Evius, and Sabus — so Plutarch, Symposiacs 4, question 5, where, casting aside all care for truth and candor, he sets about investigating the origins of the Jewish ceremonies most ineptly. That the names Iacchus and Bacchus flowed from יְהוָה ("Yahweh") is very nearly proved, and learnedly conjectured, by Sandford, in the first book of his treatise On the Descent of Christ into Hell. I know that many owe much, and some owe everything, to that excellent and most learned man in the investigation of the origins of πολυθεότης ("polytheism"), idolatry, and Hellenism — yet you will find him rarely named by anyone, and praised by none. That Adonis comes from אֲדֹנִי ("my lord"), no one, I think, will deny; Sabus from צְבָאוֹת ("hosts"); and Evius seems to express אֶהְיֶה ("I am"), whence Plutarch dreams up the notion that the Levites among the Jews got their name. But these are either names or epithets of the living God. The ancients, accordingly, understood by those names — which had reached them, however faintly, by report — the true Godhead. Once these had been received in this fashion, they assigned to them other θεῖα ("divine things"). Among these, some were true, but others ψευδεπίγραφα ("falsely attributed"), false, diabolical. First, they referred to Bacchus what they had heard concerning Noah; and the name Bacchus seems to some to be derived from נֹחַ ("Noah"). That the wanton Bacchus stole the vine and vineyard from Noah is not to be doubted. Hence Lactantius: "The poets' lie lies not in the fact, but in the name." See Vossius, On Idolatry, book 1, chapters 19 and 25. Thus the true God and אִישׁ הָאֲדָמָה ("the man of the ground," Genesis 9:20) were confused. Bacchus, too, is perhaps בַּר כּוּשׁ ("son of Cush") — so Bochart holds, in his Sacred Geography, book 1, chapter 2 — that is, Nimrod. Hence he was called Ζαγρεύς ("the mighty hunter" — Genesis 10:9), and Νεβρώδης, as the Greeks universally call Nimrod. And Sandford shows, by very many examples, that almost the whole history of Moses was ascribed to Bacchus — book 1, chapter 1, sections 18 and 19; after him, and with the same instances, Vossius, book 1, chapter 30; nor does Bochart think otherwise, book 1, chapter 18. Now whatever is said of Bacchus is also said, all of it, of Osiris in Egypt, who, having been great among his own people, obtained, after death, all the honors of the sun. At length there emerged the Theban Bacchus, or Dionysus, so called from Mount Nysa; and certain learned men suspect that Nysa is nothing other than Syene, by a μετάθεσις ("transposition") of letters. That Arabia was called "India" by the Greeks could easily be proved by many testimonies. But there is also a Mount Nysa in India beyond the Caucasus, not far from the river Cophen, as Philostratus shows in his Life of Apollonius, book 2, chapter 4, where he relates that men planted it with vines in honor of Bacchus, who is said to have worked wonders there. But the inhabitants of that region reported that this Bacchus was an Assyrian, and that it was from him that the Theban Bacchus derived. Others say that the city situated at the foot of the mountain was called Nysa, and the mountain itself Meros. So Curtius, book 8, chapter 10. Now μηρός means "thigh." Hence the fable of Bacchus being sewn into the thigh of Jupiter — unless you suspect a Hebraism here, and that "to be born from the thigh of Jupiter" signifies nothing other than to be the son of God, as Heinsius holds in his Aristarchus. And these things are not undeserving of the mockery with which Lucian receives them, Dialogue 9.

XVIII. As for the birth and deeds of the Theban Dionysus, Eusebius reports them from Diodorus, Praeparatio Evangelica, book 20, chapter 20. Now this man, having perhaps been the first of the Europeans to make certain expeditions into the regions of Asia, exhausted, among the fable-makers of the following age, all the ancient traditions concerning the Bacchuses mentioned above; and he alone became all of them, though in reality he was none of them — for the myth-makers heaped upon him nearly everything πατροπαράδοτα ("handed down from the fathers"). Nor did this remarkable confusion stop here. Because the ancients ascribed the discovery of the vine and of wine to Bacchus, the compilers of natural theology contended that by "Bacchus" nothing was meant but wine, or autumn, or that season of the year in which the vines ripen. So Lucretius teaches us, book 2, lines 654–658. And Athenaeus, Deipnosophists book 1: Ἔνιοι δὲ καὶ τὴν Διονύσου φυγὴν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν οἰνοποιΐαν σημαίνειν φασὶ, πάλαι ἐγνωριζομένην· ἡδὺν γὰρ εἶναι τὸν οἶνον παρεγχυθείσης θαλάσσης ("Some say that the story of Dionysus fleeing into the sea signifies the making of wine, a fact long since known; for wine is sweeter when sea-water is mixed into it") — that is: "As for the fable of Bacchus fleeing to the sea, some think it signifies the seasoning of wine, a thing already known long ago; since wine is sweeter when sea-water is poured into it." But it is altogether certain that the fable was taken from the history of Moses.

XIX. Philo of Byblos is witness that they fabricated these things inaptly and ignorantly, in his preface to the history of Sanchuniathon: Ἀλλ᾽ οἱ μὲν νεώτατοι τῶν ἱερολόγων, τὰ μὲν γεγονότα πράγματα ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἀποπέμψαντες ἀλληγορίας καὶ μύθους ἐπενόησαν, καὶ, τοῖς κοσμικοῖς παθήμασι συγγένειαν πλασάμενοι μυστήρια κατέστησαν ("But the more recent sacred writers, having from the beginning rejected the things that actually happened, devised allegories and myths, and, fabricating an affinity with the phenomena of the cosmos, established them as mysteries") — that is: "But the younger theologians, after rejecting what had actually happened, from the beginning contrived allegories and fables, and, fabricating a kinship with cosmic phenomena, established mysteries." And he, indeed, having determined that everything said about the gods should be referred back to true histories, rejects on the one hand that whole natural theology, and on the other the μυθική ("mythology") of the poets. But countless other examples of this confusion occur everywhere. The history of the world's origin in Diodorus Siculus, and especially in Sanchuniathon and that Philo of Byblos, shows the same thing. The first chapter of Genesis is transposed into a history of many centuries, concerning I know not what kings: Heaven, Earth, Sun, Moon, and מָוֶת ("Death"), who is said to be Pluto, all have their place in it. Even אֱלֹהִים ("God") himself is brought in. Amid these stumbling-blocks, anyone may conjecture how easy it was for the ancient serpent to impose upon the human race wicked opinions about God, and an impious worship of himself.

XX. Pausanias speaks excellently, in his Arcadica: Ἐν τῷ παντὶ αἰῶνι πολλὰ μὲν πάλαι συμβάντα μηκέτι δὲ γινόμενα, ἄπιστα εἶναι πεποιήκασιν εἰς τοὺς, οἱ τοῖς ἀληθέσιν ἐποικοδομοῦντες ἐψευσμένα ("Throughout all the ages, many things that happened long ago but no longer occur have been made incredible, because of those who, building falsehoods upon the truth, obscured it") — that is: "In all the ancient and now obsolete events of past ages, credit has been withdrawn from the common people by the fault of those who buried the very foundations of truth under a heap of fables." They rendered the truth itself so corrupted and burdened with lies as to make it incredible; and how this came about, he shows a little afterward — as Lucan also says, book 8, line 831.

XXII. I know not what mysteries Athanasius Kircher has recently attempted to draw out of their sacred rites, laboring — with great and costly effort, but in vain, not to say ridiculously — to teach that they alone were wise, whom the rest of the world has hitherto believed to have raved beyond the folly of mankind. He saw in their hieroglyphics things which, beyond all doubt, they themselves never saw, and which no one who reckoned Christian modesty, or truth, of greater worth than secular vainglory, would ever expect to see. But: Οὐκ ἴδεν ἀλλ᾽ ἐδόκησεν ἰδεῖν διὰ νύκτα σελήνην ("He did not see it, but only thought he saw it, as the moon through the night").

XXIII. We have shown what judgment Paul passed on their manner of practicing their religions; we have also brought forward, in agreement, the testimony of Philo the Jew, who spent his life in the capital of Egypt. Josephus, too, is copious in reproaching them with this same crime, book 1 against Apion. In Exodus 12:12 God threatens "that he will execute judgments against all the gods of the Egyptians." Moses relates, in Numbers 33:4, that he carried out this threat, whatever it involved. It is not to be doubted that, among other cattle, he slew Apis himself, and other animals sacred to the Egyptians. It is well known what those among the heathen who thought themselves wise — but who seem to us, indeed, to have been more insane than the Egyptians — thought of the Egyptians' religious worship. The satirist, Satire 15:1–6. Anaxandrides, in Athenaeus's Deipnosophists, book 7, addresses the Egyptians thus: "Maximum esse numen anguillam putas; / Obsonium verò nos multum lautissimum: / Canem veneraris, ego verbero" ("You think the eel a very great deity; but to us it is a most delicious dish. You worship the dog; I beat it"). And Antiphanes, in the Lycon.

XXIV. Apollonius, in Philostratus, reproaches Thespesion, chief of the Gymnosophists, with this same disgrace, when discussing statues and images, Life of Apollonius, book 6, chapter 19: Περὶ θεῶν, ὑμᾶς ἐπερωτήσομαι πρῶτον· τὶ μάθοντες, ἄτοπα καὶ γελοῖα θεῶν εἴδη παραδεδώκατε τοῖς δεῦρο ἀνθρώποις πλὴν ὀλίγων· ὀλίγων γὰρ, πάνυ μέντοι ὀλίγων, ἃ σοφῶς, καὶ θεοειδῶς ἵδρυται. Τὰ λοιπὰ δ᾽ ὑμῶν ἱερὰ, ζώων ἀλόγων, καὶ ἀδόξων τιμαί, μᾶλλον ἢ θεῶν, φαίνονται — "I will first question you about the gods: taught by what, have you handed down such absurd and ridiculous forms of the gods to the men of this land, with but few exceptions? For few indeed, very few, are the divine forms to be seen that bear any trace of wisdom and godlikeness; but in your other temples, what is worshipped appears to be the honors of irrational and disreputable animals, rather than of gods." The reader will not find unwelcome what Thespesion retorts, if he cares to consult the passage in the author himself. It appears, moreover, from that same Philostratus, that the Egyptians were utterly unable to render any account of their insane worship — whatever Kircher, after the passage of so many centuries, may pretend to have discovered, in those monstrous idols of theirs, the mysteries of the whole of Christianity. Cicero thought that they had regard to a single utility: "The Egyptians," he says, "— who are mocked for it — consecrated no beast except for some utility they derived from it," On the Nature of the Gods, book 1. And Gildas, in his own manner exaggerating tragically, in On the Ruin of Britain, joins the Britons to the Egyptians: "The monstrosities of Britain," he says, "were themselves diabolical, well-nigh outnumbering those of Egypt, some of which, with their features still misshapen, standing rigid in their accustomed way within or beyond the deserted walls, we behold with grim countenances." We who have been freed by the grace of Christ are all astonished at, and abhor, these monstrous crimes, this tyranny of the ancient serpent; and all the more deservedly abominable is the impiety of those who, though they wish to be called Christians, and alone worthy to be reckoned by that most holy name, we nevertheless find, convicted out of their own confessions, to be driven by a madness no less — if not greater. "For more tolerable is the error of those who worship, in place of God, a golden or silver statue, or an image of some other material — the way the Gentiles venerated their gods — or a red cloth raised upon a spear, as is told of the Lapps, or living animals, as once the Egyptians did, than the error of those who worship a scrap of bread." These are the words of Costerus the Jesuit, Enchiridion, chapter 8. Here indeed, if we are men, if endowed with sense and reason, if any credit is to be given to the words of sacred Scripture, we have, on their own confession, convicted culprits: such idolatry is found among the sons of the most holy father the pope as was never seen nor heard of even in the very darkness of heathenism itself.

XXV. Since the world was overwhelmed by such a multitude of gods, and men did not know whom or what they were worshipping, it was customary in invocations to use the phrase "Whoever you are." "Now, whoever you are, O god, I worship you," Plautus, Rudens 1.3. And: "We follow you, holy one of the gods, whoever you are." Virgil, Aeneid 4:576. And on the Capitol a shield was consecrated, inscribed: "To the Genius of the city of Rome, whether it be male or female."

XXVI. Hence, too, that formula for evoking the gods out of places besieged in war, which Macrobius records from fragments of Sammonicus: "If there be a god, if there be a goddess, under whose protection this people and this city stand — and especially you, who have taken upon yourself the protection of this city and its people — I pray, I entreat, and I beg your indulgence, that you would abandon this people and this city, forsake their places, temples, sacred things, and their city; that, departing from these, you would strike this people and city with fear, dread, and forgetfulness, and, having deserted them, would come over to Rome, to me and mine, so that our city's places, temples, and sacred things may be more pleasing to you; and that you would place yourselves in charge over me, over the Roman people, and over my soldiers, so that we may know and perceive it. If you do so, I vow to build you temples and games."

XXVII. Hence it was believed that, before any city was overthrown, the gods had already abandoned it. So Virgil, of the fall of Troy: "All the gods, by whom this empire had stood, departed, forsaking their shrines and altars." — Aeneid 2:351.

XXVIII. For the most ancient poets recorded that, when destruction was already drawing near, the gods had been seen carrying their images out of the temples. And in general, Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes, 219: Ἀλλ᾽ οὖν θεοὺς τοὺς τῆς ἀλούσης πόλεως ἐκλείπειν λόγος ("But indeed it is said that the gods of a captured city abandon it").

XXIX. This is why the Romans wished it to be kept secret under whose god's protection the city of Rome stood, lest the gods, called by their own proper names, might be evoked away by an enemy. This was provided for by pontifical law. And the pontiffs themselves prayed in this manner: "Jupiter, best and greatest — or by whatever other name you wish to be called."

XXX. I would marvel exceedingly that these empty fabrications ever found favor with wise men, and with those desiring to live according to reason, were it not that daily evidence allows us to perceive how great a tyranny vain superstition exercises over the minds of men. Thus, in a manner not unlike that which we have reported from Sammonicus, when, battle having been joined near the shrine of St. Quentin, the Spaniards found it necessary to tear down and demolish a temple dedicated to St. Lawrence, into which the enemy had taken refuge, King Philip bound himself by a vow to the saint that he would make good the damage inflicted by erecting another, much greater temple. This was the occasion for the building of the Escorial, dedicated to Lawrence, which an anonymous poet elegantly expressed: "It is lawful to defile the hearth with blood, when a greater temple is to be given in return."

XXXI. And such, plainly, was the form of ancient vows, which Papinius [Statius] celebrates in his Tydeus, Thebaid 2:726–734: "If I return bearing my father Parthaon's arms, and warlike Pleuron lies open to me on my homecoming, then I shall dedicate to you a golden temple in the midst of the city..."

XXXII. But ignorance of the true God is the fountain and origin of all evils. From it, impious and wicked wretches held out for mockery and imitation those very beings whom they had proposed for themselves to worship — beings foolish, senseless, filthy, defiled with robberies, quarrels, wars, adulteries, and unspeakable sins. And so the remaining vestiges of the light of nature were extinguished, and no greater care was taken of the works of God that manifest his eternal power and deity. Thus at length Hellenism prevailed — that is, the mythical theology (θεολογία μυθική) of the Gentiles. From this arose all the gods, the greater, the middling, and the lowest.

XXXIII. But with how great a calamity these portents of the poets afflicted the human race — as regards honest morals, a tranquil life consonant with reason, the civil state, and the preconception (πρόληψις) of eternal punishments — is well known: it will be enough to set forth one or two detestable examples. Saturn, who is Cronos (Κρόνος), was among them Chronos (Χρόνος), that is, Time. Thus did they mythologize in natural theology. He is also Noah, drawn from a most corrupted tradition. Time, or duration, is measured out by the motion of the heavens; hence Saturn is the son of Uranus, or Heaven. So too is Noah reckoned, since all others were destroyed by the universal ruin of the flood. And they further imagined that Saturn devoured his sons and then vomited them up again — whether because time by turns begets, consumes, swallows up, and casts forth all things, or because Noah brought his sons out again to a world made new, as it were, after having shut them up with him in the ark, is uncertain. It is plain that the fable was concocted out of a most obscure tradition and an ingenious allegory. And from this at last, by Satan's contrivance, there arose a horrible mania for idols, with a monstrous cruelty mingled into this abominable superstition. For foolish wretches, employing I know not what unspeakable ceremonies as a solace for their misery, sacrificed their own children to Saturn. Hence the name "the Mound of Children."

XXXIV. But this wickedness appears to be older than all the Greek portents; there is no doubt that it received its growth from them, until at last it became universal. Nor will any part of Satanic worship be found in which the human race conspired with greater unanimity. Whether the ancient serpent — himself one day to be triumphed over on the cross of Christ — intended here to exalt himself magnificently and triumph over conquered sinners, or whether he meant, by means of this very sacrifice, to work prejudice and reproach against the truth in men's minds, it is certain that in promoting this crime far and wide he poured out all his venom upon it. Let us review a few examples. The matter is well known concerning the Africans: "Among the Africans, infants were openly sacrificed to Saturn down to the proconsulship of Tiberius," Tertullian, Apology, chapter 8. Arnobius reports the same. When the Carthaginians had been defeated by Agathocles, king of the Sicilians, thinking their god angry with them, in order to pay their atonement more scrupulously they sacrificed two hundred sons of nobles to Saturn; Pescennius Festus, as cited in Lactantius, is witness to this. Hard-pressed in the Roman war, they performed the same rites, and Hannibal's own son Aspar was slaughtered. Hence Silius Italicus, in the fourth book of his Punica, brings in Imilce, Hannibal's wife, lamenting this crime.

XXXV. Among the Romans it was customary for living men to devote themselves to the gods of the dead; the story of the Decii is well known: the father in the Gallic war, the son in the Samnite war, devoted themselves in the same way — men whom Juvenal celebrates, Satire 8.254: "the souls of the Decii were plebeian, plebeian were..."

XXXVI. Arnobius affirms that it was once customary to worship Jupiter Latiaris with human slaughter. Under the consulship of Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus, a decree of the senate was passed that no human being should be sacrificed; and Pliny, Natural History book 30, chapter 1, relates that until that time such monstrous rites were openly celebrated. Thus, when the Gauls burst in, "the elders, who had held the highest offices, gathered in the forum, and there, with the pontiff pronouncing the devotion, consecrated themselves to the gods of the dead," as we read in Florus, book 1.13.

XXXVII. Cicero too, in his speech for Fonteius, chapter 10, relates that the Gauls were accustomed to appease the gods with these unspeakable victims: "Who does not know," he says, "that to this very day they retain that monstrous and barbarous custom of sacrificing human beings?" Plutarch likewise notes that a Gaulish man and woman used to be sacrificed at Rome every year. The Roman emperor Hadrian sacrificed his favorite Antinous to the gods in Egypt. Dio, as preserved by Xiphilinus, book 69, writes: Ἀντίνοος ἐν τῇ Αἰγύπτῳ ἐτελεύτησεν, εἴτ᾽ οὖν εἰς τὸν Νεῖλον ἐκπεσών, ὡς Ἁδριανὸς γράφει, εἴτε καὶ ἱερουργηθείς, ὡς ἡ ἀλήθεια ἔχει ("Antinous died in Egypt, whether by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes, or, as is really the truth, by being made a sacrifice"). And Hadrian made the one he had sacrificed into a god. Procopius reports that the inhabitants of the island of Thule kept up this custom of sacrificing human beings down to his own time. The Britons had the same practice. When the island of Mona had been conquered by Paulinus, "a garrison was set over the vanquished, and the groves, dedicated to savage superstitions, were cut down; for they held it lawful to drench their altars with the blood of captives and to consult the gods through human entrails," says Tacitus, Annals book 14, chapter 30. And on that same theme, Horace has: "I shall behold the Britons, fierce toward their guests."

XXXVIII. The most diligent Camden proves in his "Britannia" that all these were gods of the Britons, and Caesar himself, in the Gallic War book 6, relates that the Gauls received the whole discipline of the Druids from the Britons. The Germans had the same madness. "With a man publicly slain, they celebrate the horrid beginnings of their rites," says Tacitus; and again, "Of the gods they chiefly worship Mercury, to whom on set days they think it lawful to offer human victims as well," Germania, chapter 9. Camerarius, in his Meditationes Historicae book 2, reports that marble monuments of this impiety still stand among the Etruscans, and that he himself saw one at Perugia. Jordanes writes of the Goths: "They always appeased Mars with the harshest form of worship, for his victims were the deaths of captives." The Greeks were bound by the same crime. They say that Erechtheus, the most ancient king of Attica, sacrificed his own two daughters; and Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae book 13, shows that Neanthes of Cyzicus devoted himself to death. Epimenides — the very man who first set up for the Athenians an altar to the unknown god — expiated the whole land of Attica with human blood for certain ancient crimes. Among the Thebans, descended from the Tyrians (from whom this superstition flowed), Menoeceus is celebrated, who devoted himself for the city and slew himself, offering his own blood to the gods below — a death that Statius magnificently celebrates in the Thebaid, book 10, lines 756–769: "...that devoted head — did I nurse it as though a worthless mother?" (793–794).

XXXIX. Curtius, book 4, chapter 3, shows that the Tyrians sacrificed a freeborn boy to Saturn. Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus testify that the Egyptians sacrificed living men to their brute gods. The priests told Herodotus, in the Clio, page 158, that Menelaus sacrificed two boys in Egypt. "The Thracians offer human blood to their gods," says Florus, History book 3, chapter 4. The Celts, when sacrificing a man, strike him with a sword above the midriff, as Diodorus, book 5, attests. Every year, in the month of January, the Normans and Danes sacrificed ninety-nine men and as many horses, together with dogs, to their gods, as Dietmar, book 10, attests. Of the people of Marseilles, Lucan, book 3, lines 303–305, writes: "Here, by a barbarous rite..."

XL. Ἐθύετο καὶ ἐν Ῥόδῳ Μεταγειτνιῶνος ἕκτῃ ἱσταμένου ἄνθρωπος τῷ Κρόνῳ ("At Rhodes, on the sixteenth of the calends of November, a man used to be sacrificed to Saturn"), says Theodoret, Cure of the Greek Maladies, book 7. And: Φοίνικες ἐν ταῖς μεγάλαις συμφοραῖς ἢ πολέμων, ἢ αὐχμῶν, ἢ λοιμῶν, ἐθύοντο τῶν φιλτάτων τινὰ ἐπιψηφίζοντες Κρόνῳ ("In great calamities — of wars, droughts, or plagues — the Phoenicians would sacrifice to Saturn one of those dearest to them, chosen by common vote for the purpose"), says Porphyry, On Abstinence from Animal Food, book 2. Even God's own people was overtaken by this universal plague: "They sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan," Psalm 106:37–38. Whoever wishes for more may add what we noted in our little book on Divine Justice, chapter 8: that certain Christians, at least in name, defiled themselves with this very crime — which I would point out, were I not ashamed to.

XLI. Porphyry traces the origin of these sacrifices back to Abraham, as Eusebius witnesses, Preparation for the Gospel book 1, chapter 9: he was called Saturn, and his daughter, sacrificed, was Genea, born of Queen Anobret. It is well known that profane writers everywhere betray a shameful lack of real history of this kind when they go searching into the origins of things and nations. Varro supposes that the ancients devised this kind of sacrifice on the ground that mankind is the best of all seeds. The Druids, as Caesar attests in the Gallic War book 6, held that the divine power of the immortal gods could not be appeased for a man's life unless a man's life were given in its place. It is clear that the human race drew the practice of sacrifice, for the expiation of sins, from an ancient and universal tradition. Anxious and doubting minds, agitated by horror and the sense of sin, could never fully persuade themselves that a just and supreme God could be appeased, for men's crimes, by the blood of cattle; and Satan, in his usual way, assails those who are troubled and all but driven to despair. He easily persuades men that they hold nothing more precious than themselves. Hence arises the impulse to sacrifice oneself and others. The prophet shows that a conscience troubled and terrified by the sense of sin and the fear of punishment was the very root of this evil, Micah 6:7; and it was this, with Satan acting as midwife, that brought this monstrosity to birth. Often the oracles gave no other answer to those who feared, or were about to dare, some great thing, than that atonement must be made with human blood: the stories of Menoeceus and Iphigenia are well known. Apollonius, as reported by Philostratus, book 6, chapter 10, relates that the custom of the Lacedaemonians of scourging themselves with whips in the worship of the gods had no other origin: "This custom," he says, "of the whips is performed in Scythian Diana's honor, because, as they say, oracles ordained it; but to resist the gods is, I think, a kind of madness" (τὸ δὲ σῶν μαστίγων ἔθος τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι τῇ ἀπὸ Σκυθῶν δρᾶται, χρησμῶν φασιν ἐξηγουμένων ταῦτα, θεοῖς δ᾽ ἀντινομοθετεῖν μανία, οἶμαι). And Pausanias, in his Boeotica, writes: Ἀφίκετο ἅμα ἐκ Δελφῶν τῷ Διονύσῳ θύειν παῖδα ὡραῖον ("An oracle came at the same time from Delphi that the Megarians should sacrifice a handsome boy to Bacchus"). Twin instances of this kind occur everywhere in the historians; the malice of Satan never found a height beyond this to which it might climb.

XLII. But there is no end to this impious heap. It is well known too that the adulteries and rapes of these dung-heap gods served as an incitement to, and an excuse for, the commission of every kind of impure crime among the multitude; let me add that example in second place. For once men had fashioned these gods for themselves, they immediately fashioned them in their own likeness as well — that is, as liars, perjurers, and defiled with every impurity. Take away from the gods their quarrels, lies, battles, perjuries, and adulteries, and certain ancient writers who now stride about like giants would shrink to dwarfs; and by these very fictions — alas! — Christian youth is even now polluted, and offered up, as the learned and pious John Comenius complains, to that same Moloch. I do not wish, by repeating them, to force upon chaste ears those filthiest of crimes, which ought forever to be passed over in silence among the saints. To make plain to what end the devil suggested these things to the minds of wicked men, a few instances will suffice: let that saying of Mercury about Jupiter, in the prologue to Plautus's Amphitryon, suffice; and, as Seneca has it in the Hippolytus: "as often as he takes on lesser forms — he who drives the sky and the clouds."

XLIII. Ah, how often does the moist, soft clay of youth drink in blasphemies of this sort, while some stupid tutor applauds! Augustine puts it excellently: "All worshippers of such gods, as soon as lust has driven them on, look — their minds dyed, as Persius says, with burning poison — far more to what these gods did shamefully than to what Plato taught or Cato judged right," City of God, book 2, chapter 7. The reader will find more in that same place concerning the most filthy worship of the Mother of the Gods. Terence, in his Chaerea, sets before the eyes of all what sort of minds and passions the human race — of itself only too headlong toward vice — conceived from the examples set before it, Eunuchus, Act 3, Scene 5, line 35: "While preparations were being made, the girl sat in the chamber... even then that scene delighted my mind far more..."

XLIV. Would that the same ruin were not still being carried into the minds of the young through indecent pictures and the reading of the poets! This impiety indeed advanced so far that men openly urged one another, by the example of the gods, to commit the filthiest of crimes. So Catullus writes, 68.137–140.

XLV. It was also customary for very many to worship the gods by means of the most shameful practices. Herodotus, book 1, and Strabo, Geography book 16, relate that the Babylonians prostituted their own daughters in the temples.

XLVI. Yet another plague, no less deadly, and springing from this same impiety, settled upon the world. For once this wicked persuasion about the gods had taken hold among the common people, the most depraved scoundrels — especially those who served in the priesthood of these gods — assuming their names and characters, committed and practiced countless crimes: robberies, adulteries, thefts, and acts of banditry. On mountains, in caves, in woods, in temples, along riverbanks and seashores, everything was full of such masked impostors. Let the well-known story of the crime committed in the temple of Isis at Rome, which Josephus relates in the Antiquities, book 18, chapter 4, serve as an example. Mundus, a Roman knight, after long trying in vain to overthrow the chastity of the most honorable matron Paulina, was secretly brought into the temple by the priests under the guise of the god Anubis, and — with the woman's own husband consenting — ravished her. Most of the ancient heroes were the bastard and spurious offspring of robbers, brigands, tyrants, and priests.

XLVII. And a noble historian gives this reason — not inaptly — why Romulus did not institute vestal virgins: Οὔτε διὰ παρθένων τὰς θεραπείας κατεστήσατο τῇ θεῷ, μεμνημένος, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, τοῦ περὶ τὴν μητέρα πάθους, ᾗ συνέβη θεραπευούσῃ τὴν θεὸν, τὴν παρθενίαν ἀποβαλεῖν, οὐχ ἱκανὸς ἐσόμενος ἐάν τινα θυηπόλων εὕρῃ διεφθαρμένην, κατὰ τοὺς πατρίους τιμωρήσασθαι νόμους, διὰ τὴν ἐπὶ ταῖς οἰκείαις συμφοραῖς ἀνάμνησιν ("Nor did he appoint virgins as priestesses of the goddess, mindful, as it seems to me, of what had befallen his own mother, who, while serving the goddess, happened to lose her virginity" — that is, was violated by a priest — "and he would not have been able, according to the ancestral laws, to punish any priestess he found corrupted, because of the memory of his own household's misfortune"), Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, book 2, chapter 65.

XLVIII. In the same way, while the authority of ignorance held sway everywhere and the papacy kept the truth of the gospel captive, none among the papists themselves — unless he is brazenly shameless — dares to deny that the Roman mass-priests, masked, committed every sort of crime. For after they had persuaded the blind and stupid common people that certain gentle spirits, not particularly hostile to the human race, visited houses by night and did things one is ashamed to relate, they themselves, disguised under the names of those spirits, actually carried out all those filthiest crimes, which they then falsely, most foolishly and absurdly, wished to attribute to those supposedly harmless spirits. So our own Chaucer speaks, of a certain company of friars very well known in his own day.

XLIX. Iarchas, an Indian philosopher, reproaching Apollonius with this very impiety, affirms — as Philostratus records, Life of Apollonius, book 3, chapter 7 — that this is why the observance of virtue has been rendered well-nigh impossible for the Greeks: Οἱ δέ γε σοφώτατοι ποιηταὶ ἡμῶν, οὐδ᾽ εἰ βούλεσθε δίκαιοί τε καὶ χρηστοὶ εἶναι ξυγχωροῦσιν ὑμῖν γίνεσθαι ("But those among you who are reckoned the wisest poets do not permit you to be just and good, even if you should wish it"). And he gives the reason: that they held the most wicked of men to be in the place of gods. Apollonius himself openly confessed as much, book 5, chapter 5: Οἱ μὲν γὰρ περὶ τοὺς ἥρωας, ὧν ποιητικὴ πᾶσα ἔχεται, καὶ διαφθείρουσι τοὺς ἀκροωμένους, ἐπειδὴ ἔρωτάς τε ἀτόπους οἱ ποιηταὶ ἑρμηνεύουσι, καὶ ἀδελφῶν γάμους καὶ διαβολὰς ἐς θεοὺς, καὶ βρώσεις παίδων, καὶ πανουργίας ἀνελευθέρους, καὶ δίκας, καὶ τὸ ὡς γεγονὼς αὐτῶν ἄγειν, καὶ τὸν ἐρῶντα, καὶ τὸν ζηλοποιοῦντα, καὶ τὸν ἐπιθυμοῦντα πλουτεῖν, ἢ τυραννεύειν ἐφ᾽ ἅπερ οἱ μῦθοι ("For the things that have been fabricated about the heroes, which is the whole subject-matter of poetry, corrupt the ears of those who hear them, recounting their illicit and unspeakable loves — the marriages of brothers and sisters, slanders against the gods, the devouring of children, and ignoble mutual quarrels; for when these things are set forth by the poets as though they had actually happened, they lead men to love and envy, and to the desire for wealth and power"). For no one can suppose himself to be doing wrong while he is only imitating the gods. Cicero, too, repeats the same point, On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 16: "I have set forth," he says, "not so much the judgments of philosophers as the ravings of madmen; nor indeed are those things much more absurd which, poured out in the utterances of the poets, have done harm by their very charm — poets who have represented the gods as inflamed with anger and raging with lust, and made us see their wars, their fights, their battles, their wounds; and besides these, hatreds, discords, quarrels, births, deaths, complaints, lamentations, lusts poured out in every kind of intemperance, adulteries, chains, unions with the human race, and mortals begotten of an immortal." Let the reader consult what Plato discusses on this point in the Timaeus, for it is worth reading.

L. To the poets were added, as reinforcements, the lawgivers and philosophers. The latter set themselves to hammer out a certain natural theology, which in reality was nothing other than the idolatry of the first apostates in the worship of the works of creation. For once the benefit of the true traditions had been lost — utterly obliterated, that is, by the fables of the poets — and the mind of the common people besieged besides by insuperable prejudices, neither the lawgivers nor the philosophers were ever able, or scarcely even attempted, to free natural theology from those impure and most pernicious fables and from idolatrous worship.

LI. In forging their theology, the lawgivers had scarcely any other aim than to temper religion in such a way that no disturbance or evil should arise from it in the civil order. This remains, even now, the view of most statesmen concerning religion. Hence they found it necessary to inscribe upon their tables of law all the errors and fables, and the whole mania for idols, with which the poets had infected the peoples, provided only that these did not stand — bareheaded, as the saying goes — directly against the public government of states or against honest morals.

LII. It is worth the effort to observe Plato himself giving way to the prejudices of the common people. Thus he writes in the Timaeus: Περὶ δὲ τῶν ἄλλων δαιμόνων εἰπεῖν καὶ γνῶναι τὴν γένεσιν μεῖζον ἢ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς· πιστέον δὲ τοῖς εἰρηκόσιν ἔμπροσθεν, ἐκγόνοις μὲν θεῶν οὖσιν, ὡς ἔφασαν, σαφῶς δέ που τούς γε αὑτῶν προγόνους εἰδόσιν. Ἀδύνατον οὖν θεῶν παισὶν ἀπιστεῖν, καίπερ ἄνευ τε εἰκότων καὶ ἀναγκαίων ἀποδείξεων λέγουσιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς οἰκεῖα φάσκουσιν ἀπαγγέλλειν ἑπομένους τῷ νόμῳ πιστευτέον· οὕτως οὖν κατ᾽ ἐκείνους ἡμῖν ἡ γένεσις περὶ τούτων τῶν θεῶν ἐχέτω καὶ λεγέσθω ("As for the other beings whom we call daimones, to speak of their generation, or even merely to conceive the matter in our minds, is beyond our capacity and powers; but credence must be given, concerning them, to those who in ancient times explained to us the nature of the gods — inasmuch as they themselves were, as they affirmed, the offspring of the gods, and so must certainly have known their own ancestors. For trust ought not to be withheld from the children of the gods, even though they speak without probable signs or necessary proofs; but because they profess to be speaking of their own affairs, known to themselves, we must follow the ancient law and custom and give them credence. Thus, then, let the origin of these gods be held and stated just as it has been handed down by them"). So he writes — mindful, evidently, of what had happened to his teacher Socrates, who was condemned to death precisely because he refused to hold as gods those whom the city held to be gods. He thus admits the common gods, though not without an open mockery of the credulity of the common people. He discusses similar matters in the second book of the Republic. Strabo, Geography book 1, teaches that the lawgivers deliberately devised fables in religion in order to restrain the minds of the peoples by a certain terror of invisible evils: Κεραυνός, καὶ αἰγίς, καὶ τρίαινα, καὶ λαμπάδες, καὶ δράκοντες, καὶ θυρσόλογχα, τῶν θεῶν ὅπλα, μῦθοι, καὶ πᾶσα θεολογία ἀρχαϊκή· ταῦτα δ᾽ ἀπεδείξαντο οἱ τὰς πολιτείας καταστησάμενοι μορμολύκας τινὰς πρὸς τοὺς νηπιόφρονας ("Thunderbolt, and aegis, and trident, and torches, and serpents, and the thyrsus-lances — the weapons of the gods — are myths, and so is the whole of ancient theology; these things were set forth by those who established civil governments, as a kind of bugbear for the simple-minded"). And this is exactly what the mass-priests of the papacy once did as well. For after they had rooted out of the minds of the common people, through the grossest ignorance and wicked morals, all the efficacy of the Christian religion, they found it necessary to invent purgatory and I know not what other bogeys, in order to keep the people, in some fashion, within the bounds of duty.

LIII. And this was the political theology (θεολογία πολιτική) of the Gentiles, of whose rites Seneca says: "All of which the wise man will observe as ordained by the laws, not as pleasing to the gods." Since, then, the common people would not suffer the poetic frenzies to be taken away from them, and would sooner be driven from the state than from their wicked opinion about religion, while the lawgivers, for their part, were content merely to seize hold of all the ancient fables for their own purposes, the wise rejected this whole political theology as a mere fable, devised only to preserve order among men in civil life. Thus the shoddy merchandise was despised, and was always accounted worthless.

LIV. The philosophers showed themselves more clear-sighted. They surveyed everything most keenly, searching after the theology that had been lost. But, to put it in a word, they were never able to disentangle themselves from the corrupt traditions and the monstrosities of the poets, except by drawing on opinions dredged up out of the pits of atheism. From these there emerged natural theology (θεολογία φυσική). Eusebius, in his books of Preparation for the Gospel, shows so plainly that this was the invention of men hardened in the greatest wickedness and unwilling to yield to the truth, that nothing needs to be added to what he says. And so this class of men too "became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened" (Romans 1:21).

LV. By these stages, then, the whole knowledge of God was corrupted. Yet among the bad — though not the worst — ways of practicing religion appears to have been that of the common people, who, understanding nothing beyond obscure traditions interlarded with the monstrosities of fable, at least held fast to something. Those who aspired to the credit of the most acute and searching inquiry into sacred matters were altogether made fools (ἐμωράνθησαν). An old opinion prevailed among the common people that some sort of judgment would be exercised after this life, and that there were different conditions surviving for men in the world below; and on this point the common people never wished to contradict themselves. It is plain how much this persuasion contributed toward restraining the wickedness and impiety rampant on the earth. And even now, though all that theology of former ages has at last been swept away everywhere among the nations, those who still live outside the knowledge of Christ have some presentiment, I know not what, of that judgment and of a future state. But this whole opinion, as an empty bugbear, was laughed at — with, I know not, perhaps a sardonic laugh — by almost the whole senate of the philosophers.

LVI. And this was the superstition of the nations — the word chosen to express it being δεισιδαιμονία. The derivation of the name, however, is variously explained. The father of Roman eloquence affirms that "superstition" (superstitio) took its name from those who spent whole days in prayer that their children might survive (superstites) them; and the comic poets attest that parents were daily absorbed in such vows: "Just as you wish your only son to survive and outlive your own life, safe and sound" — Plautus, Asinaria, Act 1, Scene 1, line 6. "By Castor, a fine boy has been born to Pamphilus; I pray the gods that he may survive" — Terence, Andria, Act 3, Scene 2. And in the Heautontimorumenos, Act 5, Scene 4, line 7: "So may you outlive both me and this one." Servius derives it, instead, from little old women who, surviving through a long span of years and given over to empty things, "rave while wishing to seem overly religious." Donatus says the same: "The superstitious," he says, "are old men and old women, who, surviving to a great age, now rave" — whence also "superstitious" is used of those who fear the gods excessively, which is itself a sign of raving. Hence the satirist speaks of it — a custom that is still kept up in the baptism of the papists. Lactantius holds that "superstitious" are those who "cherish the memory of the dead who have outlived their time," Institutes book 2, chapter 28. One is also called superstitious who is possessed by a god (ἔνθεος) and divinely inspired (θέσφατος); so Plautus: "This fellow is indeed superstitious — he foretells the truth," Curculio, Act 3, line 27. "Superstition," then, denotes either a corrupt disposition of the soul concerning divine things, or an empty and foolish form of worship. On the first sense Cicero and Plutarch, quite mistakenly, wrote a great deal — the former scattered through his works, the latter in a special and elegant treatise, On Superstition. In the second sense, Tacitus impiously calls our religion a deadly superstition, Annals book 15; and Suetonius, in his Life of Nero, calls the Christians "a class of men of a new and maleficent superstition." Some have even rejected all religion whatsoever under the name of superstition: "Vain is superstition — virtue alone is a goddess in the breast."

LVII. Would that today no one could still be found capable of such madness! Although the religion of the heathen was nothing but a most pernicious superstition, they themselves nevertheless recognized a distinction, and maintained that it was necessary because of the common multitude, who would not otherwise be restrained. Strabo puts it excellently: Λαμία μῦθός ἐστι, καὶ ἡ Γοργώ, καὶ ὁ Ἐφιάλτης, καὶ ἡ Μορμολύκη, οἵ τε πολλοὶ τῶν τὰς πόλεις οἰκούντων, εἰς μὲν προτροπὴν ἄγονται τοῖς ἡδέσι τῶν μύθων, ὅταν ἀκούωσι τῶν ποιητῶν ἀνδραγαθήματα μυθώδη διηγουμένων, οἷον Ἡρακλέους ἄθλους ἢ Θήσεως, ἢ τιμὰς παρὰ τῶν θεῶν νενεμημένας, ἢ νὴ Δία ὁρῶσι γραφὰς ἢ ξόανα ἢ πλάσματα τοιαύτην τινὰ περιπέτειαν ὑποσημαίνοντα μυθώδη. Εἰς ἀποτροπὴν δὲ ὅταν κολάσεις παρὰ θεῶν καὶ φόβους καὶ ἀπειλὰς ἢ διὰ λόγων ἢ διὰ τύπων ἀοράτων προσδέχωνται, ἢ καὶ πιστεύωσι περιπεσεῖν τινάς· οὐ γὰρ ὄχλον γε γυναικῶν καὶ παντὸς χυδαίου πλήθους ἐπαγαγεῖν λόγῳ δυνατὸν φιλοσόφῳ καὶ προσκαλέσασθαι πρὸς εὐσέβειαν καὶ ὁσιότητα καὶ πίστιν, ἀλλὰ δεῖ καὶ διὰ δεισιδαιμονίας ("Lamia is a myth, and so is the Gorgon, and Ephialtes, and the bogey-woman; and the greater part of those who dwell in cities are drawn toward good conduct by the pleasant elements in these myths, whenever they hear the poets relating fabulous deeds of valor — such as the labors of Heracles or of Theseus, or honors bestowed by the gods; or, by Zeus, when they see paintings, or images, or statues suggesting some such fabulous turn of events. And they are turned away from wrongdoing when they expect, whether from report or from unseen shapes, punishments, fears, and threats from the gods, or believe that some have actually fallen into such things; for it is not possible to lead a crowd of women and every sort of common rabble by philosophical argument alone, and to summon them to piety, holiness, and faith — one must also make use of superstitious fear"), Geography book 1. Who would not think he was listening to a supreme pontiff speaking from his throne! This same fault — as he explains everything excellently — is described by the great Plato: Ἔθος τε γυναιξί τε δὴ διαφερόντως πάσαις καὶ τοῖς ἀσθενοῦσι πάντῃ καὶ κινδυνεύουσι καὶ ἀποροῦσιν, ὅπῃ τις ἂν ἀπορῇ, καὶ τοὐναντίον ὅταν εὐπορίας τινὸς λάβωνται, καθιεροῦν τε τὸ παρὸν ἀεί, καὶ θυσίας εὔχεσθαι καὶ ἱδρύσεις ὑπισχνεῖσθαι θεοῖς καὶ δαίμοσι καὶ παισὶ θεῶν, ἔν τε φάσμασιν ἐγρηγορότας διὰ φόβους, καὶ ἐν ὀνείροις ὡσαύτως ὄψεις πολλὰς ἀπομνημονεύοντας, ἑκάστοισί τε αὐτῶν ἄκη ποιουμένους βωμοὺς καὶ ἱερά, πάσας μὲν οἰκίας, πάσας δὲ κώμας, ἔν τε καθαροῖς ἱδρυομένους ἐμπιπλάναι, καὶ ὅπῃ τις ἔτυχε τῶν τοιούτων, Laws book 10, near the end ("It is above all the custom of women, and of those who are afflicted with some notable weakness, or who find themselves in some danger, or who labor under some grave want — or, conversely, when some abundance of good fortune comes their way — always to consecrate whatever is present, to vow sacrifices, and to promise statues to gods and daimones and the children of the gods; and then, when apparitions appear to them waking, out of fear, or when, remembering the many things they seem to have seen even in dreams, they try to bring remedies to each of these, they fill every house and every village with altars and shrines, and by these rites consecrate places as though they were pure"). In what other words anyone could paint that superstition which flourishes in the papacy more vividly, I really do not know. So Cicero speaks of religion and superstition, On Divination book 2, near the end: "Wherefore, as religion — which is joined with the knowledge of nature — ought to be propagated, so all the roots of superstition ought to be torn out. For it presses upon you, and urges, and pursues you wherever you turn; whether you have listened to a prophet or to an omen; whether you have offered sacrifice or observed the flight of a bird; if you have seen a Chaldean or a soothsayer; if there has been lightning, or thunder, or something struck from heaven; if anything has been born or has happened resembling a portent — and of such things it is inevitable that something or other will very often occur — so that one is never permitted to remain settled in a quiet mind." I have cited these things so that we may know that, under whatever profession of religion, superstition is everywhere alike to itself.

LVIII. For the rest, what pertains to the religion or superstition of the heathen has been recorded by very many writers. What, according to their own understanding, was the proper manner of practicing religion is set out by Varro, Cicero, Ovid, Festus Pompeius, Macrobius, Censorinus, Pliny, and most of the historians in their accounts of the life of Numa. It is certain that some small fragments of truth lay hidden within these ancestrally-handed-down rites. As for those fragments that slipped out — whether against the will of those who related them, or incidentally, while they were engaged in other business, or while actually searching for the truth itself — we have ample enough harvest of testimonies to a purer theology in Josephus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Theodoret, Lactantius, Augustine, Steuchus of Gubbio, Du Plessis-Mornay, Grotius, and countless others among the moderns. Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine, Theodoret, and others, following the apostle's lead in the first chapter of Romans, excellently expose the absurdities, folly, impiety, madness, and derangement of the worship — and of the whole religion that flourished among them; while Maimonides, Giraldi, Stuckius, Vossius, and Selden, in agreement with Hesiod, Cicero, Plutarch, Strabo, Pliny, and Seneca, set forth elegantly and clearly the origin, the practice, and the hidden mysteries of idolatry.

LIX. But after religion among the nations, emerging from an endless heap of fables, had swollen into so vast a mass of superstition and idolatry that nothing more foolish, or more utterly at odds with all natural theology, could ever be devised, at length even the wisest of men began to feel such shame at the whole apparatus of rites and worship of the gods, that they were unwilling to have anything more in common with the gods beyond the contemplation of nature and the observance of what is right and honorable. So Cicero writes of Socrates, Academica book 1.4: "Socrates," he says, "seems to me... to have brought philosophy down to ordinary life, so as to inquire concerning virtues and vices, and generally concerning things good and evil; while he judged that heavenly matters were either beyond our comprehension, or, even if they were fully known, contributed nothing to living well." And Tacitus, Annals book 6, chapter 22: "As I listen to these and similar things, my judgment remains uncertain whether the affairs of mortals revolve by fate and unchangeable necessity, or by chance; for you will find the wisest of the ancients, and those who follow their several schools, at variance on this point; and the opinion is deeply rooted in many, that neither our beginning nor our end, nor indeed mankind at all, is any concern to the gods." And Seneca: "We shall worship in such a way as to remember that this worship pertains more to custom than to reality." These sayings are answered by the words with which Cicero closes his most learned books On the Nature of the Gods: "When this had been said," he writes, "we parted in such a way that Velleius's argument seemed to me the truer, but Balbus's seemed to come closer to a likeness of the truth." And he had already, at the start of the first book (chapter 5), set out his own settled opinion on all divine matters: "We are not," he says, "of the number of those to whom nothing appears true, but of those who say that to all true things certain false ones are attached, with so great a resemblance that there is in them no sure mark for judging and assenting."

LX. That men should thus be tossed about in uncertainty was pleasing to Satan, since he had nothing certain to put in the place of the truths he had taken away. Hence, when the Athenians consulted Pythian Apollo as to which religious observances they ought chiefly to keep, the oracle given was that they should keep those that were in accordance with ancestral custom — as the same Cicero attests, On the Laws. And so, at last, every best and wisest man came to agree on that religion which Lucan ascribes to Cato: "This was the unshaken creed of stern Cato..." Persius, too, describes excellently that state of affairs, and the uncertainty in which everyone was tossed: "...that I may bring these things to the temples, and make my offering with meal" — Satire 2.62, etc.

LXI. At last, then, being utterly weary of the fables, men poured out their contempt for the gods on whatever occasion offered. Let that same most "religious" orator himself serve as an example, in his speech On His House, addressed to the pontiffs, against Clodius: "You say," he writes, "that what I am accustomed to proclaim about myself is intolerable — and, witty fellow that you are, you even bring in a polished and charming remark: that I am in the habit of saying that I am Jupiter, and likewise declaring that Minerva is my sister. I am not so much arrogant in saying I am Jupiter, as ignorant in supposing Minerva to be Jupiter's sister. Yet even so, I claim for myself a virgin sister; you did not allow your own sister to remain a virgin. But take care lest you yourself ought rather to call yourself Jupiter — since you can rightly call the same woman both your sister and your wife!" chapter 34.

LXII. When Antony, drunk, pretended to be Bacchus, the Athenians publicly betrothed their own Minerva to him with solemn ceremonies, as Dio attests, History book 48. Nor, when men were placed in danger, was there any expectation of help or assistance from these gods. Hence, when King Porus's friends urged him to sacrifice to the river, so that it would not bear up the rafts of the Macedonians and so would not grant Alexander an easy crossing, he replied — as the wise Indians relate, according to Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, book 2, chapter 10 — Οὐκ ἔστι τῶν ὅπλα ἐχόντων τὸ καταρᾶσθαι ("It is not for men bearing arms to make supplication").

LXIII. Those who think Nero deserves to be counted among human beings may see in Suetonius how he treated the gods. Not without reason did Seneca, in the Octavia (Act 2), ascribe to him that saying which — as the prophet witnesses, Isaiah 44 — fits idolaters generally well enough: "Foolishly should I fear the gods, when I myself make them." The same spirit appears, no differently, in the greatest of poets — Achilles, Iliad 10.15–20: Ἔβλαψάς μ᾽, Ἑκάεργε, θεῶν ὀλοώτατε πάντων, .... ἦ σ᾽ ἂν τισαίμην, εἴ μοι δύναμίς γε παρείη ("You have injured me, far-shooting one, most destructive of all the gods... truly I would take vengeance on you, if only I had the power"). And Propertius:

LXIV. Tertullian, sharply — that is, in his own characteristic manner — assails this whole impiety in his Apology: "Your household gods," he says, "whom you call your Lares, you treat with a householder's authority — pawning them, selling them, exchanging them, turning one, now, from a Saturn into a little cooking-pot, another from a Minerva into a ladle, as each one happens to get worn down and battered; and each is worshipped only so long as its owner has not found some more pressing domestic need to make more sacred use of it."

LXV. Having set forth the cradle and the progress of the theology of the Gentiles, we must now, in a word, set out its catastrophe. God had indeed determined, from the very foundations of the world, at a preordained time, to send forth "a light for the revelation of the Gentiles." Yet it pleased him to keep this mystery hidden within himself for a while, having permitted all the nations meanwhile to walk in their own ways, so that, once they were covered over with the thickest darkness and every kind of misery, that saving light might at last shine forth all the more gratefully. Yet he did not hide this counsel of his will so completely within the secret storehouse of his infinite wisdom that, out of the utmost mercy toward mankind and the most just and holy anger against those false, empty, worthless gods and idols, both promises of this grace and dreadful threats did not go forth. For, "the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the nations shall not be able to abide his indignation. Thus," he says, "shall you say to them: the gods that have not made the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens," Jeremiah 10:10–11. Likewise he threatens that he will make all the gods of the earth waste away, Zephaniah 2:11. It is plain that God directed these threats against those feigned gods and idols under whose auspices, and in submission to whose instigation (that is, in them, to the ancient serpent), the four most famous empires had continually declared war against himself and his people. And of all these it has long since been settled. They have vanished from their shrines; their heaven and their sun, their mountains and their islands, have collapsed; they themselves, together with all their worship, their pageantry, and their worshippers, have been removed from the earth and from the regions under heaven. At the very first ray of the rising Sun of Righteousness, the idolatrous world felt and grieved that its gods tottered — nay, shuddered:

LXVI. But sending forth his saving light by degrees, God at last so confirmed the old oracles that there is no longer a single mortal, in whatever nation, who follows that Gentile theology, or worships and venerates those ancient idols with their ancient rites. Thus all those vain, absurd, and blasphemous things, by which, across so many centuries and an untold length of time, through the cunning of Satan and the native blindness of the human mind, the world — "lying in the wicked one" — defiled, polluted, and rendered useless natural theology, have utterly perished by the sentence of God's avenging justice.

Chapter 9

The power and efficacy of the gospel in overthrowing Gentilism — All the Bellarminian marks of the true church apply equally to Gentilism — An examination of the prejudices they instill into men's minds — Satan's last effort on behalf of his own worship.

I. Whoever weighs a little more attentively the dominion that ancient Gentilism exercised over the human race — the roots it drove down through so long a succession of ages throughout the whole world, the fruits it bore, and its total disappearance (ἀφανισμός) — will perhaps find that his own frame of mind is not far removed from those questions with which, in Cicero's dialogue, the Epicurean Velleius assails the Platonic account of the origin of all things: "What," he asks, "was the engineering? What tools, what levers, what workmen were there for so great a task?" (Though all these things, as Maffei and Ribadeneira report, God the Father is said to have shown to Ignatius, the father of the Jesuits.) It is impossible, I say, that the mind should not be drawn to reflect on what and how great that power or hidden virtue was which God employed to remove so vast a mass — a mass that had grown up from time immemorial "like a tree, through a hidden age." For to accomplish so great a work, and to overturn the ancient and universal foundations of that depraved superstition, the very finger of God was plainly required.

II. To make this plainer, I will show in a few words what pretexts the human race had for retaining its universal and most ancient superstition, and on what prejudices and reasonings it relied in setting itself against the divine truth. For prejudices give error its strength and vigor, and from them, by the mediation of vain reasonings, arise the pretexts by which men given to mere opinion (δοξαστικοί) fortify the approaches of the mind against the light of truth, in order to retain it. Men who now please God in their own worship are called "the church." For that assembly, or community of men, which strives to please God in celebrating the worship he himself has instituted, is the true church, and always has been. It is the opinion of many learned men that this assembly or community can be distinguished from all others who might falsely claim that name to themselves, by certain marks. The most learned Bellarmine has determined that there are fifteen principal ones, and has shown at length that they carry a certain well-nigh incredible power to win credence for that assembly to which they properly belong. Those who, by the indication of these marks, suppose they have found the true church would sooner allow themselves to be cast out of life itself than out of communion with it. But in truth, all these Bellarminian marks — or at least the greater number of them, and by far the most outstanding — are far better fitted to dress up heathenism with the title of the true religion than to point out that divine truth, and the profession of it, which we have learned from the teaching of the Son of God himself, or its true professors. And if the far greater part of those who call themselves Christians — as they boast of themselves — are persuaded that they still ought, to this day, to place such confidence in these marks that, rejecting the most certain proofs (τεκμήρια) of divine truth, they believe those marks alone in the business of religion, and commit their souls to be directed by them toward truth — how much more firmly ought heathen men to have clung, tooth and nail, to that profession of divine worship which was fortified with those very marks, when all the other indications of heavenly truth were utterly unknown to them!

III. Bellarmine's first mark of the true church is the very name "catholic" — namely, that whichever church is called catholic is the true church. This mark, since it is worth almost nothing, the learned man sent ahead to perish, as it were, like a lightly-armed soldier. We know the place and occasion on which the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians; but the origin of this name, "catholic," is as thoroughly uncertain as the sources of the Nile. It does not occur in sacred Scripture. Irenaeus, reciting the Creed, makes no mention of it, book 1, chapter 2; nor does Tertullian, in his Prescription Against Heretics; and, as Justin rightly says, Apology 2, ὀνόματος προσωνυμία, οὔτε ἀγαθὸν οὔτε κακὸν κρίνεται, ἄνευ τῶν ὑποπιπτουσῶν τῷ ὀνόματι πράξεων ("a surname derived from a name is judged neither good nor bad, apart from the actions that fall under that name"). The Roman church indeed calls itself catholic; it was not so called of old by holy men. To Ignatius (if indeed that epistle really is Ignatius's) it was ἥτις προκάθηται ἐν τόπῳ χωρίου Ῥωμαίων ("the church which presides in the region of the Romans"). To Clement it was ἐκκλησία παροικοῦσα Ῥώμην ("the church sojourning at Rome"). And the Pope is called, in the first council, "the bishop ἐν τῇ Ῥώμῃ" ("in Rome"), canon 6. The Council of Chalcedon shows plainly enough in what regard both he and the Roman church were once held. To very many Christians, scattered for many centuries throughout the whole world, it is known as the Popish, papistical, apostate, idolatrous, Roman church. Since, then, the name itself is merely the invention (εὕρημα) of uncertain men, let us drop that dispute and look at the thing itself.

IV. From this it came about that some devised the term "catholic church" as something wonderfully pleasing to all worshippers of the true religion — since there were not lacking those who most foolishly confined the church of Christ within the limits of this or that particular party or faction of Christians — and not altogether undeservedly either, since by that word they wished to express nothing other than what our Savior himself had foretold would come to pass: namely, that the gospel would be preached "in the whole inhabited world" (Matthew 24:14), or "in the whole world" (Matthew 26:13), or "unto the whole world" (Mark 14:9), and not to the Jews alone. And once that word had become celebrated, its fame grew daily, and with credit. But when the Roman Pope had climbed, by evil arts, to that pinnacle of worldly power, so that it was easy for him to entice flatterers with the hope of plunder, he tried, through their flatteries (and helped besides by the carelessness and modesty of others), to draw that name to himself and to his own faction; while he himself, meanwhile, with no ungenerous hand, measured back to them in turn things which no sober man would believe were ever truly within his power to give. So it was of old done, as in Horace, Epistles book 2.2.99–101.

V. By the same right, the Mohammedans are "Muslims"; Simon was once called μεγάλη τοῦ Θεοῦ δύναμις ("the great power of God"); and Diana, "the great deity." Even now, wherever on earth the more numerous party is found, it adorns itself with honorable titles; the name of "faction" is reserved for the smaller number, or for the oppressed side. Let us see, then, whether the heathen themselves did not arrogate to themselves alone those names which in their own day were reckoned of the best repute among men, while the true worshippers of God were everywhere branded with reproachful names. Before all else, they constantly boasted, and argued most fiercely, that they alone practiced faith and true religion, and that everyone else was superstitious, ignorant of the ancient gods, and, so to speak, heretical and schismatic. We know that, up to the coming of our Lord, the worship of the true God flourished among the Jews alone. As to what the heathen thought of them, that most weighty author Cornelius Tacitus is witness, Histories book 5, chapter 4: "Moses," he says, "in order to secure the loyalty of his people for the future, established new rites, contrary to those of all other mortals. Among them, everything is profane which is sacred to us; and again, what is forbidden to us is permitted among them" — that is, they are heretics and schismatics, because their lawgiver taught them to observe rites abhorrent to the common, catholic usage of the human race. Plutarch says almost the same. And there is scarcely a historian who has not recorded that they worshipped the head of an ass in their temple. "They consecrated in their inner shrine," says Tacitus — meaning, on his own authority, an ass — "the effigy of the animal that had shown them, by its guidance, the way out of their wandering and their thirst," Histories book 5, chapters 3–4. And the historian Democritus, as cited in Suidas, writes: χρυσοῦν ὄνου κεφαλὴν προσεκύνουν ("They worshipped a golden head of an ass"). Josephus shows that Posidonius and Apollonius Molo — who himself raved with the same madness — handed down the same tale, in the second book Against Apion. I pass over other monstrous lies, though a not unfitting comparison could be made between these and those that the papists — the "Catholics," that is — have invented about the Albigensians, the Waldensians, and other faithful servants of Christ. With one voice they all declared that nation to be given over to superstitions, hostile to religion, and repugnant to the common judgment of mankind concerning the worship of God.

VI. Christians arose at last, and for some time they too were called Jews; nor for a long while did the Gentiles distinguish between the two peoples. "He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were constantly rioting at the instigation of Christ," writes Suetonius, in his Life of Claudius. And Arrian, in Epictetus, book 2, chapter 9, writes: Οὐχ ὁρᾷς, πῶς ἕκαστος λέγεται Ἰουδαῖος; καὶ ὅταν τινὰ ἐπαμφοτερίζοντα ἴδωμεν, εἰώθαμεν λέγειν, οὐκ ἔστιν Ἰουδαῖος, ἀλλ᾽ ὑποκρίνεται· ὅταν δὲ ἀναλάβῃ τὸ πάθος τὸ τοῦ βεβαμμένου καὶ ᾑρημένου, τότε καὶ ἔστι τῷ ὄντι καὶ καλεῖται Ἰουδαῖος ("Do you not see how each man is called a Jew? For if we see someone wavering between two positions, we are accustomed to say he is not a Jew, but is playacting; but when he takes on the disposition of one who has been dyed, that is, baptized, and who professes that sect, then he really is, and is called, a Jew"). Some cite this passage, in vain, to prove that the Jews were accustomed to use the rite of baptism, whereas the philosopher is quite plainly speaking of Christians. Likewise, in Revelation 3:9, by "Jews" the Holy Spirit himself means none other than Christians. And that same Tacitus sets out the judgment of the whole world concerning these people, Annals book 15, chapter 44: "Nero visited with the most exquisite punishments those whom the common people, hating them for their crimes, called Christians. The author of that name was Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, had been put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate. This deadly superstition, though checked for the moment, was breaking out again." And Arnobius shows that Christians were charged with every kind of difference in morals and rites from the rest of mankind. As for the mere name of their religion and worship of the gods, men were so entirely confident that they judged the very name "Christian" to contain crime enough to warrant the ultimate punishment, the execution of a heretic; hence Tertullian and others found it necessary to write an Apology for that very name. "Circumcised," "Apella," "Jew," "Christian," "Heretic" — among those "Catholics," these were names for crimes. Both idolatrous peoples, then, proceed along the same path, in equal step. So if there is any force or efficacy in honorable names for indicating the truth and confirming the mind in the opinion they adorn — as the Cardinal judges — it was precisely this that the worshippers of Gentilism made the greatest use of.

VII. The second place in Bellarmine's list is occupied by antiquity — not, indeed, that absolute antiquity which refers its origin to God alone (for if this controversy were made to rest on that, it would be entirely settled against these Bellarminian marks), but that doubtful and merely probable antiquity which must be dug out of histories and other records of past events, and judged by them. On this same argument, or rather prejudice, the whole of Gentilism once rested as well. When Jesus Christ himself first came forth to set out the heavenly truth from the Father's bosom, the Pharisees attacked him first of all with this question: Τίς ἡ διδαχὴ ἡ καινὴ αὕτη; ("What new doctrine is this?"), Mark 1:27.

VIII. Likewise, when the apostle Paul preached that same truth at Athens, the philosophers attacked him: Δυνάμεθα γνῶναι τίς ἡ καινὴ αὕτη ἡ ὑπὸ σοῦ λαλουμένη διδαχή; ("May we know what this new doctrine is, which is spoken by you?"), Acts 17:19. And throughout that whole contest between the gospel and the superstition of the Gentiles, there was scarcely anything that stirred the minds of unbelievers more violently into rage against the truth than that the Christian religion was new — that it lacked antiquity, and that it tried to abolish the ancient rites and the ancestral worship of the gods. How much prejudice that persuasion instilled in their minds may easily be guessed from the papists themselves, who are hardened in their errors by the pleasure — or rather the profit — those errors bring them. But very many have shown that the antiquity which the Romanists claim is doubtful in every case, and openly false in most. It was, however, plain — setting aside only those records of things which they thought themselves entitled to despise because they belonged to Jews, heretics, and schismatics — that, since the human race began, there existed no memory of things or of religions whatsoever that preceded the origin of their own worship; so that no one doubted that the religion they professed was eternal. Symmachus uses this very argument in his letter to Theodosius: "If a long span of years," he says, "lends authority to religions, then the faith of so many centuries must be preserved, and we must follow our forefathers, who followed theirs with good fortune. Let us now imagine Rome herself standing here and addressing you in these words: Excellent princes, fathers of the fatherland, respect my years, to which the pious rite has brought me, that I may still use the ceremonies of my ancestors." And Caecilius, in Minucius Felix, says: "How much more reverent and better it is to receive the teaching of our forefathers as guardians of the truth, to worship the religions handed down to us, to fear the gods with whom you were imbued by your parents from the beginning, rather than to become more intimately acquainted with them; and not to pass judgment on the divine powers, but to yield to our elders." Hence Augustine wisely says: "This is the devil's own way — that deception should be commended by a pedigree of antiquity." Indeed, even the American Indians, as the Jesuit Xavier attests, book 4, letter 1, were accustomed to boast of the antiquity of their own religion against the novelty of the gospel. I am not now trying to show that Bellarmine fights against evangelical truth with the weapons of the heathen; I am showing how great an undertaking it was to overcome and abolish paganism, when its professors were armed with arguments which that most learned man himself judged to carry such great force in keeping men's minds attached to opinions they had once adopted.

IX. Edmund Campion no doubt thought he had accomplished something splendid when, among the arguments by which he tried to persuade the unlearned of the papal religion, he added by way of climax: "Witness the universities, witness the tables of the laws, witness the native customs of men, witness the election and inauguration of emperors, witness the rites and anointing of kings, witness the orders of knighthood and their very robes, witness the windows, witness the coins, witness the city gates and the guildhalls, witness the possessions and the life of our forefathers, witness every thing and every trifle — that no religion in the world but ours has ever settled its roots so deep." Though these arguments are of the flimsiest sort, they do show plainly that this religion spread far and wide over no small span of time, and took possession of the minds of very many, and corrupted their morals. But no one fails to see with how much greater pomp and semblance of argument all these same things could be said of Gentilism, back when it was at war with evangelical truth. For the superstition of the heathen had invaded not one Europe alone, or a few of its more celebrated regions, as that of the papists has done, but had so taken possession of the entire world from the most ancient ages, beyond all the credit of history and the memory of man, that nothing at all existed anywhere on the whole face of the earth that did not bear witness to its dominion. It is well known what Clement, Justin, Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, Ambrose, and others set against this pretext of antiquity. If, then, that doubtful antiquity, which can be dug out of the records of human deeds and affairs, is a presumption of truth, certainly no mortals, in any age, or in any cause, could ever have produced it with greater evidence or with a greater multitude of testimonies than the champions of heathenism. Without doubt, the great mass of them were no less persuaded that they were human beings, or that they were alive, than that the religious worship of the nations and peoples had flourished from the very beginning of things — if indeed all things had a beginning at all; or, if things themselves were eternal, that their worship was eternal too. They shouted nothing more loudly, then, than that it was everywhere, always, and by everyone. Hence Radbod, king of the Frisians, when he was about to be baptized and had already dipped one foot in the water, asked "where the greater part of his ancestors were situated — in hell, or in paradise?" And when he was told that more of them were in hell, he at once drew back his foot and said, "It is more fitting to follow the majority than the minority."

X. Next, the Cardinal places, in the third position, long and never-interrupted duration. If he means past ages, this mark does not really differ from the one before it, except in that here the duration is specified as never interrupted — long, or drawn out from ancient times. But if he means future ages, this mark is nothing more than a learned man's conjecture — though I myself indeed believe the Roman church will endure until he comes who will destroy her with the breath of his mouth. Yet the heathen too, by their vows, marked out for their worship an everlasting duration, and confirmed it by predictions. The poet, intending to show that he had secured for himself an eternal name, says: "still shall I, in after ages..." Horace, Odes 3.30.7. But if he wishes to play the historian, he is by no means to be compared with the Gentiles. The beginnings of idolatrous superstition are, to this very day, utterly unknown. But that at least two thousand years elapsed from its rise to the preaching of the gospel in the world is beyond doubt; and its profession was never once interrupted. This is a well-known fact, needing no further proof. So deep had this prejudice — springing from the antiquity and long duration of that religious worship which they observed — driven its roots into their minds, that it should be no wonder if they scarcely allowed themselves, by any means, to be torn away from that most pernicious opinion, fortified as it was by such considerations.

XI. In the fourth place the Cardinal lists the great number and variety of believers. If he meant to assign this mark to his own church, all sectarians everywhere would without doubt purchase it dearly, since it runs directly counter to that mark of the true church which Christ himself gave, if indeed the "flock of Christ" is the true church. But since the Pope wishes it to be a mark, let it be a mark. Whoever should contend — supposing this dispute must be settled by the word of God — that great numbers are not a mark of the true church, and that the Roman faction ought not to be called great or numerous, either absolutely or comparatively, would in my judgment have an easy case in hand. But that is not our business here. Most of the papists are wise and learned men, thoroughly practiced in the affairs of the world. They know very well what things are apt and suitable for enticing the minds of mortals to adopt some opinion in religion, or for persuading them to cling to it tooth and nail, stubbornly. They therefore understand full well how great a force sheer numbers carry in this cause. Indeed, it has been nearly settled for a long time now that they see the whole hope of their cause resting on nothing else than that they are many; and so, having abandoned all other arguments, they have long since resolved to settle the business of religion by the sword, wherever on earth they may be. Meanwhile, we know that this mark applies most properly of all to Gentilism. The greater number, everyone, the whole world, belonged to it. The sons of the mathematicians affirm that the highest mountains do nothing to prevent the earth from being called a perfect sphere; much less, then, can it seem any obstacle that the little flock of the true worshippers of God was so very small, such that the whole world might be said to lie in the evil of Gentilism. For virtually the whole of mankind, wherever it was found, had agreed, with a singular unanimity, on polytheism; and, good God! what men, what emperors, kings, generals, philosophers, sages — good, just, temperate, brave, most devoted to their country, most constant in fairness and goodness beyond what can even be imagined — were among them! How, then, could they possibly have been willing to be torn away and separated from the religion of these men — that is, from the religion of practically the whole human race, and especially of its very best men? What could be said or imagined more repugnant to all reason than that, bewitched by the persuasion of a few men, they should send word of their secession to the settled persuasion of the whole world, held for so many ages? Consider, reader, this corner of the world in which, by God's gracious disposing, we now live our lives: how very few there are who would not count it the height of madness to depart from the most widely received opinion of the majority — especially when that departure has, for some, been attended by evils that came crashing down in a mass upon the first preachers of the gospel. And yet we all profess that we ought to hearken, not to the multitude, not to antiquity, but to the word of Christ alone. As for the amplitude of Gentilism, the catholicism of the papists will never match it — not even if it should burst itself trying.

XII. Next in Bellarmine comes the succession of bishops in the Roman church; the caliphate holds the same rationale among the Muhammadans. Ancient Rome likewise had her own supreme pontiffs, whose title, name, place, office, and spirit this Bellarminian bishop has invaded, seized, and now possesses (Revelation 13:11-13). The succession of those pontiffs, from the first consuls down to Tiberius Caesar, under whose rule the Christian name began to become known, was recorded in the public annals. And they believed that the supreme authority of these men had been divinely established. So the orator [Cicero], in his speech For His House, addressed to the pontiffs, chs. 1, 12, says: "Although many things have been discovered and instituted by our ancestors under divine guidance, nothing is more outstanding than their willing that you alone should preside both over the religious rites of the immortal gods and over the highest affairs of the commonwealth." In this very opinion all the Roman party persist to this day. He immediately also brings forward what even now serves both sides in the papists' disputes about the church: "For what," he says, "is so arrogant as to attempt to instruct the college of pontiffs concerning religion, divine matters, and sacred ceremonies; or so foolish as to tell them what one has found in their own books; or so presumptuous as to wish to know those things about which our ancestors willed that you alone should be consulted, and that you alone should know?" And none of these pontiffs, so far as we know from the records of their times, was ever a woman, a magician, a murderer, an incestuous person, or a sacrilegious man. To hold an opinion in religious matters differing from theirs was regarded as nothing short of the utmost madness.

XIII. Indeed, so great was the authority of these supreme pontiffs that scarcely anyone could dissent from their judgment in religion with more impunity than one can now dissent from the pope himself. The historian describes their authority in such terms that one can scarcely tell whether he is speaking of the old Rome or the new: "The pontiffs," he says (that is, by the institution of Numa), τὴν μεγίστην παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις ἐξουσίαν ἔχουσι εἰσὶ καὶ τῶν μεγίστων πραγμάτων κύριοι· καὶ γὰρ δικάζουσιν οὗτοι τὰς ἱερὰς δίκας ἁπάσας, ἰδιώταις τε καὶ ἀρχοῦσι καὶ λειτουργοῖς θείων ("hold the greatest power among the Romans and are lords of the greatest affairs; for they judge all sacred causes, whether of private persons, magistrates, or ministers of the gods" — which is still the solemn distribution of the Roman church's members into various ranks) καὶ νομοθετοῦσιν ὅσα τῶν ἱερῶν ἄγραφα ὄντα καὶ ἀνέθιστα, κρίνοντες ἃ ἂν ἐπιτήδεια τυγχάνειν αὐτοῖς φανείη νόμων τε καὶ ἐθισμῶν. Τὰς δὲ ἀρχὰς ἁπάσας ὅσαις θυσία τε καὶ θεραπεία θεῶν ἀνάκειται, καὶ τοὺς ἱερεῖς ἅπαντας ἐξετάζουσι ("and they legislate concerning whatever sacred matters are unwritten and not fixed by custom, judging what seems to them fitting, whether of laws or of customs; and they examine all the magistracies to which sacrifice and the service of the gods is entrusted, and all the priests as well") Ὑπηρέτας τε αὐτῶν καὶ λειτουργοὺς, οἷς χρῶνται πρὸς τὰ ἱερὰ, οὗτοι φυλάττουσι μηδὲν ἐξαμαρτάνειν παρὰ τοὺς ἱεροὺς νόμους. Τοῖς τε ἰδιώταις, ὑπόσοι μὴ ἴσασι τοὺς περὶ τὰ θεῖα, ἢ δαιμόνια, σεβασμούς, ἐξηγηταὶ γίνονται καὶ προφῆται· καὶ εἴ τινας αἴσθωνται μὴ πειθομένους ταῖς ἐπιταγαῖς αὐτῶν, ζημιοῦσι πρὸς ἕκαστον χρῆμα ὁρῶντες ("they also keep watch over their own attendants and ministers, whom they employ for sacred rites, that these transgress nothing against the sacred laws; and to private persons, as many as do not know the reverences due to things divine or to spirits, they become interpreters and prophets, and if they perceive any not obeying their commands, they fine them, having regard to each man's means") Εἰσί τε ἀνυπεύθυνοι πάσης δίκης τε καὶ ζημίας, οὔτε βουλῇ λόγον ἀποδιδόντες οὔτε δήμῳ. Ἐκλιπόντος δέ τινος αὐτῶν τὸν βίον, ἕτερος εἰς τὸν ἐκείνου καθίστατο τόπον, οὐχ ὑπὸ τοῦ δήμου αἱρεθεὶς, ἀλλ᾽ ὑπὸ αὐτῶν ἐκείνων ("and they are unaccountable to any trial or penalty, rendering account neither to the senate nor to the people; and when one of them departed this life, another was appointed to his place, not chosen by the people, but by those very pontiffs themselves") — Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, book 2. One might rightly doubt whether Dionysius, were he now living at Rome as he once did, could give a more accurate description of pontifical authority. "The pontiffs," he says, "are endowed with supreme authority, and rule in matters of the greatest moment. For they judge all sacred disputes among private persons, magistrates, and ministers of sacred things" (in exercising this part of his authority, the Roman pontiff has thrown into confusion every Christian kingdom without exception, and some he has even ruined and overturned). "But they also make laws concerning sacred matters not yet written down nor received by custom, if these seem worthy to be established by laws and customs" (that is, they alone were the judges of unwritten traditions, so that they could decree, by laws and canons, that whatever they wished, and whenever they wished, should be observed — which is the strongest citadel of the present pontifical power). "Likewise they inquire into all magistrates to whom the sacrifices and worship of the gods is entrusted, and into all priests, and they keep the ministers of sacred things to their duty, lest they transgress in anything against the sacred laws" (that is, they alone are lords of the whole clergy, the fount and origin of every ecclesiastical order and power). "To the unlearned also they point out and interpret the worship of the gods or of spirits" (for these unlearned it is enough if, with implicit faith, they reverently observe and embrace what the pontiffs themselves prescribe in the worship of the saints). "But if they observe anyone despising their ordinances, they fine him according to the magnitude of the offense" (but we do not read that these penalties were capital, except in the case of the Vestal virgins; yet there is scarcely a region in the whole of Europe which the Roman pontiffs of the second rank have not stained with deadly slaughters, blood, fire, and deaths of various kinds, on account of neglect of their ordinances). "They themselves are exempt from trials and fines, nor are they bound to render account either to the senate or to the people" (that is, the pontiff judges all, and is judged by none; and indeed the word ἀνυπεύθυνος ("unaccountable") sounds sweet to pontifical ears — but whether they will or not, they shall at last render account to the Judge of all). "But if one of them should depart this life, another is customarily substituted in the place of the deceased, not by the votes of the people, but whoever seems most fit to the college" — just as is still done at Rome today. Let the reader learn from this whose successor, and whose vicar, the Roman pontiff is.

XIV. In the next place he sets forth agreement in doctrine with the ancient church. But since he excludes the apostles and their writings from that "ancient church," he means nothing other than that the true church is the one which teaches concerning sacred matters just as its predecessors, of whom it is composed, taught. Yet this was the best-fortified citadel of the whole of paganism. They reckoned nothing more foolish, nothing more deserving of censure, than to reject rites πατροπαράδοτοι ("handed down from the fathers"). That was the "superstition" which knew nothing of the ancient gods. Socrates was condemned to death for no other reason than that he judged those not to be gods whom the city had of old believed to be gods. Against Christians especially men raged with such fury precisely because they were deserters of their ancestral and native religion. How much trouble the idolaters caused the professors of the gospel on this very argument, Origen, Justin, Tertullian, Arnobius, Lactantius, Augustine, and Clement of Alexandria bear witness, and to a man all who undertook the defense of the truth against their sophistries. Thus they too were not free from this prejudice against the gospel.

XV. Bellarmine's seventh mark is the union of the members among themselves, and with the head, the bishop of Rome. One is ashamed of so insolent a boast: that union which flourishes among the Roman party is the greatest reproach of the Christian name, and had not the motive of self-interest — which operates powerfully among the majority — been at work, it would long since have all but vanished. Take away violence, the most savage tyranny, burning alive, ignorance, avarice, worldly pride, and love of this present world, and that "union" will at once show itself too thin a thing to stand. What sort of thing it is, the wars, robberies, butcheries, murders, devastations of cities, and depopulations of fields bear witness — things daily perpetrated and still occurring among the members of that church, while the Roman pontiff protests in vain. Were they not the most stupid, the most blind, or the most shameless of mortals — and likewise the most ignorant of evangelical truth — they would long ago have been ashamed of so insane a boast. I would rather have the church divided into a thousand fragments than united after the papist fashion. Discords, dissensions, schisms — political, ecclesiastical, of minds, of opinions, of writings — flourish within that conspiracy of men which wishes to be called "the church," as the whole world knows. Only in this do these crafty men, bewitched by the affairs of this age, seem to agree, for various reasons — political, worldly, satanic — namely, that they might vigorously oppose evangelical truth and the liberty of Christians purchased by Christ himself. Yet I would not assert that there is no unity whatsoever among the papists, since the Spirit foretold concerning the pope that he "would cause all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to have a mark in their right hand" (Revelation 13:16). Among the heathen matters stood very differently in many respects. That "strong man armed" kept his whole house, the world, in peace and union. There was indeed a certain diversity in worship, not unlike that seen among the religious orders, of whom one favors this saint and another that one more. As to the main point, the ancient idolaters worshipped in the closest concord among themselves under their head Satan and his vicar, the Roman high priest — especially after the world had removed itself to that city. That Augustus should not permit various religions to be introduced, nor allow gods other than those he himself worshipped to be adored and proclaimed, Maecenas urged upon him, as recorded in Dio — as we have shown elsewhere; and the introduction of foreign gods was forbidden by the Law of the Twelve Tables. That it was impious and unlawful for Romans to adopt sacred customs foreign to those of the city, they argue against the teaching of Paul, Acts 16:21. Egypt alone was almost the demanded exception for heresies. In suppressing the truth there was no disagreement. "The pagans," says Augustine in his Sermon on Fasting, "worshipping many different gods, indeed quarrelling and burning with hostile hatred against one another, nevertheless maintain among themselves a kind of unity, in that they go alike to their temples; though the gods themselves are at odds, the worshippers are of one mind." And puffed up with the notion of this concord, they were accustomed to reproach the Christians for their dissensions, as the same Augustine testifies, in his book On the Sheep, chapter 15, and Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, book 7.

XVI. Let us proceed with the cardinal. He mentions, in the eighth and ninth places, the sanctity of doctrine, together with its efficacy, and the sanctity of its authors. Beyond all doubt, the most holy doctrine is the truest. For the gospel itself is "the truth which is according to godliness," as the apostle testifies, Titus 1:1. And it is likewise supremely efficacious, since "the word of God is living and powerful" (Hebrews 4:12), indeed "the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth" (Romans 1:16). By it are regenerated "as many as are born of God" (1 Peter 1:23). And its author is holy, since none but the most holy Son of God was its author (Hebrews 1:1-2; John 1:18). But what holiness is, and what is true or false, we cannot know except as taught by that very word. Now the holiness which can be seen can be feigned; that which cannot be feigned cannot be seen. As for the holiness of the Roman church, very many men of every rank within it — indeed almost all — bear witness against it: the clergy especially. The lives, morals, and deaths of the popes, detestable even to pagans, bear witness; the arrogance, pride, avarice, ignorance, cowardice, cruelty, and rapine of the bishops; the cunning, frauds, impurity, hypocrisy, and unspeakable sins of those called "religious"; the idolatry of them all; and, above all, the frauds, impostures, lies, treacheries, murders, lusts, and perjuries of the Jesuits, together with their skill in extenuating the sins of men of every rank. And the sanctity of that church has at last progressed so far that, among the American Indians — among whom, of all peoples, it ought most to have been cultivated in honor of Christ and the gospel — the very name "Christian" has been rendered plainly odious and abominable, so that, whatever is finally determined about them, they obstinately and stubbornly refuse to have anything in common with Christians or their religion. Luis de Granada complains that matters have at last come to such a pass "that among barbarous nations the Christian name is so execrable that, when monks are sent to them, in order that the natives may not hold them in similar hatred, it is necessary to say that they are not Christians but 'fathers' who have come to look after their salvation; for the Spaniards treated them with such cruelty that the most holy name of Christian came to be regarded not as a name of piety and religion, but of cruelty and savagery." The most holy Lord Jesus will, at his appointed time, exact the penalties for this sort of holiness. The fathers of the Society likewise acted "holily" when, in preaching the gospel among the Chinese, they carefully concealed that Jesus Christ had been crucified, and so persuaded them to place their faith in some other, unknown "Jesus" — a practice finally forbidden at Rome. It is remarkable that Bellarmine dared to touch on this topic at all, since he knew perfectly well how easy it would be, from the approved histories and writers of his own church, to compile, from everyday examples, enormous volumes crammed full of the execrable crimes, lusts, and impieties of the foremost fathers of that church. But that task is not ours. If our most learned author speaks of a holiness that meets the eyes of men, all confess that it ought to be measured by some rule, either divinely given or received in whatever manner. Now there was among the heathen a doctrine held by certain philosophers, which many Christians even now are not ashamed to call most holy. Very many examples prove its efficacy in changing men's morals; and how great was the sanctity of life among the heathen according to the precepts of philosophy is well known. Apart from faith alone, and the knowledge of the true God in Christ — which alone is eternal life — it seems that scarcely anything of what meets the eye was wanting to some of those philosophers.

XVII. Next he lists the miracles which, he contends, occur in his own church and nowhere else. Nowhere do certain papist writers conduct themselves more magnificently than when it comes to miracles. If ever the great Valerianus showed himself a man in recounting the miracles of the Capuchin friars — let the reader consult him, for whom the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine is not sufficient, and also the Observations of that most learned man Johannes Comenius upon Valerianus's history of these miracles. If anyone delights in tricks, trifles, fictions, lies, vanities, useless and monstrous things, diabolical, ridiculous, and blasphemous tales, let him turn to the legends, the writers of the lives of the saints, the archives of the monks, the canonizations of the papal saints, and the compilers of ecclesiastical annals after the fourth century, and whatever else of that kind can anywhere be scraped together or invented — these will furnish him an abundant supply. I have judged it worth repeating here just one out of a thousand such tales, by which the rest may be judged; it is recorded in the Book of Conformities. When Francis, says the author, "was once preaching, and a donkey among the crowd was making a disturbance, Francis said to it, 'Brother donkey, be still until I have finished my sermon.' At once the donkey, obedient to the word, composed himself and lay down at Francis's feet in an orderly manner." It would be a wonder if there remained in the whole world a single donkey unwilling at once to surrender itself to the power of that church, in which such efficacy for working miracles as this holds sway.

XVIII. Meanwhile, however — while all men know that true miracles, wrought by the immediate power of God to confirm heavenly truth, such as were those of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the apostles, possessed great force and efficacy to rouse the minds of men to attend to the truth itself and believe it — it is equally most certain that diabolical portents and wonders, whose causes cannot be traced, and fictions sold and believed as genuine miracles, are extremely powerful for entangling the common people in superstitious credulity, and for making them embrace with stubborn reverence the doctrines which such wonders appear to confirm. Yet miracles of this sort were exceedingly frequent among the heathen. There is scarcely one among the more reputable Greek or Latin historians who has not recorded a great many of them in writing. Well known are the things Porphyry wrote about Pythagoras, and Philostratus about Apollonius — so much so that Hierocles impiously contended that this magician of Tyana was to be compared with Christ himself in the brilliance of his miracles; Eusebius refutes his wicked audacity in a treatise devoted to the subject. But this, of course, is nothing to the papists, for whom it is customary to swear that this or that friar performed more miracles than Christ himself and all the apostles together. Countless wonders of this kind are scattered throughout Diodorus, Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius, Tacitus, Caesar, Pausanias, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Valerius Maximus gathered a number of them, book 1, chapter 6. I do not wish to dwell on particular instances, or to compare them with the miracles of the papists. Let it suffice to allude to the much-celebrated story of the deliverance of the temple at Delphi from the sacrilege of the Gauls. Pausanias, among others, relates it in his Phocica. All know that Satan set up his throne among men — his chief seat — at Delphi for several centuries. Nowhere on earth did he more shamelessly sell himself as "the god of this world." The Gauls, under the leadership of Brennus, bursting into Greece, undertook to plunder the temple of Apollo built there, enriched by the offerings of almost every nation and people. When, having overcome Thermopylae, Brennus made straight for Delphi, the townspeople, struck with fear, fled for refuge to the oracle; the god at once bade them be of good courage and fear nothing: φυλάξειν δὲ αὐτὸς ἐπηγγείλετο τὰ ἑαυτοῦ ("he promised that he would defend what was his own"); at once everything was full of prodigies. Τοῖς βαρβάροις ἀντεσήμαινε τὰ ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ταχύ τε καὶ ὧν ἴσμεν φανερώτατα ("signs from the god, sudden and the most manifest of any we know, appeared against the barbarians"). Ἥ τε γὰρ γῆ πᾶσα ὅσην ἐπεῖχεν τῶν Γαλατῶν στρατεία βιαίως καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐσείετο τῆς ἡμέρας ("for first the earth, so much of it as the Gauls' battle-line occupied, was violently shaken for almost the whole day"). Βρονταί τε καὶ κεραυνοὶ συνεχεῖς ἐγίνοντο, καὶ οἱ μὲν ἐξέπληττόν τε τοὺς Κελτοὺς καὶ δέχεσθαι τοῖς ὠσὶ τὰ παραγγελλόμενα ἐκώλυον ("continual thunder and lightning terrified the Celts, and, by dulling their senses, prevented them from hearing the signals given by their commanders"). Τὰ τῶν ἡρώων τηνικαῦτα σφίσιν ἐφάνη φάσματα, ὁ Ὑπέροχος καὶ Λαίδοκός τε, καὶ Πύρρος ("and then there appeared to them apparitions of heroes — Hyperochus, Laodocus, and Pyrrhus"), and others besides. Τοιούτοις μὲν οἱ βάρβαροι παρὰ πᾶσαν τὴν ἡμέραν παθήμασί τε καὶ ἐκπλήξεσι συνείχοντο. Τὰ δὲ τῇ νυκτὶ πολλῷ σφᾶς ἔμελλεν ἀλγεινότερα ἐπιλήψασθαι ("with such sufferings and terrors the barbarians were beset the whole day long; but by night far more grievous things were about to befall them"). How this came about, what follows shows: ῥίγος τε γὰρ ἰσχυρὸν καὶ νιφετὸς ἦν ὁμοῦ τῷ ῥίγει. Πέτραι τε ἀπολισθάνουσαι τοῦ Παρνασσοῦ μεγάλαι, καὶ κρημνοὶ καταρρηγνύμενοι σκοπὸν τοὺς βαρβάρους εἶχον, καὶ αὐτοῖς οὐ καθ᾽ ἕνα ἢ δύο, ἀλλὰ κατὰ τριάκοντα καὶ ἔτι πλείοσιν, ὡς ἕκαστοι ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ φρουροῦντες, ἢ καὶ ἀναπαυόμενοι τύχοιεν, ἀθρόοις ἡ ἀπώλεια ἐγίνετο ὑπὸ τῆς ἐμβολῆς τῶν κρημνῶν ("for that night a bitter cold, together with snow, afflicted them severely; and besides, huge rocks torn loose from Parnassus, and crags breaking away, took the barbarians as their mark; nor were they crushed one or two at a time, but thirty or more together, according as each group happened to be posted on watch or resting together, were struck down all at once by the onrush of the cliffs"). In this way, terrified, broken, and scattered, they were destroyed to the last man. Thus it pleased God to avenge the wicked impiety of mankind, and their falling away from the knowledge and worship of himself. For because they were not minded to retain God in their knowledge, God handed them over to the power of the prince of darkness, and permitted him, for their greater hardening in the defense of the citadel of superstition, to work so many and such prodigious wonders. In the same manner God foretold — and has indeed carried out — that he would deal with the followers of antichrist. For because "they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved," "God sent them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie," and gave them over to be deluded by him "whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders," as the apostle teaches us, 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11. There is, however, this difference between the degrees of efficacy of the two: the papal antichrist has never yet, anywhere, performed as many or as great miracles and prodigies as Satan produced in defense of pagan idolatry. For although myriads of such portents and prodigies are not to be weighed a straw's worth against a single testimony of Holy Scripture, yet if any such things had ever occurred anywhere in defense of the papists' sacred rites, of the sort and magnitude of what happened at Delphi, one can easily guess how eagerly the papists would seize upon them for their own advantage, and with what insolent boasting they would parade themselves everywhere. It was on this very prejudice — namely, that of miracles — that the heathen relied, and were not easily persuaded to be torn away from the darkness of their errors. For what? Should they abandon gods so powerful, propitious, and present, of whose care and affection for themselves and their worship they had such illustrious proofs — gods whose deity, power, supreme might, and benefits had been made manifest by so many wondrous prodigies — for the preaching of a new religion, unheard of before in the world, a work undertaken by a few obscure, superstitious, and worthless men? This indeed seemed altogether foreign to all wisdom, constancy, faith, and virtue. Was it to be thought reasonable that, abandoning the gods of their fathers after using them through an incalculable series of years in both war and peace, they should receive instead an unknown God, a crucified deliverer, and the Jewish religion? It would have seemed better to die than to admit to oneself so great a crime or disgrace. But that the gospel did in fact overcome these mountains of prejudice is well known.

XIX. The prophetic light is Bellarmine's twelfth mark — not, indeed, that light which was in the divinely inspired writers of the Old and New Testaments, nor that of Jesus Christ and his apostles, on which all Christian faith rests, but a certain gift of predicting future events which he says some in the Roman church have possessed — this is what the cardinal means. All know that pseudo-prophets have existed in every age, both within and outside the people of God, and there is nothing by which Satan has more bewitched the minds of men, and made them more subject to himself, than predictions of future things. Among the Gentiles there lived the Sibyls, themselves pagan, whose most celebrated oracles all served to confirm the foulest idolatry, as appears from all their prophecies drawn from their books, extant in Livy, Cicero, and others. The Delphic oracle, and others besides, the whole world venerated. We do not now dispute how far Satan is able, or how far God is willing to permit him, to foretell future things. This is certain: among the heathen it was most firmly believed that the prophetic light resided with themselves alone; that their gods alone had foreknowledge of the future and gave notice of it; and that they had shared that gift of foreknowing future things with many men. Occupied, then, by this prejudice as well, they stubbornly declared war upon the truth.

XX. In his thirteenth mark, which is "the confession of adversaries," the cardinal extricates himself unhappily; had he not already resolved beforehand to complete a total of fifteen marks, beyond all doubt he would never have snatched up so inept a notion from the street corner. Would that there had been no one among the ancient fathers, the scholastics, or others, who by their own admission conceded so much to paganism as to affirm that the heathen, provided only they lived "according to reason" (μετὰ λόγου), could be saved in that superstition; for the cardinal will never extort a more telling testimony from the mouth of any adversary of his own church than that one.

XXI. The unhappy end of those who opposed themselves to the church constitutes the fourteenth mark. This too the idolaters claimed for themselves. We have already mentioned the utter destruction of the sacrilegious Gauls. "The gold of Toulouse" passed into a proverb. All the historians record the unhappy ends of those who, neglecting or despising the established religions, undertook any enterprise whatsoever. From this one may guess how much confidence the heathen placed in this mark: for when the gospel first began to become known, the metropolis of all superstition had grown, through various successes and prosperous outcomes, to such a pitch of worldly felicity that it had nowhere higher left to climb. And from this they constantly affirmed that all unfortunate turns of events, all unhappy outcomes of wars, and every evil by which mankind was in any way afflicted, were to be imputed to the Christians and their religion. Hence Tertullian: "They also allege, in defense of their hatred, the further vanity of supposing that the Christians are the cause of every public calamity, of every popular misfortune. If the Tiber rises to the walls, if the Nile fails to rise upon the fields, if the sky stands still, if the earth quakes, if there is famine, if there is plague, at once the cry goes up, 'The Christians to the lions!'" Cyprian says similar things in his letter To Demetrianus, as does Augustine, City of God, book 3, chapter 30, and book 5, chapter 22, and in the latter part of question 126 To the Orthodox: πῶς δὲ ὁ Ἑλληνισμὸς οὐ δείκνυται ὁσιώτερος, ὅτι ἕως μὲν ἐκεῖνος κατεῖχε τὰς πόλεις, πᾶσαι αἱ πόλεις καὶ οἱ ἀγροὶ εὐπραγίαν καὶ εὐθηνίαν ἐκέκτηντο, καὶ ταῦτα συχνότερον πολεμούμεναι, ἀφ᾽ οὗ δὲ αὐτὰς τὸ Χριστιανικὸν κατέλαβε κήρυγμα, καὶ οἴκων, καὶ οἰκούντων καὶ τῆς λοιπῆς εὐθηνίας κατέστησαν ἔρημοι; καὶ μόλις τὰ λείψανα τῶν πάλαι ὑπὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων γεγενημένων κτισμάτων κατέχουσαι, τό ποτε πόλεις γεγενῆσθαι δεικνύουσι, τῆς παλαιᾶς εὐθηνίας καὶ τῆς νέας ἐρημίας ἑκατέρας τὰς θρησκείας αἰτίας ἀμφοτέρων προφέρουσαι ("How, then, is Hellenism not shown to be more pious, in that, so long as it held the cities, all the cities and the fields possessed prosperity and abundance, even though warred upon more frequently; but from the time the Christian preaching took hold of them, they were left destitute of houses, of inhabitants, and of all other prosperity, and, scarcely retaining the remains of buildings raised long ago by the Greeks, show thereby that they were once cities — thus each side adducing its own religion as the cause both of the old prosperity and of the new desolation?"). It is thus most certain that Bellarmine here fights with none but the very weapons of the Gentiles. Let one consult the apologetic writings of the ancient Christians — Justin, Tertullian, Arnobius, Augustine, Orosius — to see plainly both what the heathen concluded from this mark, and what is really to be concluded from it.

XXII. Temporal felicity divinely granted is Bellarmine's final mark of the true church. Had he approached the ruin of the church soberly, he would scarcely have made use of this mark. It is a pagan mark, a Muhammadan mark, and one especially opposed to the word of God. It was on this very ground that the idolatrous crowd of Jews in Egypt contended against the prophet Jeremiah, Jeremiah 44:15-18: "Then all the men who knew that their wives had burned incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, and all the people who dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying: As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the LORD, we will not listen to you. But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goes forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything, and have been consumed by the sword and by famine." Let the cardinal go now and teach us what the difference is between his mark and this mark of the Jews. On both sides men dispute most fiercely, and affirm that felicity was divinely granted on the one side, on account of which they gave themselves to the worship of the heavenly powers, and that on the other side extreme misery resulted from neglecting that worship. But what, I ask, are bread, food, and merriment, compared with what the pagan orator brings forward in asserting this very mark? "However much we may wish, conscript fathers, to flatter ourselves," he says, "yet we have surpassed all peoples and nations — not in number, as the Spaniards; not in strength, as the Gauls; not in cunning, as the Carthaginians; not in the arts, as the Greeks; nor, finally, in that native and inborn sense peculiar to their own race and soil, as the Italians and Latins themselves — but in piety and religion, and in this one wisdom, that we have discerned that all things are ruled and governed by the will of the immortal gods; by this we have surpassed all peoples and nations" (Cicero, On the Response of the Haruspices, 9). If the cardinal were to hear a former consul discoursing most gravely on the deeds, victories, and prodigious successes of the Romans, and turning all these to the confirmation of the emptiest superstition, what, I ask, would he have to say in reply? That this furnishes a mark of the true church — and thus of true religion and true worship — he would not deny; whether he would concede the point or not is uncertain; but how he could defend both himself and the truth is exceedingly hard to guess. So Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, book 2, affirms that he has set forth the Roman sacred rites ἵνα τοῖς ἀγνοοῦσι τὴν Ῥωμαίων εὐσέβειαν, ἣν οἱ ἄνδρες ἐπετήδευον, μὴ παράδοξον φανῇ τὸ πάντας αὐτοῖς τὸ κάλλιστον λαβεῖν τοὺς πολέμους τέλος· ἁπάντων γὰρ αὐτῶν τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ὑποθέσεις εὐσεβεστάτας φανήσονται ποιησάμενοι, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο μάλιστα τοὺς θεοὺς ἐσχηκότες ἐν τοῖς κινδύνοις εὐμενεῖς — that is, "so that those to whom the piety of the Romans, which these men practiced, has hitherto been unknown, may cease to wonder that the outcomes of their wars have always turned out most happily for them; for it will be found that they undertook all their wars and enterprises most religiously and on the most just grounds, and therefore had the gods most propitious to them in their dangers."

XXIII. And all this is said to this end: that the divine power and efficacy of the gospel — that is, of the preaching of the cross of Christ, by which it erected such notable trophies over every form of idolatrous worship within so short a span of time — may shine forth the more brightly. Relying on that alone, and on the presence and power of Christ in it, a very few men attacked countless multitudes, the whole world; the poor attacked the lords of all things; the unwise, the wisest; the unlearned, the most learned — men fortified with prejudices, arguments, most ancient traditions, miracles, and proofs which even Christians, at least in name, still reckon irrefragable — and they did not desist, until, through a thousand dangers, deaths, torments, and countless perils, they had subdued the whole world to God and to Christ.

XXIV. But as soon as the light of the gospel began to shine forth, Satan seemed, from many signs, to foresee the ruin of his catholic and most ancient dominion. Yet, unwilling to appear to grow faint or fail himself in this extremity, he left no stone unturned to fortify himself and his own against the heavenly truth, and to crush it. For besides forcing his slaves, with monstrous cruelty, to rage against the professors of the gospel, so that, if it could be done, he might smother the truth in the blood of those who held it, he also strove, in various ways, to restore that superstition in which he alone was everything, and to add to it new strength and a new luster. For since paganism had two parts — namely, empty opinions concerning God and things divine, and idolatrous worship — very many things in both parts were most widely received among all men, things from which human reason itself, whenever it called them to the bar of examination, could not help but recoil. Therefore, lest anyone should take occasion from these things first to doubt the whole of that emptiest superstition in whose snares they were entangled, and thence go on to seek out the truth, as soon as the fame of the gospel had spread abroad in the world, he stirred up great and learned men who, without prejudice to his own absolute rule (αὐτοκρατορία), might devise and defend opinions about God and things divine that were more spiritual and less repugnant to right reason, and might establish ways of celebrating worship at least less foolish and ridiculous than those commonly in use. In the first part of this work, Amelius, Eumenius, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Celsus, and others labored diligently on his behalf. For although these men clung most tenaciously to idolatry, they nevertheless set forth, with great care, opinions about God more sober than the common run of philosophers had previously handed down, and they exploded vain, false, and harmful notions about the deity. And it is most certain that, in this very endeavor, they made use of the benefit of that truth which they hated, but which had already cast its rays into the minds of men. Of those who labored to gloss over the wicked worship and its most abominable mysteries with a fair varnish, the chief were Apollonius, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Julian; and in these men consisted the last effort of collapsing Hellenism. But the word and Spirit of God prevailed — until, through the increasing malice and impiety of men, almost the whole world once more shamefully fell away from the true and pure worship of God.

Book Two

On the Restoration of Theology after the Fall and the Entrance of Sin, and Its Corruption Anew; or, Concerning Adamic Sublapsarian Antediluvian Theology.

Chapter 1

Theology gradually corrupted, gradually restored — Theology in the abstract, as divine doctrine — The degrees of revelation — The origin of supernatural theology — The first degree, in the promise of the seed of the woman — In that promise a new covenant given, entered into, established — The force of the word בְּרִית ("covenant") — The nature of the covenant between God and men, Genesis 3:15, explained — Christ promised as mediator — The Lamb slain — The chief heads of the new theology — What the Targumists, and Paul in Hebrews 2:14, draw from Genesis 3:15 — What "the last days" are — Christ the seed of the woman — The malice of the more recent Jews — The godlessness of the Socinians — The well-known blunder of the Vulgate translator — The blasphemy of certain commentators — The madness of Fabricius Boderianus — Adam's repentance and thanksgiving — The precepts of the new theology, what they were and of what kind — The institution of sacrifices — The trifling notions of the papists, the Socinians, and Episcopius concerning their origin — Smalcius's opinion refuted — Porphyry's account examined — A summary of Adamic theology after the fall.

I. We have set forth, in the previous book, those matters pertaining to the general notions of theology. We have also shown the origin, use, and disappearance of innate, or original, theology (θεολογία ἔμφυτος). We must now proceed to treat of the institution of that other, substituted theology (θεολογία ὑπαλλακτική). Since, however, neither was that natural theology corrupted all at once, nor has this new theology, which we are now taking up, been restored in a single stroke and in one uniform manner, but rather "in many parts and in many ways" — the one having suffered corruption by degrees, the other having attained its perfection by degrees — I have judged it proper to set forth briefly the more notable stages of each.

II. We have taught earlier that theology can be taken either "in the abstract," as they say, for divine doctrine, or "in the concrete," for a disposition of mind in theologians — that is, as "a faculty exercised to discern both good and evil" (Hebrews 5:14). So Aristotle says of astrology: "Astrology is the name given both to the science concerning heavenly things, and to the sailors' skill regarding those matters." For in antiquity the ἀστρολόγος ("astrologer") was the same as the ἀστρονόμος ("astronomer"). Nowadays the name is given to one who predicts I know not what effects of the stars. But every theology of true name that exists after the fall is of the same kind: it has been renewed at various times only objectively, through various degrees of revelation. That disposition of mind, then, by which such doctrine is grasped and perceived, is exactly the same in the theologians of every age. But since we shall have much to say about this when we come to consider theology properly so called — Christian theology — we have judged it best to reserve the whole discussion of that disposition for that place. We shall first treat briefly of the various degrees and progress of supernatural revelation, or of the new theology. The apostle points to the whole of this doctrine in Hebrews 1:1. And since the primeval theology underwent degrees of corruption nearly matching these, these too must be discussed.

III. After the entrance of sin, and the consequent uselessness and disappearance of natural theology, there proceeded, from the infinite abyss of divine grace, wisdom, and love of mankind, the Adamic antediluvian theology — that is, the very first evangelical promise. Here supernatural theology fixed its first footstep; here was its origin and its first degree. This revelation of the mind and grace of God must, then, be recounted first; and then we must show how the corruption of theologians took up the progress from there, followed by a catholic apostasy, and a dreadful utter destruction. We have shown earlier that all true theology rests upon some divine covenant. Now although בְּרִית sometimes signifies a bare promise, and is first used in that sense in Scripture (Genesis 6:18; Exodus 34:10; Isaiah 59:21), nevertheless, since a promise of this kind exhibits some good which demands a corresponding stipulation of duties — "the answer of a good conscience toward God" (compare Jeremiah 31:33) — we may declare that every divine covenant has both its precepts and its promises. When, therefore, we say that God entered into a new covenant with the fallen Adam, we mean a new prescription of obedience, fortified with gracious promises. Nothing more than this is required for constituting and confirming a covenant between God and men. We call that covenant a covenant of grace because it was gratuitously founded in another, that is, in a mediator. For whatever covenant could have been entered into immediately with men — even one requiring obedience with equity and without strictness — would still have been a covenant of works. This new covenant, then, was a covenant of grace precisely because it was founded in another, who was bound to fulfill all its conditions. Upon the promises and precepts of this covenant this new theology was built.

IV. The foundation and nature of this covenant may be contemplated in that most celebrated promise of the victorious seed. Genesis 3:15: וְאֵיבָה אָשִׁית בֵּינְךָ וּבֵין הָאִשָּׁה וּבֵין זַרְעֲךָ וּבֵין זַרְעָהּ הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב — "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Here Christ was first promised; hence he was afterward called ὁ λόγος ("the Word") — that is, he of whom that saving word, or word of promise, of God was spoken. For "word" is very often used absolutely for "promise," as we say in English, "I will give you my word for it," and "I will make good my word; that is my promise" — an observation made by the most learned Cartwright in his Harmony of the Gospels. In this same promise, the Lamb was slain — slain, that is, with respect to the actual event yet to come, but already slain with respect to its saving effect, namely, from the very foundations of the world. This, I say, is the sum of the new theology. Here indeed the river of paradise (so to speak) divides itself into four heads: namely, that righteousness — and, by its power, a gracious acceptance — was no longer to be sought at home, from obedience rendered by one's own native strength, but was to be received freely from another, who would avert the peril of eternal death; this is first revealed here. Concerning death, the wages of sin, and the justification of sinners before God, God was even then dealing with our first parents. He calls Adam to answer for himself, in verse nine; in verse eleven he demands an account of the sin and convicts him as guilty; he pronounces death upon the guilty one, verse nineteen; for by that most severe expostulation, "Hast thou eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" he shows that Adam had utterly voided the covenant of works, and had thereby forfeited all communion with God. Concerning the renewal of that communion through another, then, he is here dealing. For he had most clearly taught that no hope at all was to be found in the sinful man himself. Second, that this deliverer — this other one, through whom every kind of salvation was thenceforth to be expected — was to be brought into the world by an incarnation, to be born, that is, of a woman (Galatians 4:4). Hence he is here called "the seed of the woman"; which bringing-in the apostle calls the εἰσαγωγὴ τοῦ πρωτοτόκου εἰς τὴν οἰκουμένην ("bringing in of the firstborn into the world," Hebrews 1:6), and of which it is said that he εἰσέρχεται εἰς τὸν κόσμον ("entereth into the world," Hebrews 10:5). Accordingly, just as sin entered the world through the woman, at the suggestion and instigation of the serpent, so also God promises that the remedy would proceed through her. Third, that in order for the deliverer to be perfect, he must both suffer and conquer the serpent; for the bite on the heel inflicted by the serpent deals a deadly wound. He therefore foretells that this deliverer, from the seed of the woman, would taste death for sin and for sinners (Hebrews 2:9). And since Satan would wish to pursue and press home, to the eternal destruction of all, the victory he had just won over the human race, God promises that that seed would not only wrest the victory from his hands and divide the spoil with that strong one (Isaiah 53:12), but would also vanquish Satan himself and overthrow his works. Finally, that this excellent Savior and supreme Victor, together with that eternal righteousness — that צֶדֶק עֹלָמִים ("everlasting righteousness," Daniel 9:24) which he was to bring in — was to be apprehended by faith. Both the nature of the case and the manner of the revelation require this. For when the most utterly lost and accursed sinners are told that salvation of every kind is to be sought and expected from some other than themselves, absolutely nothing more is required in order that they may become partakers of that salvation, than that they should trust in him, and, denying themselves, place their whole hope in him. The manner of the revelation consisted in a promise, which likewise demands faith; for it cannot be understood how anyone should set about obtaining a promised thing, except by giving credence to the promise itself. It would be easy to show that, in these heads — however obscurely — the whole doctrine concerning the person and office of the Mediator, concerning free justification, concerning repentance, concerning eternal death, life, and reward, and concerning the resurrection of the flesh, is contained.

V. That this promise had respect to the Messiah, the older Jews acknowledged, though the more recent deny it. The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel: "They shall apply a remedy to the heel בְּיוֹמֵי מַלְכָּא מְשִׁיחָא ('in the days of King Messiah')." The Jerusalem Targum: "They shall grant safety in the heel בְּסוֹף עִקְבָא יוֹמַיָּא בְּיוֹמוֹהִי דְמַלְכָּא מְשִׁיחָא ('at the end of the extremity of days, in the days of King Messiah')"; and it says, "He will remember it against thee" — which is the language of one who threatens, as we say in English, "Remember this," by which we threaten retaliation. Both paraphrasts teach that the serpent's wound would be incurable. Paul, dealing with the Jews in the same sense, expounds this promise according to the faith commonly held by them at that time, Hebrews 2:14: ἐπεὶ οὖν τὰ παιδία κεκοινώνηκε σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος, καὶ αὐτὸς παραπλησίως μετέσχε τῶν αὐτῶν, ἵνα διὰ τοῦ θανάτου καταργήσῃ τὸν τὸ κράτος ἔχοντα τοῦ θανάτου, τοῦτ᾽ ἔστι τὸν διάβολον ("Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil"); verse 15, καὶ ἀπαλλάξῃ τούτους, ὅσοι φόβῳ θανάτου διὰ παντὸς τοῦ ζῆν ἔνοχοι ἦσαν δουλείας ("and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage"). What else do these words mean but that a cure, or remedy, for the serpent's bite was prepared through the Messiah? And this was to come to pass ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν ("in the last days") — that is, בְּסוֹף עִקְבָא יוֹמַיָּא. That "the days of the Messiah" are "the last days" the apostle also asserts elsewhere, namely, chapter 1:2. Moreover, that no remedy was prepared for the serpent — as both Targums expressly affirm — the same apostle likewise teaches, chapter 2:16: οὐ γὰρ δήπου ἀγγέλων ἐπιλαμβάνεται, ἀλλὰ σπέρματος Ἀβραὰμ ἐπιλαμβάνεται ("for verily he took not on him the nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of Abraham"). So too in the Midrash on the Psalms, on Psalm 1: "All things shall be healed in the world to come, except the serpent" (הכל מתרפאים לעולם הבא חוץ מן הנחש). That the apostle, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, disputes from principles once conceded among the Jews, we shall show (God willing) in our commentary on that epistle. The more recent Jews, out of hatred for Christ, hold a different opinion. Fagius rightly says: "From this we may see that there was greater honesty among the ancient Hebrews in the interpretation of the Scriptures than there is today among the more recent Jewish writers, who often, and deliberately, distort the clearest and most important passages of Scripture, and maliciously twist them to their own sense." Josephus of old clung to the mere husk of the words, book 1, chapter 3 of the Antiquities. I know not what allegories Philo invents. The Socinians deny that any promise concerning Christ is contained here. "If we should deny that there is a promise there, but rather a curse — and that, like all the others, a temporal one, signifying the enmity between men and serpents, since none had existed before — what, I ask, would Carolius bring forward to confirm that a 'word' was promised there?" — so Johannes Sommer, Against Peter Carolius, book 2, chapter 3, fol. 73. Hence, in expounding the degrees of the revelation of the divine will, Volkelius passes over this passage in perpetual silence (On the True Religion, book 2, chapter 8, pp. 13-14), as does Simon Episcopius, who follows in his footsteps (Institutes of Theology, book 2, chapter 11). Valentinus Smalcius states it expressly, in his Refutation of the Theses of Frantzius, disputation 4, p. 94: "That the gospel," he says — these are Frantzius's words — "took the beginnings of its establishment already in paradise, is confirmed by no authority of Holy Scripture, and by no argument. If it be said that those words, 'The seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent,' can be understood of Christ and of the victory he won over Satan — which is the only thing urged by everyone, and the only thing that can be drawn from these words — I answer that this does nothing for the point at issue. For there are many sayings in Holy Scripture originally uttered concerning other matters, which can afterward, under the new covenant, be applied to Christ and to what pertains to the new covenant. But to treat them as prophecies and promises belongs only to those who have nothing else by which openly to prove their opinions. And certainly, if the beginnings of the gospel had started in paradise, it seems scarcely credible that none of the sacred writers of the New Testament should have cited that prophecy even once — which nevertheless never happened, as is clearer than daylight." We have seen, then, what this man's opinion is concerning this evangelical prophecy and promise. He denies — and boldly — that it pertains directly to Christ, or that any mention is made of it in the New Testament. But not all are of the same opinion. Jeremias Felbinger calls Christ "that seed of the woman, promised by God to fallen men in paradise, who was to bruise the head of the infernal serpent" (Demonstration of the Gospel, p. 17). But Smalcius, with excessive shamelessness, denies that mention is made of this promise in the New Testament. The serpent is the devil (2 Corinthians 11:3; Revelation 12:9,14; 20:2); the wicked are γεννήματα ἐχιδνῶν ("offspring of vipers," Matthew 3:7), ἐκ πατρὸς διαβόλου ("of their father the devil," John 8:44), who was ἀνθρωποκτόνος ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς ("a murderer from the beginning," John 8:44) and ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς ἁμαρτάνει ("sinneth from the beginning," 1 John 3:8), through the seduction of our common first parents, by which he slew all mankind. Next, the seed of the woman is Christ (Hebrews 2:14; Galatians 3:16; 4:4). That he himself crushed the head of that serpent, the Socinians will not, I think, deny. See John 12:31; 14:30; Luke 10:18; 1 Corinthians 15:54; Hebrews 2:14; 1 John 3:8 — but of these elsewhere. The Vulgate translator has "she shall bruise" [ipsa conteret], and I know not what blasphemous nonsense certain commentators babble from this concerning the Blessed Virgin, with sheer asinine stupidity. זֶרַע ("seed") is masculine in gender; to it corresponds the pronoun הוּא, "he." Hence, although the older translators render זֶרַע by σπέρμα and not by σπόρος, they nevertheless have "him" [αὐτόν] where the sense requires "her" [αὐτῆς], attending to the sense of the thing rather than to the mere words, after the manner of the ancients. So the comic poet: "Where is the villain who ruined me?" — using a masculine pronoun of an antecedent of another gender. The same manner of speaking is not unusual in the New Testament: μαθητεύσατε πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, βαπτίζοντες αὐτούς ("teach all nations, baptizing them" — "them" masculine, though "nations" is neuter, Matthew 28:19); and the reverse form: "ὁ [namely, the seed] ἔπεσε παρὰ τὴν ὁδόν, καὶ τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ κατέφαγεν αὐτό" ("some fell by the way side, and the fowls of the air devoured it," where "it" is neuter though "seed" [σπόρος] is masculine, Luke 8:5); and, "πάλιν ἐντολὴν καινὴν γράφω ὑμῖν, ὅ ἐστιν ἀληθὲς ἐν αὐτῷ, καὶ ἐν ὑμῖν" ("again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in him and in you," 1 John 2:8); and Revelation 17:16: "καὶ τὰ δέκα κέρατα ἃ εἶδες ἐπὶ τὸ θηρίον, οὗτοι μισήσουσι τὴν πόρνην" ("and the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore") — why "these," masculine? Because those "horns" were in fact "kings" [βασιλεῖς], a masculine noun. Jerome rejects the reading "she" [ipsa] as contrary to the truth of the Hebrew, in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis. Detestable, therefore, is the audacity of Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie — a learned man indeed, but given to superstitions — who, in the Plantin interlinear edition, undertook to substitute הִיא for הוּא. That there is here no trace whatsoever of a variant reading appears from the testimony of that most diligent investigator of such variants, Louis Cappel, Sacred Criticism, book 5, chapter 11, section 4. In place of הִיא, whether through the deliberate design of propagating a falsehood, or through the mere carelessness of the printers, there crept in הָיָה — a word which is not even proper Hebrew. That, having received this promise, Adam repented and was delivered from his sin, is shown by the author of the book entitled the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 10:1: αὕτη (namely, Wisdom) πρωτόπλαστον πατέρα κόσμου μόνον κτισθέντα διεφύλαξε, καὶ ἐξείλατο αὐτὸν ἐκ παραπτώματος ἰδίου ("she preserved the first-formed father of the world, who was created alone, and delivered him out of his own transgression"). And the Targum on the Song of Songs 1:1 affirms, from Jewish tradition, that Adam, after the remission of his sin, on the Sabbath day offered a song of praise to God. Through this new revelation of grace, redemption, and the remission of sins — to be obtained through the death of the Mediator — the whole special nature of the theology of sinful men was utterly transformed. The ultimate end common to all theology did indeed remain the same, namely, the eternal enjoyment of God; but that an innovation was made not only in its doctrines, but also in its principles and means, the fuller account of evangelical theology will show.

VI. The precepts belonging to this new theology were of two kinds. First, all the moral precepts, of which innate theology in large part consisted, were transferred to the use of this new theology. That native light, directive of moral actions, which God implanted in the mind of the first man at his very creation, remained — though corrupted and weakened — in all his posterity, by God's own gracious economy, even after the fall, and that only in part; this we have demonstrated more fully above. But God did not cease to foster that light day by day, through his Spirit, in those who embraced this new revelation by faith. Hence, although those precepts had not yet been fixed in a spoken word (λόγος προφορικός), they nevertheless became a perfect rule of obedience, faith supplying them with new use, and theologians with new light.

VII. No other precepts were given to Adam as a rule for living, apart from the remnants of that natural light which distinguishes the honorable from the base. These, stirred up and directed by faith, sufficed for that purpose. And many examples exist among the antediluvians of obedience rendered according to this law (Genesis 4:4, 6-7; 7:1-2). Of the seven precepts which some affirm were delivered to Adam, and others to Noah, we must treat later. This much is most certain: that all human duty rests upon the precepts of God.

VIII. Now that innate light, or indwelling theology (θεολογία ἐνδιάθετος), extended to all the precepts of the Decalogue. And just as it seemed good to God, in the very state of integrity, to explain and confirm the second commandment — by which his will concerning the manner of all worship is eternally established — by means of an arbitrary command suited to that state, namely, the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so also, after the entrance of sin, and the promise of the reparation of sinners through the seed of the woman, it pleased him to establish that same commandment by a new mandate, suited to this new state — a mandate by whose obedience men could express both the faith due to the promise and the new use of the innate law. This was the institution of sacrifices, which completed the whole of Adamic theology after the fall.

IX. The papists ascribe the origin of sacrifices to natural light, and contend that this rite of worshipping God would have had its place and use even in the state of innocence: Gregory de Valentia, On the Sacrifice of the Mass, book 1, chapter 4; Bellarmine, On the Mass, book 1, chapter 24; Lessius, On Justice and Right, book 1; Suarez, on the Third Part of the Summa, disputation 71, section 8. This fiction — like a great many others — is needed for the mass, which is itself the most monstrous of fictions. The Socinians suppose that this rite took its origin from that right reason by which man concludes he ought to worship God with the best of what he has in his possession; so too the Arminian Episcopius: "Abel," he says, "by faith alone, led by no divine precept — that is, by the instinct of right reason alone — judged that God ought to be worshipped with the best of the things he had in his possession, that is, with sacrifices from the firstlings of his flock and their fat" (Institutes of Theology, book 1, chapter 8, section 3). What nonsense! As if anyone could act out of faith while being led by no divine precept! Either acting out of faith and acting out of right reason without any precept whatsoever would be the same thing; or there would be some "faith" that had regard neither to a precept nor to a promise; or God would have granted to the arbitrary will of his creatures the liberty of inventing new modes of worshipping himself; or the whole reason for Abel's sacrifice would have been simply that he decided God ought to be worshipped with the best things he possessed — all of which is plainly godless nonsense. The same Episcopius, elsewhere investigating the origin of this rite, again boldly sets forth this same opinion: "It may be believed without danger," he says, "that this rite of sacrificing was introduced from the very beginning of the world, out of a certain immense zeal and affection for deserving well of God and honoring him by that singular act and office, whereby the best, dearest, and most precious things were expended in honor of God; and thus it was publicly demonstrated that all these things were owed to God by a greater right than to men, whose use and consumption — and so whose will — they daily served. As for God, even if perhaps this rite did not seem the best (for it is not credible that God delights in the blood and slaughter of innocent animals — a consideration which perhaps also suffices to make us believe that this rite was not commanded by God himself), yet because it proceeded from so religious a disposition, nothing prevents us from believing that he was pleased to accept it as acceptable, and, out of his own kindness, permitted that it should continue to be practiced thenceforth, and that he even eventually enjoined and prescribed it to his own dearest people." "Nothing prevents it," you say, Episcopius? On the contrary — whatever can be known of God by nature, and whatever he himself has revealed in the Scriptures concerning himself or his will, forbids us to give credence to so absurd a fable. For what? Is it reasonable to make the wisdom and will of God mere followers of the wisdom and will of wretched sinners, so that whatever these should happen to devise in his worship — even though neither the best thing that could have been devised, nor even pleasing to God himself — he would not merely graciously permit and accept, but would even most severely enjoin, under pain of death and destruction, to be observed by his whole church for two thousand years? Will "that which may be known of God" (τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ), which proclaims that nothing but what is supremely perfect is to be ascribed to God, permit us to believe this? Will Scripture, where God himself so often rejects and condemns every human invention in his worship? Was there nothing in the ancient sacrifices but a mere feeling of expending the best and dearest things upon God? Did these things point to nothing concerning Christ and his sacrifice? Was there no specimen of divine wisdom and goodness in them, except that God permitted men to follow their own mortal devices — something he does only by way of a great curse? Was there no divine instruction in them, no support for faith in the Messiah who was to come, established in them? But it is shameful to linger any longer over such trifling nonsense.

X. We know what mankind is, and of what sort those men are of whom it consists; nor is it hard to guess what would have become of divine worship had even the smallest particle of it been given over to human discretion. Nor is it right to judge that this solemn rite, by which God was pleased to set forth the entire mystery concerning the death and merit of his only-begotten Son, took its origin from any other source than the counsel of his own will. Once the new covenant was entered into, the remission of sins was accomplished; but the apostle teaches that this cannot be accomplished "without shedding of blood" (Hebrews 9:22). By sacrificial blood, therefore — perhaps that of the very animals from whose skins God fashioned coats for our first parents — that covenant was ratified by God's own institution.

XI. Porphyry alone among the philosophers set himself, by deliberate effort, to investigate the origins of sacrifices. It pleases us, therefore, to set forth his view — especially since it contains a number of things the knowledge of which can shed some light, in passing, on certain passages of Holy Scripture. In the second book of his work On Abstinence from Animal Food (περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων), he takes up the subject. First, then, he ascribes the origin of all sacrifices to the grateful disposition of men, and to the purpose of worshipping God with the best of what they had in their possession. "τῶν εὐεργεσιῶν τὰς ἀμοιβὰς καὶ τὰς χάριτας ἄλλοις μὲν ἄλλως ἀποδοτέον κατὰ τὴν ἀξίαν τῆς εὐποιΐας, τοῖς δὲ εἰς τὰ μέγιστα ἡμᾶς εὖ πεποιηκόσιν, τὰς μεγίστας, καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν τιμιωτέρων· καὶ μάλιστα εἰ αὐτοὶ εἶεν τούτων πάροχοι. κάλλιστα δὲ καὶ τιμιώτατα ὧν ἡμᾶς οἱ θεοὶ εὖ ποιοῦσιν οἱ καρποί, ὥστε ἀπὸ τούτων αὐτοὺς τιμητέον" ("Recompense and thanks for benefits received must be rendered differently to different benefactors, according to the worth of the good done; and to those who have done us the greatest good, the greatest thanks are owed, and from the most valuable things — especially if they themselves are the givers of those very things. Now the fairest and most valuable things with which the gods do us good are the fruits of the earth; wherefore it is from these that we ought to worship them"). What he affirms here is true, and sufficiently in accord with Holy Scripture: see Proverbs 3:9. He then undertakes, at length in the same place, to establish that the rite of sacrificing had this very origin. For he says, "καθάπερ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς ἀνδράσιν, οὕτω κἀκείνοις ἡγούμεθα δεῖν ποιεῖσθαι τὰς ἀπαρχάς" ("just as to good men, so also to them" — that is, to the gods — "we think it right to pay the firstfruits of our goods"). He teaches that the Egyptians practiced this custom from time immemorial; elsewhere, however, he states that all other peoples did the same "from the beginning" (section 5). And he affirms that this religious worship was demanded by right reason, and, from that reason, by the observance owed to a most excellent benefactor — an opinion, it has been shown, which certain Christians also hold. Furthermore, being in bondage to his own hypothesis about not eating flesh, and thus taking the side of Cain, he contends that only the fruits of the earth ought to be employed in sacrifices. For he relates that from the very beginning of the world and of nations, sacrifice was made of herbs, grain, and flowers — not of myrrh, or cassia, or frankincense mixed with saffron, but of pure things, just as the earth produced them — and that it was only many ages later, as error grew worse by degrees, that offerings began to be made of other things of whatever kind. "The most ancient nation," he says, "the Egyptian, ἤρξατο πρῶτον ἀφ᾽ ἑστίας τοῖς οὐρανίοις θεοῖς θύειν, οὐ σμύρνης οὐδὲ κασίας καὶ λιβανωτοῦ κρόκῳ μιχθέντων ἀπαρχάς· οὐ τούτων ἔθυον πρότερον· ἀλλὰ χλόης, οἷόν τινα τῆς γονίμου φύσεως χνοῦν, ταῖς χερσὶν ἀράμενοι" ("was first to sacrifice to the heavenly gods from the hearth, not with offerings of myrrh, nor of cassia and frankincense mixed with saffron — they did not sacrifice such things at first — but taking up in their hands, as it were, a down of green shoots, of the generative nature of things") (section 5). And this opinion he relates and confirms through the greatest part of that book. As for the offering of animals, or of blood, in sacrifices, he contends that this was introduced into use only quite late, as wickedness, impiety, and superstition grew stronger — and this, he says, despite the fact that a great many oracles disapproved of that form of worship, and permitted it at last only with much caution attached. "To Episkeipos," he says, "who was descended from the interpreters of the gods, and who wished to offer the firstfruits of his sheep, the oracle, they say, gave permission — but with much circumspection; for it runs thus:

To the inspector of sacred rites, who was of the family of the seers, wishing to give the firstfruits of his sheep, they say the oracle granted permission, but with much caution; for these are its words. And that caution is plainly contrary to the divine institutions, according to which everything that died of itself was altogether unclean. Furthermore, adhering to this same teaching, he holds that there is some supreme deity, which, being good and holy, does nothing and can do nothing except what is good and beneficial and pleasing to men. This he judged to be natural to it, so that it is impossible for it to depart from this. Τούτους ἀδύνατόν ἐστιν, καὶ τὰς ὠφελείας ἐκπορίζειν, καὶ πάλιν ἂν βλάβης ἐν τοῖς αὐτοῖς, αἰτίας γίγνεσθαι ("It is impossible for these" — namely the good gods — "both to supply benefits and, again, to be the causes of harms in the same respects"), he says, section 38. To these he numbers the good geniuses, or angels: Διαγγέλλοντας τὰ παρ᾽ ἀνθρώπων θεοῖς, καὶ τὰ παρὰ θεῶν ἀνθρώποις, τὰς μὲν παρ᾽ ἡμων εὐχὰς ὡς πρὸς δικαστὰς ἀναφέροντας τοὺς θεούς ("Intermediaries between gods and men, bearing our prayers to the gods as to judges"). He argues that the worship of the supreme deity, or of the good gods, must be performed not by sacrifices, but by the laying aside of the passions, by the withdrawal of the mind from bodily things, by contemplation of the heavenly things, and by loving and pursuing them, as reason, not fancy, dictates. He holds, moreover, that there are evil and harmful spirits, or demons, who, inhabiting the air nearest the earth, are the authors and causes of all evils — diseases, famine, plagues, earthquakes, and wars. These, he determines, are liars and proud, eager to occupy, among the human race, the place and role of the supreme and greatest God. Τὸ ψεῦδος, τούτοις οἰκεῖον, βούλονται γὰρ εἶναι θεοὶ, καὶ ἡ προεστῶσα αὐτῶν δύναμις δοκεῖν θεὸς εἶναι ὁ μέγιστος ("Falsehood is proper to these, for they all wish to be accounted gods, and that power which presides over the rest wishes to be reckoned the greatest God"). This he himself drew from the sacred books, which no one among the ancient philosophers unrolled more diligently, or with a mind more filled with malice. For indeed that phrase, "falsehood is proper to these," plainly echoes those words of our Lord Jesus Christ, John 8:44: "When he speaks a lie" — namely the devil — τὸ ψεῦδος, ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων λαλεῖ, ὅτι ψεύστης ἐστὶ καὶ ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ ("he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar, and so is his father"). The rest, drawn from the same source, are diverted into Platonic pits. He teaches, moreover, that it is necessary to offer sacrifices to these demons, since they are devoted to bodily and earthly things, over which they have power, and are given over to depraved passions. Ὡς γάρ φασιν οἱ θεολόγοι τοῖς δεομένοις ἀπὸ τῶν ἐκτὸς, καὶ μηδέπω κρατοῦσι τῶν παθῶν, ἀναγκαῖόν ἀποτρέπεσθαι καὶ ταύτην τὴν δύναμιν, εἰ δὲ μή γε πόνων οὐ λήξουσιν ("For, as the theologians say, it is necessary for those who are bound to external things, and who have not yet mastered their passions, to turn aside this power as well; otherwise they will never be free of troubles"). He contends at length that to these alone, and to no other beings, are animal sacrifices offered, by whose smoke and savor — that ethereal part in them which comes nearest to bodily substance — they are fattened.

Ὁ εὐσεβείας φροντίζων, ὡς θεοῖς μὲν οὐ θύεται ἔμψυχον οὐδὲν, δαίμοσι δὲ καὶ ἄλλοις ἤτοι ἀγαθοῖς ἢ καὶ φαύλοις — that is, "One who is zealous for piety sacrifices nothing animate to the gods, but to demons, and to other divine powers, whether good or bad." Here we have the defendant confessing: that the gentiles worshipped with sacrifices not God, but demons — a wickedness which the apostle Paul had reproached them for before, in almost the same words, 1 Corinthians 10:20: Ἃ θύει τὰ ἔθνη, δαιμονίοις θύει, καὶ οὐ Θεῷ ("What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God"). Accordingly this testimony is used against the gentiles by Eusebius, Præparatio Evangelica, book 3; Augustine, City of God, book 10; Theodoret, Therapeutics, sermon 3 — so much so that Lucas Holstenius, in his Life of Porphyry, not undeservedly pronounced: "No one at all among those outside [the faith] has supplied the doctors of the church with more or stronger weapons with which to slay the manifold error of the gentiles than this same Porphyry." Such is the force of truth, everywhere consistent with itself, and inserting particles of itself through every twist and turn of error, so that it often escapes even from unwilling lips.

XII. And this was the sum of the postlapsarian Adamic theology. All the theology of sinners consists in these three parts which we have set forth; only the degrees of it varied afterward. The whole foundation is laid in the promise, which, drawn out through various increases of light for the church's use, the gospel at last exhibited and fully expounded. The standard for obeying God, or the implanted (ἔμφυτον, "inborn") law, the Decalogue expressed at its appointed time, whose nature and use the prophets expounded. The pattern of external or ceremonial worship, and of the divine good pleasure, was established in the institution of sacrifices, and was solemnly consecrated as an oracle (θεοπρόπιον, "divine pronouncement") for all posterity: that no worship is acceptable to God unless instituted by himself.

Chapter 2

The institution of the new church according to the standard of postlapsarian theology — Adam's zeal and duty in building it up — how long it remained pure — the defection in Cain the apostate — the nature, degrees, and manner of that defection — the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering — the oversights (παροράματα) of some of the ancients — the obscurity of the translation of the Seventy — why the sacrifice of Cain was rejected by God — on the words of Moses, "And Cain said unto Abel his brother" (Genesis 4:8) — the fables of the Targums — Cain, removed from the church, fled it, distrusting the promise of mercy — the reformation of the church in the casting out and cursing of Cain.

I. According to the standard of theology which we have set forth, the first church of sinners was instituted in the family of Adam. This was its immediate end: that a company of those worshipping God in the Mediator might be constituted. The care of this work rested upon Adam. For since he was father of the whole human family, and had received the promise of the victorious Seed to be proclaimed to all his posterity, he was bound to that office both by the bond of nature and by the force of a positive law of precept. Many things persuade us that he did not fail in this duty. For that he should diligently discharge the office entrusted to him was ensured, without doubt, by the greatest benefit lately received from God, by the love and pity natural to his own kind, and by the most tender sense of the condition into which he had, through sin, reduced his wretched posterity. His whole family, then, under his care and government — that is, the whole human race entire, no one excepted — was the church of God, in which faith, obedience, and religious worship flourished. In that state of affairs the church was absolutely catholic. How long a span of time it continued irreproachable in the profession of this new theology is not entirely certain; it admitted the first stain of defection in the apostasy of Cain. Since this was the first instance of defection given by the church of sinners professing the worship of God in the Mediator, it must be related in a few words.

II. We have already shown that this theology had three parts. The apostate sinned against all of them. The foundation of the whole was the promised Mediator. That Cain's defection began from unbelief, the apostle shows when he celebrates the faith of Abel, Hebrews 11:4. Nor, when admonished by God, did he acknowledge his sin — an impenitence (ἀμετανοησία, "unrepentance") which sprang from that same root. Then he performed the instituted worship otherwise than he ought, and here that unbelief (ἀπιστία), long hidden within, first showed itself openly; finally, anger and envy drove him, now fallen from faith, into fratricide, by which he transgressed the dictate of right reason, or the implanted law. Thus the sinner proved himself a rebel against the whole divine covenant and each of its several parts. Hence he became the first of hypocrites, made the leader and type (τύπος) of all the rest unto the end of the age, 1 John 3:12.

III. Some in former times have supposed that God testified his acceptance of Abel's sacrifice by sending fire from heaven to consume it. Thus Theodotion translated those words of Genesis 4:4, "and unto his offering" — reading "and the LORD had respect unto Abel" as Καὶ ἐνεπύρισεν ("And he set on fire") — that is, "And the Lord set fire upon Abel." Jerome, in his Hebrew Traditions on Genesis, commends this exposition. Strange is the paraphrase of the elders [the Seventy] upon Genesis 4:6-7, which has driven many of the ancients astray in expounding Cain's sin. The words are: Καὶ εἶπε Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς τῷ Κάϊν, Ἵνα τί περίλυπος ἐγένου; καὶ ἵνα τί συνέπεσε τὸ πρόσωπόν σου; οὐκ ἐὰν ὀρθῶς προσενέγκῃς, ὀρθῶς δὲ μὴ διέλῃς ἥμαρτες; ἡσύχασον· πρὸς σὲ ἡ ἀποστροφὴ αὐτοῦ, καὶ σὺ ἄρξεις αὐτοῦ ("And the Lord God said to Cain, Why art thou become very sorrowful, and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou hast rightly offered, but not rightly divided, hast thou not sinned? Be still: unto thee is his turning, and thou shalt rule over him"). What those words, "if thou hast rightly offered, but not rightly divided," might mean is altogether uncertain; they have no bearing on the sacred text. Remarkable, occasioned by them, are the hallucinations and over-subtleties (περιεργίαι) of Augustine, City of God, book 15, chapter 7; of Chrysostom, on Genesis chapter 4, Homily 18; of Cyril, Against Julian; and of others. Jerome, in his Hebrew Traditions on Genesis 4, sharply censures this oversight (παρόραμα) of the Seventy, yet not without a slip of memory of his own. "Chattath," he says, "'sin,' is of masculine gender among the Hebrews, but of feminine gender in the Greek tongue." For it is certain that חַטָּאת ("sin") is of feminine gender. Jerome was misled because in this passage it is joined with the participle רֹבֵץ ("croucheth"), which is masculine — but that is not unusual among the Hebrews; and the seeming anomaly (ἀνομαλία) of this passage is removed by noting that חֵטְא ("chet") and אָוֶן ("aven"), both meaning the same thing as חַטָּאת, are of masculine gender. The most learned Mercerus has uncovered the source of this slip. I will say briefly what the matter is: Cain's sacrifice was rejected neither on account of its material, nor because some portion of his goods had been wrongly consecrated, nor for want of any external rite, but on account of the sin and unbelief of the one sacrificing.

IV. Rebuked by God, Cain for a time concealed his envy and anger against his brother. This seems to be signified by the words: "And Cain said unto Abel his brother" (וַיֹּאמֶר קַיִן אֶל־הֶבֶל אָחִיו). Our own [English translators] render these words thus: "And Cain talked with his brother Abel." The Samaritan codex and the version of the Seventy add, "Let us go out into the field." The Vulgate has "Let us go forth abroad," doubtless from the Jerusalem Targum. In the Masoretic Bibles, after "his brother" there is a gap of one small line. Lindanus, Morinus, and others cry out that the Hebrew text is corrupt. Jerome rejects this supposition: "Cain said," he writes, "to his brother" — understanding, that is, those things which the Lord had spoken; and so what is found in the Samaritan and in our own volume is superfluous" (Hebrew Traditions on Genesis). One may see, too, how highly he valued that Samaritan codex, which some prefer to the Hebrew. Aben Ezra, in his comment on the passage, follows Jerome in supplying the sense: "It seems to me," he says, "that he told or related to him with what rebukes he had been received by God." Onkelos adheres to the words of the text. Jonathan, as also the Targum called the Jerusalem [Targum], relates a long dispute between the brothers: "And Cain said," it runs, "to Abel his brother, 'Come, let us both go out into the field.' And it came to pass, when they had both gone out into the field, that Cain answered and said to Abel, 'I perceive that the world was created through mercies'" (the Jerusalem Targum has it otherwise: "that the world was not created through mercy") "'but it is not governed according to the fruit of good works, and there is respect of persons in judgment; for which reason thy offering was accepted, but mine was not accepted with favor.' Abel answered and said to Cain, 'The world was created in mercies, and is governed according to the fruits of good works, and there is no respect of persons in judgment; and therefore, because the fruits of my works were better than thine, my offering was received with favor.' Cain answered and said to his brother, 'There is no judgment, and no judge, and no other world; nor shall good reward be given to the righteous, nor vengeance taken on the wicked.' Abel answered and said to Cain, 'There is a judgment, and there is a judge, and there is another world, and good reward shall be given to the righteous, and vengeance shall be taken on the wicked.' And on account of these matters they contended in the open field." This is Ben Uzziel's manner — that is to say, foolish. For there was no place for such things here.

V. Philo the Jew says that Cain was a sophist (σοφιστής), "and that he challenged his brother to a dispute" — perhaps inferring this from the fact that he had dealt craftily even with God himself, Genesis 4:8. But the matter is plain, and our own [translators] admirably convey the sense of the words in their version: "And Cain talked with his brother." That is: after he had resolved in his mind to remove his brother from the way, he, suppressing deep in his heart the deadly hatred which he nursed inwardly from envy, and feigning love in his countenance, spoke with him in a friendly and brotherly manner. This is the sense of the words — the way of those who thirst for the blood of others. So afterward Joab treacherously destroyed Abner, and Absalom Amnon, under a feigned renewal of affection. Allured by such a pretext, the first martyr fell by treachery.

VI. The devil, moreover, was in a special manner the author who moved Cain to commit this murder. And so it is not only on account of this very murder that Cain is said to have been "of the wicked one" (ἐκ τοῦ πονηροῦ), 1 John 3:12, but the devil himself is called "a murderer from the beginning" (ἀνθρωποκτόνος ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς), John 8:44. For he is not called a murderer there merely because he enticed the first humans into sin, from which death would follow, but also because he actually procured that this murder be carried out — just as, at his instigation, the Pharisees of that time later sought to kill the Lord Jesus. This an ancient poet, whose verses survive in Epiphanius, expressed elegantly.

VII. But after the unbelief and hypocrisy of Cain had thus openly revealed themselves — so that he could no longer be tolerated in the church — God, who still exercised his immediate care over the tender flock, lest it be infected by fellowship with the impious apostate and those who had joined him in his crimes (whose number appears to have been not small, since with their help he set about building a city), expelled him, laden with a curse, from the borders of the church. This is the sense of those words, Genesis 4:12: "A fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth" (נָע וָנָד תִּהְיֶה בָאָרֶץ); that is: "Go forth upon the face of the earth, newly cursed for thy sake, as one now heaped with fresh defection from my rule; wander in it wherever you will, savor earthly things, and have nothing further in common with my worship or my church."

VIII. He himself repeats this part of his punishment in verse 14: "A fugitive and a wanderer shall I be in the earth" (וְהָיִיתִי נָע וְנָד בָּאָרֶץ) — not "groaning and trembling" (Στένων καὶ τρέμων) as the Seventy have it — and "from thy face shall I hide myself" (מִפָּנֶיךָ אֶסָּתֵר). He had previously despised the gracious face of God in the promised seed. He casts away, in yet other words, all hope of again entering into grace with God: "My iniquity is greater than can be pardoned" (גָּדוֹל עֲוֹנִי מִנְּשֹׂא), or "than I can bear." Jonas Schlichting, in his work On the Trinity, against Meisner, page 119, denies that these words are "to be blamed, as though they contained anything evil in themselves" — as if they had proceeded from right reason. But it is certain they did not spring from faith, and were therefore full of despair. Further, he thought that he could hide from the providence of God — having neither hope nor fear. He acknowledges, then, that he is excluded from the communion of the saints and from the presence of God in solemn worship. Driven out from the church, he also fled it, Genesis 4:16.

IX. This defection of Cain took place in the one hundred and twenty-ninth year after the church was founded in the promise of the deliverer. For it is probable that Eve bore Seth in the year following Abel's death. That was the hundred and thirtieth year of Adam's life, Genesis 5:3. In that span of time the human race no doubt grew in number and multitude, and with it the church itself — which was still absolutely catholic, embracing that whole race. This first church of sinners professing faith in the Mediator thus continued blameless for a hundred and thirty years, or thereabouts, walking holily and blamelessly before God according to the standard of the restored theology.

X. Cain, then, at one hundred and twenty years of age, rushed into apostasy. For it is absurd, what Gregory Abulpharajius, the Arab chronologer — the beginning of whose history the learned Pococke published not long ago — reports on the authority of a certain Theodosius: namely, that "Adam begot Cain only after thirty years had passed from his expulsion from paradise, and that Abel mourned for a hundred years before returning to his wife and begetting Seth." But the sacred text expressly (ῥητῶς) rejects these ravings, Genesis 5:3; and yet, I know not whence, this most absurd rumor spread throughout the whole East and has stained the writings of very many.

XI. Hypocrisy, then, having advanced from unbelief against God to the persecution of the saints, brought with it both the occasion and the necessity of reforming the church — of which, in the casting out and cursing of Cain, we have the first example and pattern divinely established.

Chapter 3

The second reformation of the antediluvian church, Genesis 4 (last verse) — הוּחַל ("was begun / was profaned") — the onomatological errors (σφάλματα ὀνοματολογικά) of some noted — the idolatry of Enosh's time, the opinion of Maimonides, of Selden, of Cyril — the total defection of the reformed church — the beginning, occasion, and manner of that defection, Genesis 6:1-5 — the sons of God and the daughters of men — the follies of the Jews — and of certain ancient Christians — there was no antediluvian idolatry — the causes of the universal destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the flood, and the tradition of it among the nations — the end of the antediluvian church — the type of things to come contained in it.

I. Cain — the standard-bearer of the corrupters of the antediluvian Adamic theology — having been cast out from the borders of the church, its force and energy (ἐνέργεια) flourished, and the pure worship of God resting upon it, down to the time of Enosh. A new corruption, as it seems, and one that spread widely, had by that time invaded the church; a new reformation, taking it up, removed it: "for then men began to call upon the name of the LORD," Genesis 4:26. On this passage several things must be added.

II. The words are, "Then was it begun to call upon the name of the LORD" (אָז הוּחַל לִקְרֹא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָה). Some suppose that the reformation of the church is denoted in these words; others, its lapse into idolatry. The Seventy render it thus: Οὗτος ἤλπισεν ἐπικαλεῖσθαι τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου τοῦ Θεοῦ ("This one hoped to call upon the name of the Lord God") — deriving הוּחַל not from [the root meaning "to begin/profane"] but from יָחַל ("to hope"). From this an innocent error arose among some. They suspected that these words express the meaning of the name of Enosh. Chrysostom's interpretation of the passage rests solely on this hallucination; for, supposing that "Enosh" means "he hoped," he discourses at length on the pious hope of that man's parents.

III. And indeed, in accounting for Hebrew names, the Greeks blunder everywhere without exception. So George Cedrenus, page 172: "He named the firstborn Cain, which means 'jealousy,' who indeed, out of jealousy, slew his brother Abel, which is interpreted 'mourning,' for the parents mourned over him as the first one murdered" — foolishly, and against the reason for the naming assigned in the text itself, Genesis 4:1. Yet it is not wholly without plausibility; for קִנְאָה ("qin'ah") is "envy," and אֵבֶל ("evel") is "mourning": so too Zonaras — "and Abel the second, whose name signifies mourning." As for אָז, "then," I judge it should be referred to the whole span of Enosh's lifetime: "in the days of Enosh, whom Seth begat, these things were done." That the condition of the church was already wretched by the time Enosh was born, I would readily grant; hence the occasion for his pious parents' naming of him. אֱנוֹשׁ ("Enosh") means "wretched man"; from a root meaning "he was mortally sick," "he was calamitous," Psalm 9:21. But no reasoning compels us to confine what is recorded here to the time of his birth. For these things perhaps happened some three hundred years, more or less, after the first reformation of the church through the casting out of Cain, since the birth of Enosh falls in the hundred and sixth year after Cain's flight. For although the beginnings of that work — whatever it finally was — of which the Holy Spirit here makes mention, were perhaps laid at the very birth of Enosh, I do not believe it was brought to effect until Enosh himself — who is pointedly named — had for some while existed as head of a household; and in this opinion are almost all the Jews.

IV. The Targum ascribed to Jonathan asserts that the entrance of idolatry into the world is noted in these words: "That was the generation in whose days they began to err, and they made for themselves idols, and called their idols by the name of the Word of the LORD" — that is, they called their idols gods. So too the Arabic interpreter, in Erpenius's edition, has "Then men began to depart from obedience to God" — differently from what the codex published in the London Polyglot Bible has. There are two copies of the Targum of Onkelos: one Arias Montanus reproduced in the Royal edition of the Bible, the other Buxtorf in his Basel edition; of which the latter affirms that "men ceased from calling upon" [the name of the Lord], while the former affirms that they "began to call upon the name of the Lord." Maimonides traces the beginning of all idolatry to this passage, at the start of his book On the Worship of the Stars: "In the days of Enosh, the children of men erred with a great error, and the minds of the wise men of that generation were dumbfounded; even Enosh himself was among those who erred, and this was their error: they said, since God himself created these stars and spheres to govern the world, and set them on high, and gave them glory, and employs them as ministers, surely then we ought rightly to praise them, and extol them, and impart glory to them." The learned man had in view those words of Moses, Genesis 1:16: "And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: and the stars also." He judges that the degenerate sons of the patriarchs took occasion from these words to worship the sun, the moon, and the whole array of the heavens, to which rule over the days and nights, and thus over the whole earth, had been entrusted. Rabbi David Kimchi holds the same opinion: "In the days," he says, "of Enosh, they erred after idolatry, and the invocation of the name of God was then profaned; but there are those who expound the word huchal by 'begin' in this manner: 'Then men began to call the names of images and idols by the name of God.'" Selden follows Maimonides, Prolegomena 3 to his Syntagma on the Syrian Gods.

V. Josephus, however, who is more ancient than all these, asserts that the worship of the one true God endured down to the seventh generation, Antiquities, book 1. R. Eliezer, in Maaseh-Bereshith, chapter 22, agrees with him, and proves that no mention of idolatry is made here, because no mention is made of the other things which they might have worshipped, namely the sun and the stars. Most of the ancient Christians agree with this. "Those men," says Cyril, Against Julian, "who lived from Adam even to Noah, honored the one God who is by nature and in truth the maker of all things; but after the flood, and the building of the tower, they came to hold discordant opinions concerning God — some supposing heaven to be a god, others the sun and moon." And this opinion is the truest, in which Epiphanius also stands, book 1, chapter 1, section 4; likewise Bede in his Chronicle. The Hebrew root principally means "to begin"; and in the Pihel stem, "to profane" — in the Hiphil or Hophal very rarely; whence תְּחִלָּה ("beginning"), and חָלַל ("to begin something publicly"). Jerome embraces this interpretation. Nor did men then first begin to profane the name of the Lord, in the days of Enosh, since that had been done by the impious Cainites long before Enosh was born. There is therefore no reason why it should be said pointedly that men then began to profane the name of God — but rather that they began to invoke it in a peculiar and especially solemn manner.

VI. Not, therefore, a corruption of religious worship, but a reformation of the church is indicated by these words. The prefixed particle marks the signifying of something new and unusual. Now while the church was confined within the bounds of a single family, its reformation was not difficult — namely, by the casting out of the obstinate. But once the human race had grown immensely, and the boundaries of the church had been extended, another course had to be taken. For a multitude of sinners breeds impunity and license to sin; and these words therefore denote two things. First, that the godly established separate assemblies for carrying out the solemn worship of God. Second, that they took up a peculiar name — that of worshippers, or sons of God — which they used until the next defection. Thus, separately, they solemnly called upon the name of God, and were themselves called by the name of God — that is, worshippers, or sons of God. Our own [English] interpreters approve both senses; for as they read in the text, "Then began men to call upon the name of the LORD," so they add in the margin, "to call themselves by the name of the LORD." And this was the only course left for reforming the church. That this course should be taken — when most were corrupting the true worship of God and persisting obstinately in wicked ways (which was then the condition of the church) — both the nature of the matter itself and right reason demand. For what were those to do who desired to present their consciences unblemished and pure before God in religious worship? Should they allow themselves to be mixed in with the crowd of apostates, and be corrupted? That does not seem to have been their duty. Should they, instead, cast the apostates out and expel them from the borders of the church? That, however, cannot be done by the fewer against the many. There remained, then, only the separation of the godly, and their gathering into distinct assemblies. That this now took place is what these words record. For it was not then that the name of the Lord was first profaned — that had been done long before by the impious Cainites; nor did men then, absolutely speaking, first begin to call upon the name of the Lord, since all the godly had, from the very foundations of the world, been devoted to his worship; but it was then, for the first time, that some — having made a visible separation from the rest of the world — solemnly carried out religious worship among themselves.

VII. And this was the second reformation of the antediluvian church. The first defection was singular, confined to the person of Cain; the first reformation consisted in his expulsion. By the time of Enosh, hypocrisy had crept more widely and infected more people. In order that they might show themselves free from the common stain, and preserve pure the worship of God in the promised Mediator, the godly Sethites, withdrawing from the crowd of apostates and establishing separate assemblies, were called "sons of God." And here, for the first time, the church came into existence visibly and voluntarily separated from the world.

VIII. By virtue of this reformation, pure theology flourished, and by its strength the church remained visibly separate for about a thousand years. In the course of that time, God gave forth a remarkable example of obedience, a proof (τεκμήριον) of true theology and a pledge of eternal life, in the translation of Enoch, Genesis 5:24. But as things proceeded, the impious Cainites, together with those Sethites from whom the godly had separated at the time of the Enoshian reformation — pretending, it seems, a peace to be cultivated in common, through intermarriages and other bonds of civil life — were admitted into the fellowship of the godly, and thereby brought nearly all things, divine and human, to universal ruin. This is generally the fatal outcome when corruption is once again admitted into the church after a reformation.

IX. Once the vast throng of impious apostates had been admitted into the fellowship of the godly, these latter could no longer free themselves — neither by authoritative expulsion of the former, as it is called, nor by voluntary secession — and so the defection at once became universal, and the whole church was found corrupted. God therefore put an end to that dispensation, and to the sublapsarian Adamic theology, in the universal destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the apostate theologians by the flood.

X. The rise, progress, and end of this final defection of the antediluvian church its most just avenger himself has committed to memory, Genesis 6:1-5. Its rise is recorded in verses 1 and 2: "And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God, seeing the daughters of men that they were fair, took them wives of all which they chose."

XI. Who these "sons of God" were, and who these "daughters of men," is disputed. The Jews trifle, I know not how, about good and evil angels; so too, even before the rabbis, did Philo and Josephus, as also the author of the books of Enoch, certain fragments of which survive, in Joseph Scaliger's notes on Eusebius, and in Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus, volume 2, chapter 2. Very many of the ancient fathers favor this delusion: Justin, Second Apology; Clement, Stromata, book 3; Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women; Lactantius, Institutes, book 2, chapter 15; Eusebius, Præparatio Evangelica, book 5; Ambrose, On Virgins Veiled; Zosimus of Panopolis, in Photius, Codex 191. But neither the nature or condition of angels, Matthew 22:30, nor the sequence of the Mosaic narrative, admits of that suspicion. Onkelos renders "the sons of God" by "the sons of the nobles," and "the daughters of men" by "the daughters of the common people." The Seventy have "sons of God" (υἱοὶ Θεοῦ); Aquila, "sons of gods" (υἱοὶ θεῶν); Symmachus, according to Jerome, "sons of those who held power" (τῶν δυναστευόντων). And all these understand the passage of the utter confusion of all ranks in the political state and common manner of life — as if men had come together like cattle, with no regard to rank or respect for dignities. Maimonides (Rambam) holds this opinion, Guide for the Perplexed, part 1, chapter 14: "'Adam,'" he says, "signifies also 'the common people' and 'the multitude of men'; as also 'sons of Adam,' and 'sons of man,' Psalm 33:13; and in this sense it is said, 'And the sons of God saw the daughters of Adam.'"

XII. But the matter is plain enough of itself. The "sons of God" were those who, from the days of Enosh, established separate assemblies for the true worship of God, professing an adoption (υἱοθεσία, "sonship"). By this name they were hated and mocked by the ungodly world — for the world has never been, nor will it ever be, unlike itself in this respect. For some centuries, perhaps, they kept themselves separate from communion with the wicked, which has always been the chief cause of ecclesiastical defection. In the course of time, however, they too increased, through unworthy offspring, among whom only the outward form (μόρφωσις) of that sonship remained. This offspring, driven by unbridled lust, joined itself in marriage to the daughters of the apostates — and these were "the daughters of men." That, up to that time, the godly Sethites had kept all their rights, both divine and human, separate from the Cainites, and had even dwelt in regions far distant, without any commerce of life or society with them, is an ancient tradition of the Jews, which, because it has some appearance of truth, I would not rashly reject. Abulpharajius, as edited by Pococke, relates it interwoven with fables: "Seth," he says, "the son of Adam, is said to have been the first inventor of writing, and to have instilled in his offspring a longing for the blessed life which their parents had enjoyed in paradise, so that they withdrew to Mount Hermon, devoted to the worship of God, to piety, and to continence, in no way approaching women — whence they were called Bene-Elohim ['sons of God']. But in the fortieth year of Jared, descending from Mount Hermon, when they had despaired of returning to paradise" (that is, when holiness of life and separation from the world had begun to weary them), "they conceived a desire for women; and when their kinswomen refused to give them wives, holding them in contempt, the Cainites invited them to marriage, freely offering them their daughters — with whom, having consorted, they bore giants, excelling in wars and hostile raids."

XIII. And this he drew from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, "Concerning the Watchers" (περὶ τῶν ἐγρηγόρων), except that what he ascribes to the Sethites, that other trifling Jewish author assigns instead to angels descending upon Mount Hermon. The surviving fragments of those books, "Concerning the Watchers" and "Concerning the Revelation of Moses," will supply anyone thirsting for such things with fables of this sort in abundance. The ancients called angels "Watchers" (ἐγρήγοροι). They seized upon a handle for this from Daniel 4:13, where a "watcher" (עִיר) is said to have looked down from heaven. The common copies of the Greek text keep the Hebrew word as εἴρ; a certain manuscript has ἐγρήγορος.

XIV. From this source there sprang an unlawful mixing (ἀθέμιτος μίξις) of everyone with everyone. At length the two companies came together into one, so that — except for the family of Noah alone — scarcely any distinction remained between the world and the church. The Holy Spirit shows this where he affirms that "all flesh had corrupted his way," Genesis 6:12. This, I say, was the origin of the universal defection of the Enoshian, or Adamic, antediluvian church, twice reformed — in which we have an illustrious example of the rise of every universal apostasy. For it was always fellowship with the wicked that brought ruin upon the church.

XV. Let us further consider the progress of this defection. The Holy Spirit expounds it in verses 11-12: "The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way." It had, that is, advanced to such a degree that it extended to all flesh, Noah alone excepted, verse 8, and Genesis 7:1; and he was "a preacher of righteousness," 2 Peter 2:5, in whose ministry the Spirit of Christ "strove with the rebellious," 1 Peter 3:19, for a hundred and twenty years, Genesis 6:3. So the Targum of Ben Uzziel expounds that passage — which, however, in its usual manner, trifles with I know not what nonsense about Shamchazai and Uzziel, who at that time, falling from heaven, begot giants.

XVI. Maimonides contends that the nature of this apostasy consisted chiefly in idolatry. Selden goes over to his opinion. Muhammad, in the Qur'an, supplies us with the names of the gods they worshipped, Surah 71: Wadd, Suwa', Yaghuth, Ya'uq, and Nasr. To these, it seems, Shamchazai and Uzziel lent their aid. But let us dismiss such trifles. What is said about antediluvian idolatry is destitute of all probability. For the Holy Spirit makes no mention of it whatever — and he would hardly have passed over so grave a sin, one that would have furnished the most effective argument for vindicating divine justice in destroying the world. God wished to display, without doubt, a great foretaste of the future judgment — as Tertullian puts it — inferior only to the cross of Christ itself, in the destruction of the ancient world by the flood; would he, then, in setting forth the causes of so great a calamity and punishment — inferior only to the eternal one — be thought to have passed over in silence the greatest of all sins, especially when he carefully lists the other crimes and wickedness that merited it? For the wickedness of men's hearts, the corruption of universal life, violence and rapine, and even unlawful marriages, are expressly recorded, Genesis 6:2, 5, 11-13. As for the vices and crimes of that age otherwise, Berosus, as cited in Annius of Viterbo, gives a not unfitting account, as does Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 1: "These giants," he says, "relying on the vastness of their bodies and their strength, oppressed all by force of arms, and, given over to lust, invented tents and musical instruments, and every kind of luxury; they devoured men,... and there was nothing which these despisers of religion and of the gods did not permit themselves." Josephus is witness, Antiquities, book 1, chapter 4, that Berosus, in his history, also consecrated the flood to memory as a true event.

XVII. The end or outcome of this universal apostasy was the flood-destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the apostates — namely, "the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished," 2 Peter 3:6. That the nations received this account of the cause of the flood by tradition is attested, among many others, by Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess, section 12: Ἥδε ἡ γενεὴ, οἱ νῦν ἄνθρωποι οὐ πρῶτοι ἐγένοντο, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκείνη μὲν ἡ γενεὴ, πάντες ὤλοντο. Οὗτοι δὲ γένεος τοῦ δευτέρου εἰσὶ· τὸ αὖθις ἐκ Δευκαλίωνος ἐς πληθὺν ἀπίκετο. Ἐκείνων δὲ περὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων τάδε μυθέονται. Ὑβρισταὶ κάρτα ἐόντες, ἀθέμιστα ἔργα ἔπρασσον, οὔτε γὰρ ὅρκια ἐφύλασσον, οὔτε ξείνους ἐδέκοντο, οὔτε ἱκετέων ἠνείχοντο· ἀντ᾽ ὧν σφίσι ἡ μεγάλη συμφορὴ ἀπίκετο. Αὐτίκα ἡ γῆ πολλὸν ὕδωρ ἐκδιδοῖ, καὶ ὄμβροι μεγάλοι ἐγένοντο, καὶ οἱ ποταμοὶ κατέβησαν μέζονες, καὶ ἡ θάλασσα ἐπὶ πολλὸν ἀνέβη, ἔστε ὃ πάντα ὕδωρ ἐγένοντο, καὶ πάντες ὤλοντο. Δευκαλίων δὲ μοῦνος ἀνθρώπων ἐλίπετο ἐς γενεὴν δευτέρην, εὐβουλίης τε καὶ τῆς εὐσεβέος εἵνεκα. Ἡ δὲ οἱ σωτηρίη ἥδε ἐγένετο. Λάρνακα μεγάλην, τὴν αὐτὸς ἔχε, ἐς ταύτην ἐσβιβάσας παῖδάς τε καὶ γυναῖκας ἑωυτοῦ, ἐσέβη. Ἐσβαίνοντι δὲ οἱ ἀπίκοντο σύες, καὶ ἵπποι, καὶ λεόντων γενεὰ, καὶ ὄφιες, καὶ ἄλλα, ὁκόσα ἐν γῇ νέμονται πάντα ἐς ζεύγεα, ὁ δὲ πάντα ἐδέκετο· καί μιν οὐκ ἐσίνοντο, ἀλλά σφισι μεγάλη διόθεν φιλίη ἐγένετο· καὶ ἐν μιῇ λάρνακι πάντες ἔπλευσαν, ἔστε τὸ ὕδωρ ἐπεκράτεε — that is: "This generation of men, which now exists, was by no means the first from the beginning, but that generation which then existed perished entirely. These men who now exist are of a second race, namely, that which again grew, from Deucalion, into such a multitude. Concerning those former men, the following things are related in myth: being exceedingly given to violence, they committed lawless deeds; for they kept neither oaths, nor received strangers, nor had regard for suppliants — for which reason a great calamity came upon them. At once the earth poured forth much water, and there were great rains, and the rivers came down greater than usual, and the sea too rose greatly, until all things became water, and all perished. But Deucalion alone of men was left for a second generation, on account of his prudence and piety together. And this was the manner of his deliverance: he embarked in a great ark, which he himself possessed, having placed in it his children and his wife. And as he was embarking, there came to him also swine, and horses, and kinds of lions, and serpents, and all other creatures that graze upon the earth, all in pairs; and he received them all to himself, and they did him no harm at all, but there was great friendship among them by the will of god; and they all sailed together in the one ark, as long as the water prevailed." All this, no one can fail to see, was derived from the sacred text. On this same subject Horace also plays:

"When Proteus drove all his herds
to visit the high mountains,
seen in the level sea." — Odes, book 1, ode 2.

Similar things, from Hieronymus the Egyptian, Berosus, Mnaseas, and Nicolaus of Damascus, Josephus relates, Antiquities, book 1, chapter 4; and Eusebius, in his Chronicle, from Abydenus and Alexander Polyhistor.

XVIII. But the universal flood is confused by most with the local (τοπικός) flood of Deucalion, or with that of Ogyges, which far preceded it. Concerning all these an extremely ancient writer, cited in Cedrenus, correctly says: Ὅτι δύο κατακλυσμοὶ κατὰ τὴν Ἑλλάδα γῆν διαβεβλημένοι γεγόνασι· πρῶτος μὲν ἐπὶ Ὠγύγου ἐν τῇ Ἀττικῇ· χρόνοις δὲ ὕστερον ἐν Θετταλίᾳ ἐπὶ Δευκαλίωνος, βασιλεύοντος Ἀθήνησι δευτέρου Κραναοῦ αὐτόχθονος. Τούτου τοῦ κατακλυσμοῦ τοῦ ἐπὶ Δευκαλίωνος δηλονότι, δοκοῦσι μεμνῆσθαι καὶ Αἰγύπτιοι, φάσκοντες τὴν χώραν αὐτῶν μὴ κατακέκλυσθαι· καὶ δικαίως φιλονεικοῦσι μὴ κατακεκλύσθαι τότε τὴν Αἴγυπτον· τοπικὸς γὰρ γέγονεν οὗτος ὁ κατακλυσμός. Τὸν γὰρ πρότερον ἤτοι τὸν καθολικὸν κατακλυσμὸν οὐδὲ γινώσκουσιν. Οὔπω γὰρ ἦν ὁ πατριάρχης αὐτῶν γεννηθείς. Χὰμ δὲ ὁ υἱὸς Νῶε, πατὴρ Μεστρέμ, ἀφ᾽ οὗ Αἰγύπτιοι — that is: "There occurred two floods, much spoken of, throughout the land of Greece: the first in the time of Ogyges in Attica" (though most say Ogyges was king not of Attica but of Thebes); "and later, in Thessaly" (that is, the region afterward so called, for not even Homer knew it by that name) "in the time of Deucalion, when Cranaus the second, an aboriginal, was reigning at Athens. Of this flood, that of Deucalion, the Egyptians too seem to make mention, claiming that their own country was not flooded — and they are right to insist that Egypt was not flooded at that time, for this was a local flood. But of the earlier, that is, the universal flood, they know nothing at all, for their patriarch had not yet been born. For Ham, the son of Noah, was the father of Mizraim, from whom the Egyptians descend." But there is no doubt that the earliest mythographers (μυθογράφοι) so mingled the report of the universal flood with the history of particular, local floods, that later generations understood neither the one nor the other correctly. Whoever wishes to know more about these floods may consult Augustine, City of God, book 18, chapter 9; Nonnus, book 3; Orosius, book 1, chapter 9.

XIX. And this was the end which the apostate antediluvian church met. Binding itself by the guilt of a new defection after its reformation, it proved beyond reforming. Thus the supernatural theology of the first revelation came to this solemn close. In it, moreover, as we shall see, was established the type and pattern for all the churches to be instituted, and for all lapsed churches to be reformed, in times to come. May God, of his infinite mercy, avert this omen from the reformed Christian churches!

Book Three

Concerning Noachic Postdiluvian Theology

Chapter 1

2 Peter 3:5-7 — a new heaven and a new earth — what the old world was — the new world, Isaiah 51:15-16, 65:17, 66:22 — the age to come — the world to come — Noah a just man — the antediluvian church had faith — theology after the flood restored and increased in his family — the first express mention of a divine covenant — promise and restipulation belong to the nature of a covenant — in what respect a promise is called a covenant — whence בְּרִית — it often signifies a bare promise, 2 Samuel 23:5; Jeremiah 31:31-32 — διαθήκη, συνθήκη — whence "foedus" — how covenants were anciently ratified, Jeremiah 34:18 — of the sign of the covenant — the bow in the cloud — why the sign of the covenant is called the covenant — the nature of the Noachic covenant — precepts added to theology — Genesis 9:5-6, exposition of the first postdiluvian precept, concerning the shedding of blood — the manner of vengeance to be taken by the magistrate, established therein — the opinion of Onkelos — the origin of the lex talionis — exposition of the second precept, concerning not eating flesh with the blood, Genesis 9:2-3 — the seven precepts given to the sons of Noah — what the Hebrews understand by them — Noah's fictitious speech to his sons, in Inghirami — the restoration of the Noachic church — its duration — the sin of Ham — the follies of the Jews — the fable of the origin of Saturn's mutilation — why Canaan was cursed — new promises given to the reformed church — its new defection — the occasion of the defection — narrative of the universal defection of the Noachic church.

I. In the preceding discourse we set forth the rise and progress of that mixed theology, which consisted partly in the law of nature, or the dictate of right reason — remnants of an innate (ἐνδιάθετος) theology — and partly in the revelation made to Adam after the entrance of sin. There too we showed briefly the various degrees of that apostasy (ἀποστασία) which at last brought on the total defection of almost the whole world from God, together with the dreadful punishment and utter destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the apostate theologians. We now turn next to setting forth the restoration, increase, progress, and outcomes of that theology from the flood down to the calling of Abraham. Blessed Peter thus sets forth this entire divine economy (οἰκονομία): "For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men," 2 Peter 3:5-7.

II. Here the apostle has in view a twofold "world": that old one, which had perished by water, and the one then present, to be consumed by fire; after whose destruction he foretells, in verse 13, the entrance of a third: "Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness." The apostle speaks, in neither place, of the visible heaven or earth with respect to substance. For though the old world was destroyed by water, the fabric of the heavens and the earth nonetheless remained. That "world," therefore, consisted of the men living in the world. Once they had been destroyed by the flood, another world had to be raised up, for the right carrying out of the worship of God. God laid the foundations of this world in the family of Noah, and the erection and adornment of the Jewish church completed the whole structure. And it was this world which Blessed Peter foretold would presently be dissolved by fire — writing, that is, in a prophetic style. So we read in Isaiah 51:15-16: "But I am the LORD thy God, that divided the sea, whose waves roared: The LORD of hosts is his name. And I have put my words in thy mouth, and I have covered thee in the shadow of mine hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people."

III. At the time, therefore, when God divided the sea and led his people out of Egypt, entrusting to them his word, or law, together with the solemn prescription of his worship, forming them into a church for himself, he instituted and completed this new world — that heaven and those lands. At the time Peter wrote, this world — that is, the now-apostate Jewish church — was hastening to destruction by fire, just as that old world had rushed to its destruction by flood. By the burning of the temple and the city, the fabric of that world was dissolved. But since the end of the age (τοῦ αἰῶνος συντέλεια) had not yet come, the apostle bids the faithful expect another world — new heavens and a new earth, according to God's promise. That promise stands in Isaiah 65:17, and, in the same words, in Isaiah 66:22: "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind." In these passages the prophet depicts the state of the church after the coming of Christ — namely, the time when God would take from among the Gentiles for priests and Levites, as the words run in verse 21 of the last chapter; that is, when he would institute the evangelical ministry. Hence that state of the church, before the conflagration of this second world, was designated "the world to come" and "the age to come," as Paul teaches us in the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 2, verse 5, and also chapter 6, verse 5. Thus that first, or old, world perished by the flood of water; the apostle foretells that the second, then present, would perish by fire; and he affirms that the future world will endure to the consummation of the age. But let us return from this digression to the path.

IV. That Noah himself, of whom we now speak, was a just man, pleasing and acceptable to God, is established by manifold testimony of the Holy Spirit. Genesis 6:8-9: "Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God"; also Genesis 7:1: "Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation." Honorable mention of him, agreeing with this testimony, is made both in the Old Testament and, what is rare and almost unparalleled, in the New: Ezekiel 14:14; 1 Peter 3:20; 2 Peter 2:5. That he obtained righteousness through faith the apostle proves in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. All saving faith has regard to the promised Seed. This faith the antediluvian man had; for it was then that he was adorned by God with the testimony of righteousness. He was just, then, and pleasing to God, walking perfectly before him, by the power of that antediluvian Adamic theology which we set forth in the preceding discourse. But now, for the sake of Noah himself, and for the restoring of the church in his family, that theology was, immediately from the flood onward, increased by various degrees of light, which I will briefly run through.

V. We earlier divided the antediluvian theology of sinners into three parts: the promise of grace, the law of nature, and the prescription of instituted worship. With a new revelation made to Noah, the first of these was further increased, the second more fully set forth, and the third established. For now, for the first time, God makes express mention of a covenant, Genesis 9:9: "And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you" (וַאֲנִי הִנְנִי מֵקִים אֶת־בְּרִיתִי אִתְּכֶם). We proved earlier that God ratified with Adam a gracious pact, exhibiting spiritual benefits in the Mediator, in that most celebrated promise of the seed. For the full solemnity of a divine covenant there is indeed required the promise of life, and of all the means necessary for graciously obtaining it, together with the requirement of obedience and an express restipulation. But it is not necessary that all these be expressed together wherever a covenant alone is spoken of.

VI. A promise always includes a requirement of obedience. For obedience is nothing other than the due observance of the means instituted for obtaining the promised life. Now where the obedience required in a covenant is merely moral, and so has its general foundation elsewhere than in the covenant itself — namely, in the law of nature — and is rendered acceptable and pleasing to God only through the covenant, since the promise is one of pure revelation, the name "covenant" is applied to the promise in a peculiar sense. And this is what happens in this passage: the promise is called a covenant. There are, besides, other reasons why "promise" and "covenant" amount to the same thing, which is not the place to relate here; but a few things may be added about the word itself. Some prefer to say that בְּרִית is derived from a root meaning "to cut off" or "to cut away" — so Grotius, in his notes on the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, because in covenants victims were cut in pieces. Others trace it to a root which also means "to choose" and "to arrange"; and this account of the word is preferred by the learned and pious Cocceius, On the Covenant of God, chapter 1. Mercerus derives it from a root meaning "to choose," "to purify." Whatever its origin, it often signifies a bare "promise," 2 Samuel 23:5; Jeremiah 31:31-32; also a gratuitous, irrevocable "gift," Numbers 18:9; and a "statute" or decree of God, Jeremiah 33:21. And it is very frequently used where no solemn agreement or pact between parties has any place at all. In the New Testament it is rendered by διαθήκη, a word equally broad in scope as בְּרִית; it is used, on Grotius's testimony, of laws, promises, and testaments. The word συνθήκη, which properly means "covenant" [in the sense of a mutual pact], is not used in the New Testament to render בְּרִית. The older Seventy consistently render that word by διαθήκη; Aquila and Symmachus differ, and also use συνθήκη. Our countryman Ball, in his treatise On the Divine Covenant, chapter 1, affirms that the Seventy render בְּרִית by συνθήκη at Isaiah 28:15. But the learned man is mistaken; for the word which they render there by συνθήκη is חֹזֶה, which properly means "vision"; at the beginning of the verse, however, they put διαθήκη in place of בְּרִית, as usual. Grotius himself best explains the reason for this: "Agreements (συνθῆκαι)," he says, "derive the force of their bond from the mutually consenting testimony of two wills; but what Moses and others call בְּרִית is generally of such a kind that it requires no consent of the other party, since its binding force rests solely on the command and authority of God." So it is: the covenant of God is not made to depend on our will, or on any conditions to be performed by us; it derives all its force and effect from the authority, grace, and faithfulness of God himself. For the promise of grace is absolute, and there is no condition of the covenant that is not contained within the promise itself. Those, therefore, act foolishly and preposterously who attempt to explain the nature of the divine בְּרִית from the nature of a covenant as customarily ratified among men. Nor does "foedus" among the Latins always denote a solemn "agreement of parties"; sometimes it denotes a law or constitution — so in Virgil, Aeneid 1:66: "and gave them a king, who, bound by a fixed decree, should know both how to restrain and, when bidden, to give loose rein." We acknowledge, however, that this promise truly had the nature of a covenant; and accordingly Chrysostom, on this passage, interprets the Seventy's διαθήκη by συνθήκαι, Homily 28 on Genesis.

VII. Moreover, "foedus" is said to derive from "feriendo" [striking]; the origin of the name lies in a foul superstition. Polybius, among others, relates the custom of entering into covenants, from which the name arose, book 3, chapter 25: "The fetial priest," he says, "taking a stone in his hands, after agreement had been reached between the parties concerning the treaty, spoke these words: 'If I make this treaty and this oath rightly and without deceit, may the gods grant me all good things; but if I act or intend otherwise, may I alone perish, while all else — my own laws, my own household gods, my own temples, my own tombs — remain safe, even as this stone now falls from my hands.'" Others report that covenants were entered into differently, and that the fetial priest used these words: "So may great Jupiter strike me foully, as I foully sacrifice this pig, if I do not keep the terms of the treaty" — and so, striking the pig, he killed it with the blow of a stone. Livy has almost the same, book 1, chapter 24: "'Hear, O Jupiter; hear, father Fetialis: as these terms have been publicly recited from beginning to end from those tablets or that wax, without deceit, and as they are here today most rightly understood, by those terms the Roman people will not be the first to fail. If it should be first to fail, by public decree, with deceit, then, O Diespiter, so strike the Roman people, as I here today strike this pig — and strike it the more, the more you are able and powerful.' When he had said this, he struck the pig with a flint stone." The poet speaks to the same effect: "Armed, before the altars of Jove, holding their bowls, they stood, and struck the treaty with a slain sow" — Aeneid, book 8, line 640. "And the priest, in pure white robe, brought forth the offspring of a bristly sow..." — book 12, line 169.

VIII. It is probable that this custom of ratifying covenants arose — not without the intrusion of a depraved superstition — from that ancient practice of entering into fixed and solemn pacts by means of sacrifices, and of the sacrificial victim being divided into two parts, between which the covenanting parties had to pass. Homer follows this custom at length, Iliad 3:252, concerning the covenant that preceded the single combat (μονομαχία) of Paris and Menelaus: "that they may cut faithful oaths." On these words Eustathius notes: "'To cut oaths' in Homer and Herodotus signifies to sacrifice the victims offered upon the taking of an oath; for the word for 'cut' is used in Ionic for 'sacrifice.'" In this manner was ratified the covenant between the princes of Judah and the king of Babylon, which God, because of the invocation of his own name, calls his own, Jeremiah 34:18: "And I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof." And again, verse 19: "which passed between the parts of the calf." As they passed between the parts of the victim, the covenanting parties laid a curse upon themselves, devoting themselves to a like division unless they kept to the terms agreed upon. So Agamemnon prays to the gods, Iliad 3:279: "whosoever shall swear falsely" — "be ye witnesses, and preserve the faithful covenants." After which he adds, line 292, devoting the perjured to a similar death. So Nehemiah 10:29: "We have made a covenant and an oath, that we would walk in God's law." Hence, perhaps, that threat against the unfaithful servant, "he shall cut him in two," Matthew 24:51 — the Lord will divide him in pieces on account of the covenant neglected. And from this cutting of the victim, "to cut" among the Hebrews is "to strike a covenant": 2 Chronicles 7:18, "then I will establish the throne of thy kingdom, according as I have covenanted (כָּרַתִּי) with David thy father" — "as I have arranged" (Ὡς διεθέμην), render the Seventy; "I have promised," the Vulgate translator; "as I have covenanted," our own vernacular translation. Literally, "I have cut off," "I have cut"; the same word is used in the same way in the prophet Haggai, chapter 2, verse 5. But these considerations do not pertain to the simple word בְּרִית itself.

IX. And this was the first stage of the progress of postlapsarian theology. For by this revelation made to Noah, that communion which subsists between God and sinners in the Mediator is now for the first time expressly called a covenant. This name, most full of consolation, plainly declaring the love and faithfulness of God, is laid as the foundation for the new church about to be raised up in the family of Noah.

X. Further, God now for the first time established a visible sign of the covenant, namely "the bow in the cloud," Genesis 9:11-13. Not that he now for the first time set the bow in the cloud, but that he now for the first time appointed the bow in the cloud as a sign of the covenant. In this way the sacraments of the New Testament may seem capable of being called "signs of the covenant" (אֹתוֹת בְּרִית). For the sake of this sign, too, the promise is called a covenant; for a promise joined with a visible sign has, properly, the nature of a covenant. Hence the sign itself is sometimes called the covenant: "This cup is the new covenant" (Τοῦτο τὸ ποτήριον ἡ καινὴ διαθήκη), Luke 22:20. It is true that here express mention is made only of temporal things (τῶν βιωτικῶν), and that the sign of the covenant itself has direct regard to a temporal benefit. Nevertheless, spiritual grace — that is, the gratuitous love of God toward the faithful — is chiefly intended. For this was the economy (οἰκονομία) of the religious institutions before Christ was manifested in the flesh; but all these things were "a shadow of good things to come" (σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων ἀγαθῶν), Hebrews 10:1, of which Christ is the high priest (ἀρχιερεύς), Hebrews 9:11. And this "everlasting covenant" (בְּרִית עוֹלָם) existed only in Christ. A temporal benefit indeed flowed from this to all; but the spiritual grace of the covenant ratified in Christ pertains only to the elect.

XI. And in this manner the antediluvian Adamic theology was increased both by a new revelation, and by the name of covenant, and by a visible sign; whence the faith and hope of theologians were confirmed. Now the designation of the bow in the cloud as a sign of the covenant belongs to instituted worship. To the promise, then, was added the name of covenant; to instituted worship, a new sacrament — by which the two former parts of this theology were enlarged.

XII. Further, to enlarge this theology, precepts also were added to it, that on every side it might rise more illustrious after the fall. The first concerned homicide, or the shedding of human blood. For the care of life is the first and last concern; all else is subservient to it. The precept stands, Genesis 9:5-6: "And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."

XIII. Here a solemn provision for avenging the violent shedding of human blood is instituted. The shedding itself had been forbidden by the law of nature; both the crime and the punishment of Cain teach this. Indeed, all violence against others rises up so utterly against the dictate of right reason that the unbridled fury with which the antediluvian sinners, as if by a common assault, oppressed one another was itself the gravest cause of the flood. But a solemn manner of punishing violence through a magistracy, extending beyond the boundaries of private families, established by the mutual consent of many, had not yet been instituted. God, therefore, in granting the habitable world to the sons of Noah, burdened them all with this condition: that, for the sake of preserving political and public peace among all, they should establish a magistracy among themselves. Hence the magistracy is "a human institution" (ἀνθρωπίνη κτίσις), but one erected on no other stable foundation than the command of God himself.

XIV. The paraphrast Onkelos rightly expounds these words: "Whosoever sheds the blood of man, by witnesses, according to the sentence of judges, his blood shall be shed." By "in man" he understands suitable witnesses among men. Jonathan is no different: "He who sheds the blood of man, by witnesses, the judges shall condemn him to death; but he who sheds it without witnesses, the Lord of the world will take vengeance on him in the day of the great judgment." Grotius supposes that the natural right of retaliation (lex talionis) is implied here, "because public tribunals had not yet been established." But the natural right of retaliation did not first arise now. And although public tribunals had not yet been established, still, provision is here made that, as the human race increased, tribunals should be established, lest that grievous antediluvian age, so full of unbridled violence, should return. The magistracy is therefore instituted by God, and the sword is given into its hand, as Munster rightly notes on this passage.

XV. To this precept was also added that concerning not eating flesh with the blood, which is the soul of the flesh. The examination of this matter...

Since this inquiry involves more labor than profit, we shall let it pass, having devoted but a few words to its explanation.

XVI. Most affirm that eating flesh was not permitted to men before the Flood. For whatever privilege there is in the eating of flesh appears to have been granted only afterward, in Genesis 9:3: כָּל־רֶמֶשׂ אֲשֶׁר הוּא־חַי לָכֶם יִהְיֶה לְאָכְלָה בְּיֶרֶק עֵשֶׂב נָתַתִּי לָכֶם אֶת־כֹּל ("Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; as the green herb I have given you all things"). These words are appended to those by which dominion over all the animals was bestowed on man, in verse 2. This passage, compared with that other in which God granted sustenance to the antediluvians, plainly shows that they did not use flesh as food. From this the report of abstinence from animal food reached the nations — as in Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 1, fable 3, verse 103, and again book 15, fable 2, verse 96; likewise Virgil, Georgics 2, verse 536; and, from among our own writers, Tertullian, On Jewish Food (if he is indeed the author of that book), chapter 2: "The first food of men," he says, "was solely the offspring and fruit of trees." Hence many philosophers dispute how it came about that men were ever led to feed on flesh at all. Plutarch, having skillfully examined the matter, ascribes it to necessity in his oration περὶ σαρκοφαγίας ("On the Eating of Flesh"). Porphyry, in book 2 of περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων ("On Abstinence from Animate Beings"), argues at length that the custom arose from participation in sacrifices. From this, Casaubon shows, in his notes on Athenaeus book 1, chapter 11, that the ancient Greeks called all slaughtered animals ἱερεῖα ("sacrificial victims"), because indeed they ate no flesh except that of animals which had been slain for sacrifice. Thus before the Flood only whole burnt offerings were in use. Once the eating of flesh was permitted, sacrifices were accompanied by feasts made from the sacred portions — probable even before the Mosaic law, though Selden argues the contrary in On the Law of Nature among the Hebrews, book 3, chapter 8. On the origins of the eating of flesh, see Bereshith Rabbah, Parashah 34, and Joseph Albo, Book of Principles, part 3, chapter 14.

XVII. Flesh having been permitted, the eating of it with its blood is forbidden, in verse 4: אַךְ בָּשָׂר בְּנַפְשׁוֹ דָמוֹ לֹא תֹאכֵלוּ ("But flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat"). It is not the eating of blood by itself that is forbidden, but the eating of flesh together with blood. It has been shown that the long-lived men of that early age were prone to cruelty; hence the earth was filled with violence before the Flood. Experience teaches, among the American Indians, that men are made savage by eating raw flesh and blood still almost pulsing with motion. To meet this vice — on the brink of which, beyond all others, the human race, destitute of the word of God, seems to stand — this prohibition of eating flesh with blood was given. Some understand it of a limb torn from a living animal; they say the barbarous Americans still delight in that food. So Aben Ezra on the passage: "Because I have granted you the eating of the flesh of animals, you ought not to be cruel toward the beasts themselves, so as to eat a limb from a living animal." Grotius thinks the more recent Jews were led into this opinion out of hatred of Christians — that is, of the Greeks, who to this day, as Tertullian says, abstain from sausages distended with blood. To me it scarcely seems that the eating of blood which has already grown cold is forbidden here, nor can this be proved by any fitting argument from the text. Indeed, blood is not forbidden primarily, directly, or absolutely — much less the eating of it separated from the flesh. The object of the prohibition is flesh affected in a particular way: בְּנַפְשׁוֹ ("in its soul"), that is, while it is still animated by living blood. Stephanus Curcellaeus seems to me to have labored in vain in his posthumous treatise On the Eating of Blood, in which he contends that this question is of some importance for Christian practice. See Louis de Dieu on the passage. But whether אבר מן החי ("a limb from a living creature" — that is, with the blood still dripping), or דם מן החי ("the blood of an animal still living," or "blood from an animal" still pulsing in the flesh), is what is forbidden, remains uncertain.

XVIII. To this head also belong those seven much-talked-of precepts (πολυθρύλλητα) which report says God gave to the sons of Noah. They are generally listed as follows:

1. עַל עֲבוֹדָה זָרָה — Concerning foreign worship.
2. עַל בִּרְכַּת הַשֵּׁם — Concerning the blessing (or cursing) of the Name.
3. עַל שְׁפִיכוּת דָּמִים — Concerning the shedding of blood.
4. עַל גִּלּוּי עֲרָיוֹת — Concerning the uncovering of shameful nakedness.
5. עַל הַגְּזֵלָה — Concerning robbery.
6. עַל הַדִּינִים — Concerning courts of judgment.
7. עַל אֵבֶר מִן הֶחָי — Concerning a limb of a living animal.

XIX. By the first of these all idolatry of every kind is forbidden. Concerning the sense and interpretation of the second, scholars are not so agreed; the dispute arises from the ambiguous use of the word בָּרַךְ, which signifies both "to bless" and "to curse." Some take the words affirmatively, and would have them mean the blessing of the divine Name, or true worship as opposed to that foreign worship; more take them negatively, of not cursing the Name of God. The third concerns homicide. The fourth concerns adultery and all unlawful intercourse. The fifth expresses the eighth commandment of the Decalogue. Civil government is established by the sixth; and the last teaches mortals to abhor all cruelty.

XX. Genebrard, in his Chronology at the year of the world 1656, asserts that these precepts were given to Noah and his sons in the first year after the Flood. "Seven precepts," he says, "are given, which the Hebrews call in part the precepts of the sons of Noah, in part the precepts of nature, and they hold that these bind the nations as well." This persuasion, indeed, flowed from Jewish tradition; mention of them is extremely frequent in both Talmuds and in the writings of many rabbis. But it is false that the Jews claim these precepts were given to Noah and his sons — that is, to those four men — immediately after the Flood. By "the sons of Noah" they mean all the nations distinct from themselves; they call themselves, by contrast, "the sons of Abraham" and "the children of Israel," as opposed to "the sons of Noah" — absurdly, as though Abraham and Israel were not themselves sons of Noah. But this is how they like to speak. By "the sons of Noah" they mean all those descended from Noah who enjoy no spiritual privilege. In affirming that these precepts were given to them, they mean nothing other than that these are the general dictates of right reason, or the heads of the law of nature possessing binding force over all who lack supernatural revelation, whereas they themselves are further bound by the written law. Hence they affirm that the first six precepts were delivered to Adam — Seder Olam, chapter 5; Sepher Melakhim, chapter 9 — thereby showing that these are the common dictates of nature, or the universal heads of the law of nature. They assert that the last was added for Noah; thus they interpret that command about not eating flesh with blood — Manasseh [ben Israel], Conciliator, question 2, on Deuteronomy. As for the rest, it is well known that John Selden illustrated these precepts with most learned commentaries, to which we refer the reader who wishes to study these matters further.

XXI. I have no wish here to set down the oration of Noah to his posterity — whom he brought with him into Italy — which Curtius Inghirami brought to light among the fragments of Etruscan antiquities, as though it deserved some place in this account of antediluvian theology. For the whole drama of the discovered little balls, said to contain enclosed brief histories of the antiquities of Etruria from Noah's arrival in Italy down to the Catilinarian War, seems to me — and not to me alone — a most laborious fabrication of a learned man indeed, but one who abused his leisure and his talent far too much, indeed impiously. But since the author of the drama observed τὸ πρέπον ("what is fitting") in the oration attributed to Noah, I have thought it right to leave it here to the reader's judgment. The title of the little ball in which the oration was placed reads: "NOA VANDIMON." Then: "These are the words of the great Vandimon, which I, Ancus Cecinna, transcribed." The oration itself is as follows: "Hear, my sons and grandsons, my words, and receive with your ears what your father speaks to you. Blessed be God, before whose face I have found favor, who preserved me, snatched from the waters, to restore the human race, which in God's wrath was destroyed by rains and floods, lest what God had made should utterly perish. Be not, therefore, ungrateful to the great Aesar; fear him alone, serve him with your whole minds, for he is worthy, and because he has done many good things for you, and because he is God. If the great Aesar is always your God, nothing shall be lacking to you. Let his altar not be defiled; let no one seek the life of his brother, as Cain did. Let there be among you a bond of peace, and let it never be broken. You have this city, which I built on this mountain; when it is not enough for you (for you must multiply), you may build others on this same mountain; and if the mountain is not enough, choose healthful places in which you may build others. And if there are no dissensions among you, all things will prosper for you. Whoever does not fear God, and whoever is at variance with his brothers, let him be cast out from among you, for the discord of brothers corrupts everything. Do not, my sons, provoke God again by fornication, iniquity, and wickedness, but remember God, who made you, delivered you from the waters, created all things for your sake, and subjected all things to you. God exalts the good and destroys the wicked; love him alone, and do all things in fear of him; for doing these things you will be filled with abundance of grain, wine, and oil, and the sons of your brothers will serve you. Your kingdom will remain forever. Keep always the sacred rites and ceremonies and all that I leave to you, and teach them to your children. May God bless you and fill you with every blessing, and may he soon send a king, unless he delivers you from foreign power." So he says — whose trifles I marvel that any learned men were ever pleased with, since there is scarcely a page of the whole book that does not sufficiently betray fraud and imposture.

XXII. And this was postdiluvian theology: namely, that natural theology of Adam, destined by the promise of the Messiah to a new end, and consigned to new uses, conformed to that state into which Satan, through sin, had by evil cunning enticed all mankind — enlarged and restored by new revelation, by the solemn renewal of the covenant, by a visible sign, and by various precepts — which the church of eight souls held as the rule of faith, obedience, and the whole of divine worship. We have no reason to doubt that many, instructed by it, spent their lives in the utmost reverence, piety, faith, love, and obedience toward God, and in gentleness, charity, mercy, justice, and faithfulness toward their own kind. For holiness of heart, purity and integrity of life, beneficence toward others, simplicity and candor in all manners, and the remaining virtues by whose benefit men are renewed to the image of God, could flourish even at the smallest outward degree of revelation, provided only that the Holy Spirit was present, illuminating the minds of men with his saving light.

XXIII. By the benefit of this theology, the reformed church, as to its outward profession and ὁμολογία ("confession"), continued on earth pure and acceptable to God for some forty years or thereabouts. For nothing is recorded that in any way contaminated it, until after the birth — and perhaps after some years' growth — of Canaan, the fourth and youngest son of Ham. At last Ham's long-hidden impiety broke out. What sort it was, the Holy Spirit shows in Genesis 9:22. It was a sin against the dictates of right reason, which, as Aristotle testifies, teach all men γονεῖς τιμᾶν ("to honor one's parents"). So too Plutarch, in his On Brotherly Love: Πάντες λέγουσι καὶ ᾄδουσιν ὡς γονεῦσι τιμὴν μετὰ θεοὺς πρώτην καὶ μεγίστην ἥτε φύσις, ὅ τε τὴν φύσιν σώζων νόμος ἀπέδωκε. Καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ὅτι μᾶλλον ἄνθρωποι κεχαρισμένον θεοῖς δρῶσιν, ἢ τοκεῦσιν αὐτῶν καὶ τροφεῦσι παλαιὰς ἐπὶ νέαις δανεισθείσας χάριτας προθύμως ἐκτίνοντες. Οὐδ᾽ αὖ πάλιν μείζων ἐπίδειξις ἀθέου γέγονε τῆς περὶ γονεῖς ὀλιγωρίας καὶ πλημμελείας· διὸ τοὺς μὲν ἄλλους κακῶς ποιεῖν ἀπείρηται, μητρὶ δ᾽ αὐτοῦ καὶ πατρὶ τὸ μὴ παρέχειν ἑαυτοὺς δρῶντας αἰεὶ καὶ λέγοντας ἀφ᾽ ὧν εὐφρανοῦνται, κἂν μὴ προσῇ τὸ λυποῦν, ἀνόσιον ἡγοῦνται καὶ ἄθεσμον ("All say and sing this — that nature, and the law that preserves nature, have assigned honor to parents as the first and greatest honor after the gods; and there is nothing men do more pleasing to the gods than eagerly repaying to their parents and nurturers the old favors owed on new ones. Nor again is there any greater display of godlessness than neglect and offense toward parents; wherefore, while it is forbidden to do ill to others generally, it is held unholy and unlawful not to show oneself always acting and speaking toward one's own mother and father in ways that gladden them, even where nothing grievous is added"). These are his excellent words. Hierocles has similar things, and almost the whole chorus of the wise. It is strange, therefore, that some, on account of those words — "and he knew what his youngest son had done to him" (וַיֵּדַע אֵת אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לוֹ בְּנוֹ הַקָּטָן), Genesis 9:24, "his young son" — contend that not Ham but Canaan must be understood. "For what," they say, "did Ham do to his father? He was only a messenger to his brothers of their father's disgrace." These are the words of the great Scaliger, in his Refutation of the Oration of David Pareus. He did, I say, do something: he openly and plainly transgressed the law of nature, as is clearly established by the deed of his brothers, opposed as it was to his impiety. He displayed his father's nakedness, mocking it to his brothers (τοῖς ἀδελφοῖς ἐπιγελῶν δείκνυσιν), as Josephus rightly notes, Antiquities, book 1, chapter 1. He sinned, then, against the greatest principles of that theology, which was the foundation and norm of the church, of worship, and of obedience.

XXIV. The sin of Ham, then, sacred Scripture, as we have shown, sets forth clearly enough. What some add to that narrative are conjectures — indeed the delirious dreams of dreamers. That he not only saw or gazed upon, with a certain joy and insulting mockery, his father's nakedness, but cut off his genitals, or bewitched him with magic arts so that he might beget no more sons thereafter — such trifles the rabbis prattle, Rashi on Genesis chapter 9. Boissard, in his Apollonius of Tyana, clings to their fables, and Athanasius Kircher, in his Origin of Letters and Obelisks, chapter 2, seems to give them credence. Hence almost everyone suspects that the fable of Saturn cutting off his father Caelus's genitals — as in Lactantius, book 1, chapter 12 — or of Jupiter cutting off Saturn himself with a sickle, took its origin from this. And this indeed is quite plausible, although, to tell the truth, Porphyry, in his book On the Cave of the Nymphs in Ithaca, so skillfully fits the whole fable to a cryptic natural theology that I could almost believe the first tellers of the fable had something of that sort in mind. As for the rest, the curse is expressly pronounced upon Canaan — either because he was at that time especially his father's darling, being his youngest son; or because he had stood by his father in the sin and in the shameful spectacle; or because this family, among the descendants of Ham, was to be the first to fall away from the true church and the worship of God; or for the comfort of the Israelites, who, about to enter the promised land, might understand that the nation with which they would go to war was accursed, and long since destined to servitude and destruction. Be that as it may, it is quite certain that Ham himself was cursed in the person of his son — that is, cast out from the family of God. Strange things — or rather ridiculous ones — are the trifles some of the ancients tell of the passion of Christ prefigured in the drunkenness of Noah: of the cross, the sacraments, the Gentiles, the Jews, the ministers of the word, all of which they imagined they saw in the wine, in Ham, in Japheth, and in the garment.

XXV. On account of this sin, then, by which his hypocrisy — hidden for some while — broke out to the gravest scandal of the church and openly showed itself, Ham was cursed by his father, who, still under God, presided over the whole church with paternal authority. In his expulsion from the society of the godly we have another, and a notable, example of ecclesiastical reformation. For the reformation of the church is first to be attempted by the removal of sinners from the assembly and communion of those who duly worship God by faith. We gave an earlier example of this in the postlapsarian Adamic church. But when the band of the stubborn grows too strong, the separation of the faithful from their assemblies takes the place of that removal.

XXVI. In this manner, then, the reformation of the new church was carried out. For such is the weakness of all and the malice of many, that no church, from the world's beginnings, has ever been able to endure long without some notable reformation. To this newly reformed church, moreover, new promises were given — partly for the consolation of its most wretched lot, partly to serve as spurs to more exact obedience and to a life to be spent before God with the utmost care and diligence. Genesis 9:26–27: "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem... God shall entice Japheth, that he may dwell in the tents of Shem."

XXVII. There is no doubt that all the assemblies of the godly likewise shunned Ham, who was driven from the solemn worship of God by his father's curse. But the time had not yet come when the human race was to be scattered into the various parts of the earth. Ham and his people, therefore, continued to dwell under the same quarter of heaven together with his brothers and their descendants. From this arose a new stain of evil; from this the seat of apostasy sprouted up again, in a church not long since emerged from the Flood and but newly reformed. No one doubts that Noah, Shem, Japheth, and their godly sons and grandsons endeavored to keep the purity of the worship of God, according to the canons of that theology in which they had been instructed, sound and intact within the church. Both their own piety and the claims of duty toward others demanded this. But that very many of their descendants, carried away by the impious seductions and examples of the Hamites — since they themselves also had a nature headlong toward every wickedness — fell away foully, and almost universally, from the rule and worship of God within a few years, we shall understand from what followed. For in the hundred and first year after the Flood, the crowd of apostates, covered with crimes, senseless with pride, and stubborn, having openly set at nought the authority, discipline, and admonitions of Noah, rushed headlong into every wickedness. And since the humble, peaceable, and pious manner of Noah's life displeased them exceedingly, they went off into everything contrary to it. Having therefore cast off all reverence for the Deity, and puffed up with I know not what pride, they set themselves to building a tower, by which they might win a name and glory for themselves. But as they were plotting great things hateful to God, a dreadful judgment of confusion of tongues seized them, and scattered them over the whole face of the earth. From that day until the coming of the promised Messiah, God permitted the greater part of the human race to walk in their own ways.

Chapter 2

Noah, אִישׁ הָאֲדָמָה ("man of the earth") – The fable of Saturn and Rhea arising from this – Janus, herald of justice – The Sibylline oracles fabricated – The authors of the Sibylline verses – Whence the Sibyls were named; traditions mixed into their oracles – An example – The builders of the tower of Babel; the manner and cause of its building – What the primeval language was – Grotius's opinion examined – Why the holy language is called Hebrew, Genesis 10:21, Joshua 24:2–3 – The most monstrous fables of the Targumist Uzziel – Abraham called "Hebrew" from Eber – The time of the division of languages.

I. That Noah was אִישׁ הָאֲדָמָה, that is, "a man of the earth," Scripture notes at Genesis 9:20 — occupied, that is, with a humble manner of life. This befitted the wretched condition of sinners on earth, and especially his own condition, who had seen the horrible judgments of God fall upon the antediluvian world. Hence the fable-makers called Saturn the husband, or spouse, of Rhea — that is, of the Earth. This is Bochart's conjecture, Sacred Geography, book 1, chapter 1. Whatever later ages thought of it, it is plain that this manner of life displeased the wicked of that age. He also, planting a vineyard, "drank of the wine" (יַיִן, "wine"); hence he was called Janus. The apostle affirms that he was the antediluvian herald of righteousness, 2 Peter 2:5. Rightly discharging that office, he condemned the world — which he could not heal — by faith and by deeds, Hebrews 11:7. His preaching is recalled by the verses called the Sibylline Oracles, in these and other lines: Ἄνδρες ἀπιστόκοροι μεγάλῳ βεβλημένοι οἴστρῳ ("Faithless, contentious men, smitten with a great frenzy").

This is she who shortly after pretends to have been Noah's daughter-in-law, and to have been in the ark together with him and her husband. But all things that circulate under the name of the Sibyls are fabricated. I marvel that any mortal was ever of such abject credulity as to think otherwise. The authors of these oracles not only drew a great deal from the sacred Scriptures, but were Christians, and heretics at that. It is not improbable that Priscilla and Maximilla, the prophetesses of Montanus, composed these centos, if indeed women were their authors. Only after their prophecies were made public were the mysteries of the Christian religion drawn out from the Sibylline oracles. That certain prophetic women, called Sibyls, as if privy to the more secret counsels of the gods — for, as Diodorus says (book 4.61), "to be inspired" is "to sibylize" (τὸ γὰρ ἐνθεάζειν, σιβυλλαίνειν) — lived among the nations, I would not deny. But that their lots and oracles were diabolical, the credit of all history teaches. Let one consult what, drawn from their books by order of the Roman senate at various times, has been recorded by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Cicero, Varro, Livy, Tacitus, Zosimus, and others; all of it smacks of diabolical superstition and paganism. Cornelius Tacitus gives the sum of it all, Annals 15.44: "It was the custom," he says, "to seek expiatory rites from the gods, and to consult the Sibylline books, from which supplication was made to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpina, and Juno was propitiated by the matrons, first on the Capitol, then by the nearest sea." Perhaps, too, the ancient serpent mixed in some true things with the false, after his manner, so as to render the true suspect and win credit for the false. Even those things which, by a faint report deriving from the tradition of the first promise and of other divine revelations, had crept into the earlier ages of the world concerning the future kingdom of the Messiah — once diffused into pagan gaps — were mixed in with these oracles. Such seems to be that oracle which Marcus Tullius mentions in On Divination, book 2, chapter 54: "We observe," he says, "the verses of the Sibyl, which she is said to have poured forth in her frenzy; and their interpreter was lately thought about to declare in the senate, on the strength of a false popular rumor, that the man whom we actually had as king ought also to be called king, if we wished to be safe. If this is in the books, to which man, and to which time, does it refer? For the man who composed them contrived cunningly that, whatever happened, it should seem to have been foretold, all definition of persons and times having been removed." He notes Lucius Cotta, a member of the college of fifteen, who, at the instigation of Antony — when Julius Caesar was ambitious even to add the name to his royal power — attempted, on the strength of the popular rumor of that time concerning a great king who was to come, to offer sacrifice accordingly. The most celebrated of the Roman historians, Suetonius and Tacitus, set forth the same oracle in almost the same words — the former in his Life of Vespasian, the latter in the fifth book of his Histories. Suetonius calls it "an old and constant opinion"; Tacitus, "a persuasion drawn from the ancient books of the priests." It is, namely, this: ἐξ σοῦ ἐξελεύσεται ὁ ἡγούμενος ("out of you shall come forth the ruler") — that is, that the East would grow strong, and that a governor from Judea would obtain the mastery of the world. But this has nothing to do with our verses.

II. We have shown above that Noah admonished his antediluvian contemporaries of their sins. It would be wicked to suspect that he did not strive, with even more earnest effort, to restrain his sons and grandsons after the Flood from impiety and falling away from God — though both efforts were in vain. For although he was the father of the whole new people, he could not keep his degenerate sons from the foolish attempt to make a name for themselves by building a huge tower, Genesis 11:3–4.

III. Sacred Scripture clearly implies that Noah himself, and all the godly, kept apart from that insane undertaking of the apostates. Those who took up that deed were בְּנֵי הָאָדָם, Genesis 11:5, that is, "the sons of men." These are opposed to "the sons of God," that is, the godly, who feared God. For "sons of God," from the days of Enosh, both before and after the Flood, were godly men who adhered to Adamic theology and divine worship; "sons of men" were deserters and apostates. The Holy Spirit therefore here indicates the impious apostates, deserters of the church. Children know the fable of giants that arose from this. But they did not build the tower in order to climb up into heaven; nor is it credible that they were mad enough for that madness, seeing that God prevented them from completing their undertaking (verse 6). Nor did they undertake that deed in order to secure themselves against another flood — they could not have been ignorant that there would be no more universal flood, nor for that purpose would they have come down from the highest mountains of the whole earth into the deepest valley. But Moses expressly testifies, verse 4, that, puffed up with pride and κενοδοξία ("vainglory"), they resolved within themselves to win for themselves a NAME and glory by that work.

IV. Much is disputed on all sides about the confusion of tongues that is not to our present purpose. Let us add a few remarks about the primeval language, and about the reason for the name it afterward obtained. We have said that "the sons of God" in no way associated themselves with the crime of πυργοποιΐα ("tower-building"). Among them, therefore, and their descendants, the use of the primeval language remained. That this language was Hebrew — which was indeed afterward so called — learned men almost unanimously agree. Rightly the celebrated Bochart, Sacred Geography, book 1, chapter 10: "While the languages of the others were confused, these" (that is, the godly participants in the covenant) "retained their own — that most ancient language, which was called Hebrew from Eber, because it remained sound and intact among Eber's descendants." So far as I know, the only recent writer of a different opinion is Grotius, in his Annotations on Genesis 11:1, "And the whole earth was of one lip." "That language," he says, "the Hebrews call their own; the Syrians call it theirs." This is correct; the Hebrews do say so, and consistently. Thus the Targum of Jonathan: בְּלִישַׁן קוּדְשָׁא הֲווֹ מְמַלְלִין דְּאִתְבְּרִי בֵּיהּ עַלְמָא מִן שֵׁרוּיָא ("They spoke the holy tongue in which the world was created from the beginning"). The Jerusalem Targum has the same words. Rabbi Solomon Jarchi [Rashi] on the passage: "One lip is the holy language." So too Aben Ezra, and all the ancient Christian writers, except Theodoret. "But the Syrians think it was their own language," says Grotius. This too is true. The Maronites hold this opinion, following Theodoret. It is quite plain that they think this foolishly. All who understand anything of the analogy between the two languages acknowledge that Syriac took its origin from Hebrew, not Hebrew from Syriac; the purity and simplicity of the Hebrew language cries this out. "The Syrian Maronites," says Joseph Scaliger, in a letter to Richard Thomson, "contend, on whatever pledge you like, that Syriac is older than Hebrew — which is the height of ignorance; for it is just as if one should say that the Italian language is older than Latin. For certainly מֶלֶךְ ("king") is earlier than מַלְכָּא, and we could bring forward many other things to overthrow this obstinacy." "But the Hebrew language," says Grotius, "is the language of the עברים ("Hebrews"), strangers from Chaldea — for this is the origin of the name "Hebrews," not from Eber; see Joshua 24:2–3. That Hebrew language of Abraham and his descendants, then, through their sojourning in Canaan, drew ever closer and closer to the Canaanite language." So he says — οὐδὲν ὑγιές ("nothing sound in it").

V. I admit that this account of the naming — "Hebrew," and "the Hebrews" — has pleased, and still pleases, certain learned men. Erpenius collected the arguments for that opinion in his Oration on the Hebrew Language, which Fuller refutes in his Miscellanea Sacra, book 4, chapter 4, and Rivet in his Exercitations on Genesis, exercise 66; and we showed above that Bochart rejects this derivation of those words. It was indeed a great thing, once, to have gone out from Mesopotamia — from peoples "whom the rivers hold shut in." For, as Philostratus says in his Life of Apollonius, book 1, chapter 14, "they reckon themselves islanders, so as to say that they go down to the sea whenever they go to the rivers, and they make the circuit of the rivers the boundary of the earth" (νησιώτας ἑαυτοὺς νομίζοντες ὡς ἐπὶ θάλατταν καταβαίνειν φάσκειν, ὅτ᾽ ἐπὶ τοὺς ποταμοὺς βαδίζοιεν, ὅρον τε ποιεῖσθαι τῆς γῆς τὸν τῶν ποταμῶν κύκλον). But that Abraham was therefore called "Hebrew," and the holy tongue "Hebrew" — that is, he "the crosser," it "the tongue of crossers" — is far too incredible. Moses says that "Shem was the father of all the sons of Eber," Genesis 10:21 — which can scarcely be understood as meaning anything other than "the father of all the Hebrews."

VI. Thus those who were "sons of Eber" were Hebrews, and Hebrews were "sons of Eber" — and this is the basis of the name. Some say these words could mean "Shem was the father of all who dwelt beyond the river." But this is said without any parallel example, and lacks all plausibility. For if the Holy Spirit had said הוּא אֲבִי כָּל הָעִבְרִים, "he was the father of all the crossers-over," that conjecture would not have been so futile. But as the words actually stand — כָּל־בְּנֵי־עֵבֶר, "all the sons of Eber" — it is plain from the common usage of the holy tongue that nothing else is denoted but "the descendants of Eber." Nor can any plausible reason be given why Shem should be called, distinctly (διακριδόν), the father of all those beyond the river, when the greatest part of his own descendants always dwelt on this side of the river, while it was very many families descended from Ham who crossed over. But what we have said about Eber is expressly affirmed by Balaam in his last prophecy, Numbers 24:24: "Ships shall come from Chittim, and shall afflict Asshur, and shall afflict Eber" — where interpreters agree that the prophet uses national and patronymic names instead of conjugated forms, so much so that the Vulgate renders it "the Assyrians and the Hebrews."

VII. But Grotius refers us to Joshua 24:3. He says that in that passage Joshua states that God took Abraham "from beyond the river" (מֵעֵבֶר הַנָּהָר), or from a place that was beyond the river. He therefore supposes that Abraham was called עִבְרִי, "Hebrew," from this, as though one should say "crosser-over"; and that, on this account — precisely because Abraham crossed the river — this name was so applied by the Holy Spirit as to become the surname of all his descendants, who were to be called, for all ages, "crossers-over," or "the nation of those who cross over." But no parallel or similar basis for a naming of this kind is found anywhere in the records of any people. There appears here, then, not even a trace of a real basis for the conjecture. Nor was Abraham the only one who, in that age, had crossed the Euphrates on his way to migrate into the land of Canaan. For that reason, then — nor because he had dwelt in Mesopotamia — was he to be called "crosser" or "trans-river dweller" any more than very many others. Indeed, it is quite certain that most of the Canaanites, sprung as they were from Ham, crossed the Euphrates not long after the dispersion at Babel. These, therefore, by this same derivation of the word, would have had to be called Hebrews no less than Abraham himself and his descendants; nor could the apostle Paul have boasted any less than others that he was "a Hebrew of the Hebrews."

VIII. It is said gratuitously by some in this matter — indeed falsely presumed — that Abraham was first called "Hebrew" by the Canaanites, as though they wished by that name to denote his crossing over, which, as they say, they had all but witnessed with their own eyes. But he was first marked with that title by the Holy Spirit himself, Genesis 14:13: "There came one who had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew." These are the words of the Holy Spirit, not of the Canaanites. It is true that among the Canaanites he was first so styled — but not by the Canaanites. The Septuagint, however, renders those words Ἄβραμ τῷ περάτῃ — "to Abram the crosser." Hence Chrysostom, too rashly, supposed that he was for this reason also called "Abram," and that this was the meaning of that name, Homily 35 on Genesis: "From the beginning," he says, "his parents gave him this name, thereby foreshowing his removal from that place; for since he was to cross the Euphrates and come into Palestine, he was for this reason called Abram" (Ἐξ ἀρχῆς οἱ γονεῖς τὸ ὄνομα αὐτῷ ἐπετίθεσαν προμηνύοντες αὐτῷ τὴν ἐκεῖθεν μετάστασιν. Ἐπειδὴ γὰρ περῶν ἔμελλε τὸν Εὐφράτην, καὶ ἐπὶ τὴν Παλαιστίνην ἔρχεσθαι, διὰ τοῦτο καὶ Ἄβραμ ἐκαλεῖτο). Would that this most learned man had erred, out of ignorance of the Hebrew language, in this one passage only! But even children know that the meaning of that name is something quite different. Some think that the Seventy called Abraham "Perates" from פְּרָת ("Euphrates"); but the actual force of the word plainly deceives them. They rendered, then, not the word itself, but an interpretation of the word. Jerome notes that this was their regular habit, on Isaiah 27:12, where, conversely, they translate נַחַל מִצְרַיִם ("the brook of Egypt") as "Rhinocorura": "For 'the torrent of Egypt,'" he says, "the Seventy rendered 'Rhinocorura,' which is a town on the border between Egypt and Palestine — expressing not so much the words of Scripture as the sense of the words." In the same way, deceived by the similarity of the letters, they more than once translated "Hebrew" as "slave" — reading, that is, daleth in place of resh. So at 1 Samuel 13:3, יִשְׁמְעוּ הָעִבְרִים, "Let the Hebrews hear," the Seventy render ἠθετήκασιν οἱ δοῦλοι, "the slaves have rebelled" — I do not know what ἠθετήκασιν is meant to signify; δοῦλοι stands for עִבְרִים. And at Jonah 1:9, עִבְרִי אָנֹכִי, "I am a Hebrew," the Seventy render Δοῦλός Κυρίου εἰμὶ ἐγώ, "I am a servant of the Lord" — where they add Κυρίου of their own accord, so as to give the illusion some color. There is no reason, then, why their interpretation of this name should move us in the least. But if Moses had meant to call him "the crosser" rather than "the Hebrew," he would not have used עִבְרִי — which is quite plainly a patronymic, like אֱמֹרִי ("Amorite") and עֲמָלֵקִי ("Amalekite") — but would have named him עוֹבֵר or עֹבְרִי, as Augustine, Steuchus, Drusius, and Buxtorf show. But the true basis for the naming is at hand. The whole nation of the Canaanites, once destined for extirpation, was at that time made up of many families, driven from their eastern dwellings by various chances, or impelled by some impulse from God, and flowing together into that land under various leaders. And all of them were distinguished from one another by surnames taken from the best-known founders of their stocks (not from Ham, nor from Canaan himself, just as Abraham was not named from Shem) — which Moses enumerates, Genesis 10:15–18. This one was an Amorite, that one a Jebusite, another a Hivite, another a Hittite. Each was named from his own stock, or from the founder of his stock. Dwelling among them, Abraham was called "Hebrew," from Eber, the most famous ancestor of the family from which he sprang — and so was thereby distinguished, even in family designation, from the whole line of Ham. For in the very same passage where Abraham is first called עִבְרִי, or "Hebrew," his ally Mamre is styled אֱמֹרִי, or "Amorite" — so that we may easily see that the basis of both surnames was the same; for both are equally patronymics. Just as, then, all the inhabitants of that land were distinguished from one another, each marked by some patronymic name, so Abraham was called "Hebrew" from the most famous founder of his stock. Nor do the Targumists take the word in any other sense. If one consults Uzziel on the passage, one will meet with the fable which I have thought fit to set out here, so that the reader may understand what sort of coals, instead of treasure, he is likely to find, should he happen to fall in with that Talmudic fable-monger — for scarcely anywhere does he show more of his character than here. So, then, he writes on Genesis 14:13: "And Og came, who had escaped from the men who died in the Flood; and he had ridden upon the ark, and there was a covering on its top, and he was fed from Noah's provisions; nor was he delivered for his own righteousness, but that the inhabitants of the world might see the might of God, and say: Did not the giants who were from the beginning rebel against the Lord of the world, and were destroyed from the earth? And he came to Abraham at the going down of the day of Passover, and found him making unleavened cakes." To this one may add the same Og's — the antediluvian's — death, which he narrates thus on Numbers 22: "Now it happened that after the wicked Og saw the camp of the Israelites, which stretched out for six miles, he said to himself, I will draw up a battle-line against this people, so that they may not do to me what they did to Sihon. He went and tore up a mountain six miles across, and set it upon his head to hurl it at them. Immediately the word of the Lord prepared a worm, which gnawed at the mountain and bored through it, so that his head was plunged into the midst of it; he wanted to pull his head back out of it" (not, as it is in the London translation, "he wanted to pull it out from his head") "but he could not, for his teeth and molars had caught it fast on this side and that. Moses went and took an axe ten cubits long, and leapt ten cubits, and struck him in the ankle, and he fell down dead." Such are his words — worthy to be numbered among Aesop's fables; and yet not even worthy of that, being insipid and utterly useless, indeed harmful. The Koran of Muhammad scarcely teems with more shameless lies than this Pentateuch of Ben Uzziel. And he is the more to be abhorred for this, that the trifler set himself to defile the sacred oracles of God. The Targum of Onkelos has עַבְרָאָה, "Hebrew"; and at Exodus 2:6 it renders הָעִבְרִנִים, "the Hebrews," by הַיְהוּדָאֵי, "the Jews"; and at Deuteronomy 15:12, אָחִיךָ הָעִבְרִי, "thy brother the Hebrew," by אֲחוּךְ בַּר יִשְׂרָאֵל, "thy brother, son of Israel." To it, "Hebrew," "Jew," and "son of Israel" are the same — this name being a patronymic.

IX. Some object that no plausible reason can be given why the whole family should be named from Eber rather than from others — from Shem, say, or Arphaxad — or why Abraham, rather than Eber's other descendants, should be called "Hebrew" from Eber. But a plausible cause and reason for both are not lacking. It is probable that Eber was greatly eminent among the new people, from the fact that, all the others being passed over, Shem is expressly said, Genesis 10:21, to be "the father of all the sons of Eber." No reason can be given for his attaining that degree of honor except through holiness and virtue toward God. Moreover, of all the patriarchs born after the Flood, he was the longest-lived (μακροβιώτατος), and outlived his own son Peleg. After Peleg's death, there can be no doubt that he took special care of his grandsons, and stood to them in place of an immediate parent. So too, although Aram was the youngest son of Shem, because he lived longer than all his brothers, the Syriac language, which many others besides his own progeny used, was called "Aramaic," as Elias Levita teaches us in his preface to the Methurgeman. Eber also lived, distinguished for his piety, at the very time when the languages were confused and the earth divided; in view of this specimen of adorable divine providence, he gave his son the name Peleg. Moreover, from the preservation of the primeval language in his family, he appears to have been the leader of those who did not consent to the building of the tower. It was not, then, except for the weightiest reasons, that his name was passed down to his descendants. That they constituted a family or tribe separate from the rest of Shem's posterity is quite plain from those words of Moses which we cited before.

X. Further, it is plain from the outcome that not only did all the sons of Joktan — who was Eber's younger son — betake themselves to the apostate crowd, but very many even of those descended from Peleg himself mingled with them, and bade farewell to their father's family, in which the pure worship of God had flourished. Abraham, however, above the rest of his godly forefathers, and indeed of Eber himself, followed most closely in their footsteps — though he himself was not free from the stain of the general apostasy. But at last, under God's guidance and by the benefit of new revelations, he brought back the piety of his ancestors and the worship of God that had been exiled from the earth. Should it, then, seem strange — especially since he became more renowned than all the other mortals of his age, and was established as the head and founder of the most glorious nation — that he should claim for himself and his posterity that famous patronymic name (which his own apostasy had rejected, or at least had counted as worth nothing, along with what remained of that kinship)? Nor was the crossing of a river so great a thing that a name should be imposed upon him and on the whole holy nation from it, to last for all ages. Abraham's migration, indeed, out of his own country and the land of his kindred, that he might follow God into a place he did not know, was an illustrious proof of his faith. But he does not judge rightly who thinks that this obedience of Abraham's should be reckoned from the mere crossing of a river, which he had in common with countless others. That, obeying God's word, submissive to his will and commands, he left his ancestral hearth and his own dwelling-place, and the superstitious worship in which he had been raised, allured by no hope of a richer condition, and followed him he knew not whither — this, among countless other things, commends his faith. If the crossing of a river be compared with that, it will be a thing of no account. But that this migration so greatly pleased God that on its account he received the promises — that his descendants should possess by hereditary right the land in which he was to sojourn, and that in him all the families of the earth should be blessed — as some affirm, is false and ἀθεόλογον ("theologically unsound"). False, because he had received those promises before he had crossed even the Tigris, let alone the Euphrates, as may be seen, Genesis 12:1–4. And theologically unsound, because it teaches that this is in any way to be imputed to Abraham's obedience, when it is most certain that it proceeded in every way from mere grace. For that God gave those promises to Abraham without any regard to any preceding obedience is more a matter of common confession than one needing proof. Concerning this origin of the name of the Hebrews, the same view is held with us — among the Jews, by Josephus, Antiquities, book 1, chapter 6; the Triple Targum; Aben Ezra on Exodus 1; Kimchi, root עבר; Elias Levita, Methurgeman; among the Fathers and ancient Christian writers, Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, book 7, chapter 2; Jerome, Questions on Genesis; Augustine, City of God, book 16, chapter 3; Eucherius on Genesis, book 2, chapter 7; Zonaras, Annals, book 1; and among the moderns, Calvin on Genesis 10:20; Pererius on Genesis 20; Mercerus on Genesis 14:13, and in his edition of Pagninus's Lexicon, root עבר; Munster on Genesis 11:16; Drusius on Genesis 14:13; Pareus on Genesis 14:15; Junius, Oration on the Hebrew Language; Cornelius a Lapide on Genesis 14; Buxtorf, Dissertation on the Preservation of the Hebrew Language; Sigonius, On the Hebrew Republic; Schindler, in his Lexicon, root עבר; Bochart, book 1, chapter 10; and countless others.

XI. Let us return to the celebrated Grotius, treating of the primeval language. He grants that Hebrew was Abraham's language; but he does not show what that language was, since it was not that ancient tongue coeval with the world. "Chaldean," says Cappel, Sacred Chronology, note to the Second Table. "That language of Abraham and his descendants," says Grotius, "through their sojourning in Canaan, drew closer and closer to the Canaanite language." Cappel asserts that he learned the Canaanite language — which was that primeval tongue now called Hebrew — from the Canaanites. We grant that the language of the Canaanites (whence Punic) came close to the Hebrew language. This has been most plainly shown, following others, by the celebrated Bochart, in a truly admirable work; the argument is drawn from the proper names of cities and men. But that those who were, without doubt, among the chief builders of the tower of Babel retained the pure primeval holy tongue, while those who religiously abstained from that crime — among whom, if any did, were Abraham's forebears — had forgotten it, surpasses all credibility. Cappel was preceded in that opinion by Joseph Scaliger, Letter to Thomson, and Notes on Eusebius, at number 804. But we shall show that Hebrew was the primeval language. The loss of that language was a penalty. But whether anyone could bring his mind to believe in earnest that those were punished by ignorance or corruption of that language who had never consented to the crime which incurred that penalty, I for my part very much doubt. It is probable that some of them, in the course of time, deviated somewhat from the purity of the dialect; Elias affirms, in his preface to the Methurgeman, that such a deviation was the origin of the Chaldean language. But that the accursed Canaanites, devoted to eternal destruction, retained the pure primeval language; and that Abraham, moreover, learned their language, whatever it finally was, and communicated that alone to his descendants — who were most strictly forbidden to have anything in common with those Canaanites, whom, of course, they were to exterminate from the face of the earth — these things seem paradoxical (παράδοξα).

XII. Moreover, it is most certain — contrary to what has seemed right to this learned man — that the Philistines did not use the Hebrew language. For those who were born of Jewish fathers but Ashdodite mothers "spoke partly in the language of Ashdod, and could not speak the language of the Jews" — with whom Nehemiah was most gravely angry, chapter 13:24–25. And Jerome, on Isaiah, book 7, chapter 19, affirms that "the Canaanite language is intermediate between Egyptian and Hebrew." "It is therefore truer," says Grotius, "that the primeval language exists nowhere in its purity, but that remnants of it are in all languages; and that the names of Adam, Eve, and the rest, expressed in Hebrew speech by Moses for the sake of the Hebrews, have the same meaning that they had in the primeval language. So Curtius says that certain soldiers were called 'immortals' by the Persians; that the approach to Cilicia was called 'the Gates' by the inhabitants; and that those who commanded a thousand soldiers each were called by the Persians 'chiliarchs.'" He thus dismisses both contending parties — Hebrew and Syriac — adjudging the palm of antiquity to neither. And in this opinion he is almost alone. Goropius Becanus, indeed, attempted to claim the honor of primitive antiquity for his own vernacular tongue, but in vain — for the matter has been settled here concerning all such claims. That God should have wished to consign his oracles in a language which was a mixture drawn from other, and those corrupted, tongues, seems scarcely credible. But the most learned Mercerus long ago answered these points, and we need no other words to refute the vanity of these exceptions; thus, then, he writes: "I hold it for certain, settled, and beyond doubt that that primeval language was Hebrew, although certain persons, more hostile to this view, say that the proper names were changed by Moses and translated into the language he favored — as though historians were not everywhere accustomed to retain proper names, even barbarous ones, unaltered, though they sometimes change them when, in the course of time, the names of regions or places have been changed. But they generally retain men's names unchanged, only accommodated to the inflection and pattern of their own language, somewhat twisted and corrupted, yet in such a way that the origin is easily recognized. Add to this: the etymology of all proper names before the Flood, and after, down to the division of languages, cannot be assigned to any other language; nor can that of the names Moses uses after that time be assigned to any language but Hebrew — as אָדָם ("Adam") from אֲדָמָה ("ground"); חַוָּה ("Eve"), because she was 'the mother of all living.' Cain, Abel, Seth, Mahalaleel, Kenan, Noah, and so forth — the source of all these, and of the rest, can be none other than Hebrew." So he writes, learnedly and piously.

XIII. Let the learned judge whether it is probable that all these proper names of men were translated by Moses into another language, when for very many of them no fitting reason for such translation can be given: קַיִן ("Cain") is named from קָנִיתִי ("I have gotten"); and שֵׁת ("Seth") means "he has appointed," because "God has appointed me another seed," and so forth. What, too, will those on the other side (οἱ ἐξ ἐναντίας) say of allusions drawn from the Hebrew language — such as that one, יַפְתְּ אֱלֹהִים לְיֶפֶת, "God shall enlarge (יַפְתְּ) Japheth"? But some say that these words were also in use in the Chaldean or Syriac language. Their pretension, however, is plainly met by those words of Adam: "She shall be called Woman (אִשָּׁה), because she was taken out of Man (אִישׁ)" — whereas among the Chaldeans, "woman" is אִתְּתָא and "man" is גְּבַר, words between which there is no such kinship as the first man (ὁ πρωτόπλαστος) points to.

XIV. But the whole of this argument was treated, not long ago, so thoroughly by the most learned Buxtorf the younger, in a special dissertation on the origin and antiquity of the Hebrew language, that no room for doubt seems to be left for the future. The primeval language, then, whose use God implanted in man at his very creation, is Hebrew. After it had been common to the whole earth for 1,757 years, at the division of the languages it remained among those descendants of Shem who had no part in the building of the mad tower; thus Genebrard, Chronicle, book 1: "Hebrew, which before was common, remained uncorrupted among the family of Eber (from whom both the language and the people take their name), because he had taken part neither in their counsels nor in the work by which they proposed to raise a tower to heaven." But as many of them gradually fell away from the true worship of God, they seem likewise to have gradually deviated from the pure dialect of the language; whence arose the Chaldean dialect, as the celebrated Selden holds, Prolegomena 2, On the Syrian Gods. And so Elias Levita teaches us, in his preface to his Sepher HaMeturgeman: לָשׁוֹן אֲרַמִּית הוּא לָשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ מְשֻׁבָּשׁ — "The Aramaic tongue is the holy tongue corrupted." Elsewhere he proves, from Rabbi Aben Ezra, that it is nearer to the holy tongue than all other languages; and he adds further: "It is plain that in the time of the patriarchs this language was already corrupted. The proof of this is יְגַר שָׂהֲדוּתָא, 'Jegar-sahadutha' [the Aramaic name Laban gave the heap of witness]; and so it seems to me that it must be said to have been corrupted as soon as Abraham went out from Chaldea. For without doubt he himself and his fathers spoke the holy tongue, just as they had received it from Adam down to Noah, אִישׁ מִפִּי אִישׁ, one from the mouth of another."

XV. Wherever the church, or at least its most clearly expressed traces, remained — especially in that family from which it was destined by God's counsel to be renewed — there too the purity of the ancient language remained. That was the family of Eber, from whom this language was called Hebrew, which before had been marked by no name at all; nor did it need a title to distinguish it from others, since it was the only one — as Augustine rightly says, City of God, book 16, chapter 11: "Because this language remained in the family of Eber, while the rest of the nations were divided among other languages — this language which is not without reason believed to have been formerly common to the human race — it was thereafter called Hebrew; for then there was need for it to be distinguished from other languages by a proper name, just as the others too were called by their proper names; but when it was the only one, it was called nothing else than the human language, or human speech, which alone the whole human race spoke." From Eber, too, Abraham — who almost alone embraced his ancestral religion in holiness — was called "Hebrew," as we have proved; and by him that language was brought into Canaan, the land promised to him and to his seed. Abraham's remaining brothers and kinsmen, and his other contemporaries of Eber's family, degenerated from the pure use of the holy tongue just as they did from the true religion.

XVI. Sacred Scripture affirms that this division of languages happened either a little before Peleg's birth, or about that time — Genesis 10:25, 1 Chronicles 1:19. The Jews, in the Seder Olam, or "Order of the World," count 340 years from the Flood, says Munster — that is the reckoning he makes in the margin of his translation. But the text has it that from the Flood to the division was 272 years; for they relate that this division happened when Abraham was forty-eight years old. Now from the Flood to Abraham's forty-eighth year is 340 years; hence Munster added fifty-two years to their number, so that his own computation would be consistent. But this is mistaken; that division fell in the two hundred and forty-first year before Abraham was born, about the time of Peleg's birth, as shown above. Buxtorf also most learnedly settles this dispute, in his Dissertation on the Confusion of Tongues; David Pareus also treats of it at length, Commentary on Genesis, chapter 12; and, most recently, Ussher, in his Sacred Chronology, chapter 5, where he vindicates the faith and truth of the reckoning of the Hebrew text against Morin's objections.

XVII. When, then, almost the whole human race had been driven into this state and condition, and left to the counsel of its own mind — after, that is, weariness of the true God and of his worship had seized them — it gradually poured itself out into every kind of idolatry. The earlier ages, indeed, could not entirely cast off whatever knowledge of God they had, whether from their parents' instruction or from vague tradition. Of these we find, accordingly, that very many — as is the way of men convicted by the small sparks of divine light — feared God, yet served idols. But as time went on, revealed theology was gradually rejected altogether, the memory of the solemn promise and of the divine covenant was utterly abolished, and the whole world universally defiled itself with abominable and most foul idolatrous rites. It is fitting, then, here to investigate more diligently the origin and progress of these things, as we promised above.

Chapter 3

The beginnings of idolatry most uncertain – Diversity of opinion concerning them – Reasons for a fresh inquiry – Adamic idolatry in paradise – Cain's apostasy and superstition – The Enoshian reformation of the church – No idolatry properly so called before the Flood – The "golden age" after the Flood – No traces of idolatry in it – Why men were called μέροπες – The time of the division of languages and the dispersion of the human race – The builders of the tower of Babel, what sort of men they were – What purpose they had in building it – The beginnings of idolatry to be sought among them.

I. That no clear traces exist of the origins and occasions of idolatry, we ourselves have seen before, and the fruitless efforts of investigators have placed this beyond dispute. That it had a beginning is plain from the outcome. The times, reasons, causes, authors, and all the first beginnings of its rise must be investigated by conjecture. Here, then: Μάντις ἄριστος, ὅστις εἰκάζει καλῶς ("The best prophet is he who guesses well" — Euripides, fragment 128); thus Cicero renders this maxim (γνώμη) from Euripides. Some suppose that idolatry took possession of the world before the Flood. Most of the Jews hold this opinion, especially Maimonides, at the beginning of his work On the Worship of the Stars, whom Selden follows in the Prolegomena to his treatise On the Syrian Gods. Others think that Satan first sprinkled this poison as soon as they had come out of the ark. The Targumists lay this crime specifically at the charge of Ham. To others it seems that, before the building of the tower of Babel — which the stubborn and proud sons of Noah undertook as a memorial to eternity — no sure traces or express records of arbitrary and profane worship can be found. Here, then, we must for a little plant our foot, and inquire into the sources of this Nile, most fertile of monsters, from which came forth "monstrous gods of every kind, and barking Anubis." This is a most fruitful field to survey in the records of ancient times — one which, though great minds have cultivated it, still, as usually happens in investigating the most obscure beginnings of things, of which "scarcely a thin breath of report glides down to us," remains a field in which others may yet exercise themselves much and long. The reader will easily see, from what we are about to relate on this subject, that there has been no lack of reasons for us to offer these gleanings of ours, after the most abundant harvests of others. For if, as to the matter itself — that is, the beginnings of foreign worship, shrouded as they are in more than enough darkness — we cannot bring any new light, still we are led to some hope that we shall set forth, not unwelcome to the reader, what relation these things bore to the worship of God, by what tricks that most ancient impostor deceived the human race and led it into fraud, and other matters silently passed over by the learned men who have cultivated this field with such great erudition — thereby lending some little light to a most obscure truth. It is my intention, however, only to touch briefly on the chief points, so that I may satisfy the work I have proposed, and be free to press on in the course I have set.

II. We have shown before that God implanted in man, created for his own glory, an innate law of obedience (ἔμφυτον), embracing all those things which would necessarily attend his nature, condition, and ultimate end. Yet he never permitted that law to be the full rule and revelation of all divine worship. In the state of creation, before the entrance of sin, he added to it the institution concerning not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In that matter, with respect to the outward act, the rational creature made the beginning of its falling away from God; but it laid the foundation for that defection in the realm of moral worship. For, giving credit to the serpent against God's threat, man to that extent held the serpent in God's place; and this was a certain species of idolatry — indeed the worst — which still thrives among all those who, setting aside the authority of the divine promises and threats, render themselves obedient to Satan's word. This, however, is not that proper idolatry whose beginnings we are investigating.

III. After the entrance of sin, God restored natural theology, enlarging it with new revelations and the institution of sacrifices, and consecrating it to new ends. In the worship thus instituted, with unbelief leading the way, sin was again immediately committed. We explained above the nature and outcome of that sin. We have also shown that Cain, cursed by God, fell away entirely from his solemn worship. It is indeed probable that he, and the citizens of Enoch, over whom he presided (Genesis 4), repudiated that worship — the worship of sacrifice, from which he had drawn the first stain of evil — and, ἐθελοθρησκοῦντα ("practicing self-devised worship"), adopted new rites of their own devising, procuring for themselves "new gods" (אֱלֹהִים חֲדָשִׁים), as Scripture speaks, Judges 5:8. But there are countless things that stand in the way of our believing this. For it was not possible for Cain to so far put off his humanity as to fashion for himself other gods, after that express and open communication which had passed between him and Jehovah, the creator of all.

IV. As time went on, some even of the Sethites having lapsed into the manners of the Cainites, the godly people of Enosh's time, along with a reformation of divine worship — so that it might be kept pure the better and the longer, for the right invocation of the name of God — instituted separate assemblies, and were thence called "the sons of God." Genesis 4, last verse: "Then men began to call upon the name of the LORD." We have shown above that some falsely suppose the origin of foreign worship to be indicated by these words; for the Holy Spirit hints, not at a profanation of the divine name, but at a reformation of the church.

V. God himself complains that before the Flood all flesh had corrupted its way. Nor is there doubt that the apostates had most openly declared war on God and on religion. But that they were bound by this crime — idolatry, that is — no testimony exists, no foundation for making a plausible conjecture. Since we have already demonstrated this clearly enough by argument above, I do not wish to go over the matter again here. We must, then, necessarily pass over the antediluvian ages in this inquiry. For the opinion of Justin Martyr does not please us, who interprets "the sons of God," who, captivated by love for the daughters of men, took them as wives, to be angels, and holds that demons were begotten from them, who at once set about promoting idolatry — Apology to the Roman Senate.

VI. What the Targumists and other Jews rave about Ham's idolatry and magical incantations, and the nature of his crime, does not belong here. That age which lies between the Flood and the famous dispersion of the nations at Babel has left very few, or almost no, traces of itself in the records that survive. Whatever the length of that span of time, Noah, the great father of the family, held the whole human race sprung from him under a pious and paternal government. That was the golden age of which the ancient fable-makers say so much. Virgil, Georgics 1.125: "Before Jove, no farmers subdued the fields"; and Martial, Epigrams, book 12; both, following Hesiod, refer this to Saturn — for so he says, Works and Days, 111: νόσφιν ἄτερ τε πόνων καὶ ὀϊζύος ("apart from toils and misery"); and Tibullus, book 1.3: "the very oaks gave honey," and so on. Lucian has similar things, in his Saturnalia, chapter 7, where he brings in Saturn speaking: καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ἁπανταχοῦ κρίτος, καὶ ᾠδή, καὶ παιδιά, καὶ ἰσοτιμία πᾶσι, καὶ δούλοις, καὶ ἐλευθέροις, οὐδεὶς γὰρ ἐπ᾽ ἐμοῦ δοῦλος ἦν ("and therefore everywhere there is judgment, and song, and play, and equal honor for all, both slaves and free — for in my time there was no slave") — all of which refers to Noah's paternal rule, and to the undivided earth. Plutarch relates, in his Life of Numa, that from this flowed the license of slaves at the Saturnalia among the Romans.

VII. For Noah was Saturn. He was the great herald of righteousness (δικαιοσύνης κήρυξ) to the antediluvians, 2 Peter 2:5, whose admonitions, once scorned, were followed by the dreadful utter destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the human race. As long, then, as his sons and grandsons either feared his authority, or showed themselves obedient to his words and preaching, it is not fair for us to suppose that they had committed this crime.

VIII. Most believe that the confusion of tongues happened in the hundred and first, or hundred and second, year after the Flood. Then men were made, and called, μέροπες, as in Homer, Iliad 1.250: γενεαὶ μερόπων ἀνθρώπων ("the generations of men of divided speech"). Μερόπων, that is, "having a divided voice" — "that is, having a voice divided into syllables and articulate," says Didymus; that is, because men have a tongue divided and fitted for pronouncing syllables, or use articulate speech, whereas the voices of the other animals are inarticulate (ἄναρθροι). Hesychius agrees with the scholiast: Μέροπες ἄνθρωποι διὰ τὸ μεμερισμένην ἔχειν τὴν ὄπα, ἤγουν τὴν φωνήν ("Men are called meropes because they have a divided voice, that is, speech"). Eustathius cites the same opinion first, then adds by way of correction: that those of our divine [Christian] company say men were called meropes from the division, or partition, of speech, which they suffered after the tower of Chalane, being scattered over the whole earth — that is, "it was the common opinion of the ancient Christians that men were called meropes from that division of languages which they suffered at the building of the tower of Babel." John Malalas of Antioch has similar words: "The tongues were divided, wherefore men are also called meropes, because their speech was divided into many tongues and voices" — the languages were divided, hence men were called meropes, Chronography, Theogony, book 2. Now, just as men were called μέροπες on account of the division of languages, so the place in which this punishment was inflicted on the rebels was called בָּבֶל ("Babel") — as though one said בּוֹא הֶבֶל, "confusion has come"; or בָּבֶל is said in place of בִּלְבֵּל, that is, "confusion," the middle lamed being dropped to avoid a harsh sound. In the hundred and first year after the Flood, Peleg was born. This name was given him "because in his days the earth was divided" (כִּי בְיָמָיו נִפְלְגָה הָאָרֶץ, Genesis 10:25). And the verb פָּלַג is used elsewhere in that sense, Psalm 55:9: פַּלֵּג לְשׁוֹנָם — "Divide their tongue." Most of the Jews affirm that this name was imposed on Eber's son by a prophetic spirit. Cornelius a Lapide and Augustinus Tornielli hold the same view — the former in his Commentaries on Genesis, the latter in his Annals, at the year of the world 1931. So, too, in the naming of Noah, his godly parents seem to have had regard to things that would not be fulfilled until six hundred years later. The Jews therefore hold that the tower of Babel was built in the two hundredth year of Peleg's life, led to this by arguments that are not altogether inept. But whatever pertains to understanding or rightly settling this chronological dispute, the most distinguished Buxtorf the younger has set forth in a special dissertation on the origin of the several languages. Sethus Calvisius, in his Chronology; Pererius, Pareus, and Rivet, in their Commentaries and Disputations on Genesis; Tornielli, in his Annals of the World; Masius, Commentary on Joshua; Ussher, in his Sacred Chronology; and very many others, both theologians and chronologers, have woven the same web.

IX. Those who assert that the division of languages took place at the birth of Peleg, and that his name was given him from that event, seem, in the opinion of some, to set the interval from the flood shorter than the time in which men could have grown to that multitude which undertook the building of the tower — for, as we have said, the birth of Peleg fell in the hundred and first year after the flood. But those who think that the name was given to Peleg by a prophetic spirit, and who place the dispersion of mankind at the end of his life, and therefore in the year of the world 1996, must accordingly place Abraham's arrival in the land of Canaan eighty-eight years after that dispersion — a span which seems too short for the founding of those kingdoms which sacred history relates to have been established in that period. Buxtorf therefore denies that Peleg was Heber's firstborn, or born in his father's seventy-fourth year, and instead assigns his birth, and consequently the division of languages, to another, much later, time. But John Temporarius, in his second Chronological Demonstration, shows that from the stock of Noah, in the space of 102 years, 1,554,420 males and females could have been born; half that number is allowed by Ussher in his Sacred Chronology, book 5, where he most learnedly beats back the madness and notorious audacity of John Morin, who rejects Hebrew chronology. Let us grant, then, that the building of the tower of Babel and the division of languages took place in the year of the world 1757, that is, 101 or 102 years after the flood. Up to that time, no trace, no monument, no testimony exists, or ever existed, to attest that idolatry existed; at least, no vestige of it survives.

X. The Jerusalem Targum teaches that the builders of the tower of Babel had it in mind to set an idol on the summit of that impious mass, to be worshipped with religious rites: "They said," it reports, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose head may reach to the top of the heavens, and let us make for ourselves an object of worship on its summit, and let us put a sword in its hand." Jonathan ben Uzziel repeats nearly the same tale in almost the same words. It is the common opinion of learned men that this tower endured long after the confusion of languages. Indeed it seems no different from the one Herodotus describes at length under the name of the temple of Bel, book 1, chapter 181. It consisted of eight towers set one upon another (of which at least the first, if not each one, was a furlong in height). Of the topmost he writes thus: Ἐν δὲ τῷ τελευταίῳ πύργῳ νηὸς ἔπεστι μέγας· ἐν δὲ τῷ νηῷ κλίνη μεγάλη κέεται ("In the last tower there stands a great shrine, and in the shrine a great couch richly spread"), etc. Not long, then, after the confusion of languages, this insane structure was turned into a temple of an idol — that is, of the sun. But the Jews trace the origin of their opinion elsewhere; they suppose that the words in Moses, by which the builders exhorted one another to undertake the work, hint at this purpose: וְנַעֲשֶׂה־לָנוּ שֵׁם ("And let us make ourselves a name"); that is, they say, "an idol of great name." For they claim that שֵׁם ("name") is used absolutely of some god, true or false. הַשֵּׁם does indeed emphatically signify "God" in one place, Leviticus 24:11; but nowhere absolutely, and never of an idol. Indeed, if this were true, one could find nowhere among the nations a more striking record of the origin of idolatry. Nor should this wickedness be reckoned as having crept over the earth gradually and by various stages, seized on various occasions; rather, a premeditated apostasy of mankind from God would have given it its rise. But this is rabbinic raving; the words the builders used point to something else entirely. Being mortal and subject to various mishaps, especially to dispersion into remote regions of the earth, they had it in mind to secure for themselves everlasting fame and glory. That was the intent they expressed in the words "Let us make ourselves a name" — that is, let us leave to our descendants a hereditary title of praise and glory. Nor is it credible that almost all the families of the whole world conspired against the living God as if in a single moment's whirlwind, and resolved all at once, having cast off all reverence and worship of the Creator, to worship idols.

XI. No reasoning, then, persuades us that they built the tower with the intent and purpose of worshipping new gods; Scripture relates that they had resolved on something far different. It is indeed probable that these builders were a race of men defiled with many crimes, who reckoned the power they had gained as slight and poor unless exercised through injury and oppression. We have shown earlier that they had rejected the admonitions and governance of Noah. Hence they were most abandoned to the dominion of Satan, and stood ready to carry out whatever the innate vanity of their minds might suggest.

XII. With the speech of all confused and divided, the exchange of new languages cast them into various separate bands. Reduced to that condition, God dispersed them by tribes and families over the whole face of the earth. There were indeed some among the ancient Christians for whom it was a heresy to deny that Noah had distributed the earth among his sons and grandsons and assigned to each family its own dwelling place. For once the labeling of heresies had become arbitrary, there was scarcely anything said or written by anyone, however true, that was not classed by some among them. It is, however, by divine disposition, not by any assignment of Noah's, that the sons of men came to occupy new dwellings, or were carried off to the various regions of the world, as Scripture shows, Genesis 11:8. That any of the builders of the tower retained the primeval language without some notable change cannot be proved by testimony or argument. We grant that words from it remained in some use among nearly all the nations; but they were very few, as Boxhorn rightly affirms in his Origines Gallicæ, chapter 7. It is not improbable that, along with the loss of the primeval language, they fell into forgetfulness of many instructions concerning divine things. It is among these, then — the builders of the tower of Babel, left to themselves, deprived of new revelations, forgetful of what had gone before, scattered here and there and wandering — that we must seek the beginnings of idolatry.

Chapter 4

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter II.

Colossians 3:11 — Epiphanius's distinction of the varieties of religion — the two kinds of idolatry, Sabaism and Hellenism — the peculiar superstition of the Druids — the beginning of idolatry in the worship of the heavenly bodies, Job 31:26-28 — the exposition of the ancients noted — the time in which Job lived — the beginning of the error in the seduction of the heart, Deuteronomy 11:16 — the manner of the most ancient worship — what adoration is — religious salutation — the ἔκστασις ("ecstasy, trance") of Socrates — Catulus — Pompey — the kiss — religious adoration, Psalm 2:12 — the version of the Seventy noted — Jerome's, on Hosea 13:2 — the objections (ἐνστάσεις) to adoration by kissing, from Pliny, Apuleius, Lucian, Minucius Felix — the reason for the bending of the body in adoration — the first sacrifices to idols without blood — the opinion of Porphyry — a reconciling of the opinions on the origin of sacrifices, Genesis 4:4, 8:20 — the offering of first fruits added to adoration, Hosea 2:8 — the origin of other ceremonies — the nature and desert of idolatry — the Egyptians the first worshippers of the stars — the Chaldeans and Persians join them — whether the sun alone was god among the Persians — the opinion of Herodotus — the number of the gods continually increased with the passage of time — the writers of the history of the Magi — the custom of the Greeks and Romans in reckoning the gods of other nations — the gods of the Germans and the Gauls — Tacitus noted — the sun the most ancient god of the Carthaginians — and of the Greeks too, on Plato's testimony — the reasoning behind the placement of sacred sites — the beginnings of idolatry — the follies and blasphemies of Cardano — Nimrod among the builders of the tower of Babel — the trifles of the Jews — the universality of the worship of the sun, and its many-namedness (πολυωνυμία).

I. The apostle Paul, in the third chapter of his epistle to the Colossians, teaches that in Jesus Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, neither barbarian nor Scythian. From this Epiphanius, in the first book of his Against Heresies, draws out various kinds of religion: Βαρβαρισμόν ("Barbarism"), Σκυθισμόν ("Scythism"), Ἑλληνισμόν ("Hellenism"), and Ἰουδαϊσμόν ("Judaism"). He writes that Barbarism prevailed from Adam to Noah; Scythism from Noah to the age of Serug, when Hellenism was introduced; and he traces the beginning of Judaism from the circumcision of Abraham. Since, however, he holds that idolatry entered the world after the flood, it is plain that by "Barbarism" he means that savagery and violence of manners which brought ruin upon the antediluvian world. He sets the distinction between Scythism and Hellenism in this, that image-making (ἀγαλματοποιΐα) was introduced by the latter, of which the former was free. Whether he was right or wrong to distinguish them so, let others judge; Petavius, in his notes on the passage, denies it. For our part, we hold that all that idolatrous worship which occupied nearly the whole world was of two kinds, of which one may be called Sabaism, the other Hellenism. But since there was much peculiar to the superstition of the Druids, we shall treat it separately, in a few words. Sabaism consisted in the worship and religious reverence of the heavens, the sun, the moon, and the stars; Hellenism added to it the veneration of dead men and of demons. The adoration of images, statues, and the stars was common to both. Now the crowd of idolaters worshipped the heavens before they worshipped fictitious deities of heaven. Idolatry, therefore, had its beginning in Sabaism, or the worship of the heavenly bodies. This we shall first prove. Then we shall show briefly what occasions of depraved superstition the human race seized upon, and by what vain reasonings Satan lured men into deceit and error; and, so far as we can attain it by conjecture, we shall mark out the time when this most pernicious error arose.

II. That idolatry had its beginning in the world in the worship of the heavens and of the sun is proved by every record of past ages. For, beyond all the credit of profane history and the most ancient memory current among the nations, there stand in the Old Testament illustrious testimonies to this sin. In this sense the most ancient writer — whether he was Moses, which is most probable, or some other divine man of an age near to his, through whom the Holy Spirit entrusted the history of Job to the church's faith — records these apologetic words of that most holy man: chapter 31:26-28, "If I beheld the sun when it shone, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, and my mouth hath kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be judged, for I should have denied the God that is above." With due respect to them, I must say that what Chrysostom, Nilus, Olympiodorus, and other of the ancients comment on this passage is most inept. They deny that idolatry is in view here, and hold instead that Job, in denying that his hand had kissed his mouth, meant to signify that he had never felt so arrogantly about his own virtues and works (which he denotes by the sun), nor about the fame of his name (which the moon confers), as to have kissed his own hand with his mouth — as though he had accomplished by his own power whatever resource or ability he possessed. This, I say, is inept, and contrary both to the aim of the passage and to its very words. The holy man is speaking quite plainly of the worship of the heavenly bodies. And while he is carefully clearing himself of this charge, he makes it plain that very many others of his time were involved in it. Job lived about 350 years after the Babylonian dispersion, that is, around the year of the world 2100, or thereabouts. The words show that by his century this superstition had made progress and spread itself far and wide. Job ascribes the beginning of the error to the seduction of the heart. Elsewhere too the Holy Spirit uncovers this same fountain of idolatry, Deuteronomy 11:16: "Beware lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside to serve other gods." All other things are by nature fitted to point to the true God; the whole danger lies in the human heart alone. Deceived, then, by the appearance of empty reasonings — which would have had no force at all had they not first been wholly turned away from the love of God and of spiritual things — the most ancient idolaters worshipped the sun and moon religiously, first in secret, then openly. We shall set out those shadowy reasonings in the next chapter. The mode of worship he mentions is simple adoration. Now adoration is a religious salutation performed by bringing the hand to the mouth. In this the error of the heart first expressed itself; other ceremonies of religion were introduced gradually. Thus Plato relates that Socrates saluted the sun, and on occasion suffered an ἔκστασις ("ecstasy, trance") in that observance. Though superstition grew to immense proportions, that simple adoration nevertheless persisted through all the ages of ancient ignorance, as Catulus attests, in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 28.

III. Further, Job denies that he brought his hand to his mouth, that it kissed it, or pressed kisses upon it. For the kiss was also a pledge and sign of religious worship. So the Psalmist, Psalm 2:12: נַשְּׁקוּ־בַר ("Kiss the Son") — that is, worship him with religious homage. The Seventy corrupt the sense of the passage, rendering the words "lay hold of instruction," and the Vulgate translator follows them. Jerome recognizes that religious worship is intended, and accordingly renders the words, "Adore purely." To venerate idols with kisses was, of old and even still, a solemn practice: Hosea 13:2, עֲגָלִים יִשָּׁקוּן ("let them kiss the calves"), that is, worship them, as the same Jerome says against Rufinus, book 1. "Men were accustomed," says Cicero, in his Against Verres, book 4, speaking of the images of Hercules, "not only to venerate them but even to kiss them." "In adoring, we bring the right hand to the mouth for a kiss, and turn the whole body about," as Pliny says, book 28, chapter 2. Plutarch, in his Life of Numa, gives the reason for this turning or circling of the body. He says it was Numa's institution τὸ προσκυνεῖν περιστροφομένους ("to worship while turning oneself about"). He adds, Ἡ δὲ περιστροφὴ τῶν προσκυνούντων, λέγεται μὲν ἀπομίμησις εἶναι τῆς τοῦ κόσμου περιφορᾶς ("The turning of worshippers is said to be an imitation of the revolution of the universe"), that is, of the circling of the heavens which the sun traces out. But this bending of the body seems to have been introduced only after temples were built facing the east. For since those who worshipped idols in them had to bend themselves toward the west, they turned their bodies about so as to show that they were directing their attention chiefly to the sun. Lucian affirms, in his On Dancing, that the Indians added dancing to their adoration by kisses. So too Apuleius, in the fourth book of his Golden Ass, speaking of a beautiful maiden whom people marveled at as a goddess: "Many of the citizens," he says, "bringing their right hand to their lips, with the forefinger resting upon the upright thumb, worshipped her outright with religious adorations, as though she were the goddess Venus herself." Indeed, once images had been set up, people kissed them directly; but in the worship of the heavenly bodies — the sun and moon, being absent — they were accustomed only to bring the hand to the mouth; and the same with other images too, when in passing there was no leisure to attend to devotion. So Minucius Felix relates that Caecilius, on catching sight of an image of Serapis, "brought his hand to his mouth, and pressed a kiss upon his lips."

IV. Not yet, that is, in Job's century, had offerings been made to the sun by horses, bats, mice, and the other reptiles (concerning which see Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chapter 29), or by crops, much less by human blood, which was done later. Offerings of the fruits of the earth followed upon simple adoration — that is, the worship of the heart expressing itself only through the actions and bendings of the body. Thus far we agree with the opinion of Porphyry in the second book of his On Abstinence from Animal Food. The first sacrifices offered to idols did not consist of animals and blood, but of the fruits of the earth. It is most certain that the first sacrifice pleasing to God was one of blood, Genesis 4:4; and likewise after the flood, Genesis 8:20. Nor is there any doubt that, so long as men worshipped the true God alone with religious rites, they honored him with blood sacrifices. Once turned to idols, they did not dare at once, nor until long afterward, to offer them sacrifices from animals. Their first sacrifices, after mere adoration, were of the fruits of the earth. Thus the prophet complains that the Israelites offered grain, wine, and oil to Baal — that is, to the sun, Hosea 2:8. And the poet attests the same. The Pythagoreans, abstaining from the blood of animals, added hymns to their adoration. These hymns, too, are a well-known part of religious worship, whether true or superstitious; such were those of Homer and Callimachus that survive. Many other ceremonies were afterward admitted among the nations, arising partly from a very dim rumor of the Mosaic legislation, and partly from the perverse mimicry (κακοζηλία) of Satan.

V. Next the most holy man adds the nature and desert of this sin. He teaches that its nature lies in the denial of God almighty, who is above, who governs all things, who disposes all things, and who created the sun itself. "I would have denied," he says, "God who is above" (מִמָּעַל). This is, perhaps, the opposite of what many entangled in that error have supposed; scarcely do most mortals reckon all religious worship of creatures to be a denial of God the Creator. But he pointedly adds "above" (מִמָּעַל); for since the chief ground of the worship of the sun always lay in this, that men saw it borne above all things, he shows that God alone is exalted above all. Rightly does Maimonides speak to this sense in his work On Idolatry, book 2: הַמְּשֻׁמָּד לַעֲבוֹדָה זָרָה הוּא כִּמְשֻׁמָּד הַתּוֹרָה כֻּלָּהּ ("He who turns to idolatry is as one who turns from the whole law"). And a little before: "Here you learn that he who takes up idolatry denies the whole law, and all the prophets, and whatever was commanded to the prophets, from the first man to the end of the world."

VI. He adds that such worship of the sun and moon is "iniquity to be judged" — that is, either most worthy of God's severe judgment and censure, or rightly abominable to all the pious. For "sun" the text has אוֹר ("light"), by a kind of antonomasia. Hence the sun was called Horus.

VII. Several passages of Deuteronomy agree with this testimony. Now this worship of the heavenly bodies, especially of the sun — which without doubt invaded the world immediately after the Babylonian dispersion — attained universal currency before the idols worshipped by Hellenism were either known or had come into being.

VIII. The Egyptians were the first openly to give themselves to this depraved superstition. This we shall soon show from Diodorus, Lactantius, and others. All the Babylonians and Chaldeans followed them. Bel was none other than the sun. This is why God was angry with Hezekiah, because when the king of Babylon had sent envoys to inquire about the miracle of the sun's retreat, 2 Chronicles 32:31, he did not seize the occasion to declare the true God, and to show that the sun was a creature obedient to his word.

IX. Herodotus testifies the same of the ancient Persians (or Massagetae) in his Clio, chapter 216: Θεῶν μοῦνον ἥλιον σέβονται, τῷ θύουσιν ἵππους ("Of the gods they worship only the sun, to whom they sacrifice horses"). This same sun was also Mithras, the greatest, if not the sole, god among the ancient Persians: Μίθραν νομίζουσιν οἱ Πέρσαι εἶναι τὸν ἥλιον ("The Persians hold Mithras to be the sun"), as Gregory Nazianzen says, Oration 1 against Julian. Strabo says likewise: Θεὸν δὲ ἥλιον μόνον ἡγοῦνται· τούτῳ ἱπποθυτοῦσι ("They consider the sun alone to be god, and sacrifice horses to him").

X. Everyone seems to affirm that the sun was the one god of the ancient Persians. This the learned Vossius denies, in book 2 of his On Idolatry, and, citing testimonies from Plutarch and Hesychius against Herodotus, shows that they admitted other gods as well. But it is by no means established that they had not, by the usual practice of idolaters, added to the number of the gods before Plutarch's time deities whom they did not yet worship in Herodotus's day. For after mankind had granted itself the right of deification (ἀποθέωσις) and of manufacturing deities, the number of the gods increased day by day. Varro counted thirty thousand. Of the earlier ages the satirist speaks rightly, Juvenal, Satire 13, line 46: "nor was the crowd of gods..." But neither does Herodotus say absolutely that the sun alone was held as a deity among the Persians; rather, that of all the gods whom Greece worshipped, the sun alone was held in divine honor among the Persians. For he elsewhere records other heavenly bodies and elements too, which stand on the same footing as the sun, among the objects of Persian veneration (Clio, chapter 131): Θύουσιν ἡλίῳ τε καὶ σελήνῃ, καὶ γῇ, καὶ πυρὶ, καὶ ὕδατι, καὶ ἀνέμοισι ("They sacrifice to the sun and the moon, to earth, fire, water, and the winds"). For the worship of these almost everywhere accompanied that of the sun. Τούτοισι μὲν δὴ μούνοισι θύουσιν ἀρχῆθεν, he adds ("To these alone, then, they have offered sacrifice from the beginning"). Idolatry had its origin in these. Ἐπιμεμαθήκασι δὲ καὶ τῇ Οὐρανίῃ θύειν ("But they have learned from others also to sacrifice to the Heavenly One").

XI. Hence, in Diogenes Laertius's proem, the writers of the history of the Magi charge Herodotus with a lie he seems to have forgotten telling — namely, that he wrote that Xerxes hurled javelins at the sun, when in fact the sun was held to be a god by the Magi who attended Xerxes on his expedition, the very priests of the Persian superstition.

XII. Herodotus adds further, "It is their custom, having climbed the highest mountains, to offer sacrifices to Jupiter, calling the whole circuit of the sky Jupiter." By what name they themselves called the circuit of the sky in their own tongue is quite unknown; for it was very common among the Greeks and Romans to designate the gods of other nations by the names of whatever deities were established in worship among themselves. So far, however, Herodotus is right, in that, even though he represents the Persians as worshipping Jupiter, he shows that he did not mean to impute to them the Greek Hellenism which he here introduces merely as a label. Others have done otherwise. Thus some write that the Gauls and Germans worshipped Jupiter and Mercury. But the whole surviving record of the origins of these peoples shows that none of the Celts had so much as heard those names spoken before the arrival of the Greeks and Romans in Gaul. Since the Greeks and Romans were utterly ignorant in their knowledge of the origins of nations, peoples, and religions, they could not believe that mankind anywhere had been wiser than their own inventions.

XIII. Caesar is more correct, and nearer the truth, when he says of the Germans, Gallic War, book 6, chapter 21, "They count among the number of the gods only those whom they see... the Sun, Vulcan, and the Moon; of the rest they have not so much as heard." Tacitus says otherwise, asserting that they worshipped Hercules, Mars, Mercury, and Isis. "Tacitus, then, knew more, and more certain things, about the religion of the Germans than Caesar did," says Lipsius. "And whether Caesar made these inquiries in Gaul or in Germany, either he was wrongly informed, or he himself did not inquire carefully enough," as Montanus says on that passage of Caesar. But in truth Tacitus was either himself deceived, or knowingly deceives others; he imposes names customary among the Romans on the gods of the Germans at his own pleasure. For Woden was not Mercury, nor Taranis Jupiter, nor Hesus Mars. Those Roman names were as unknown to the Germans as were the myths which formed the foundation of their worship in Hellenism. But Eostre, or Æstar, was perhaps the same goddess as the Astarte of the Syrians. Bede says of her: "Eosturmonath, which is now called Pascha, was once named... after a goddess of theirs called Eostre, in whose honor festivals were celebrated in that month." And indeed the word Eostar comes close to the Syrian name עֶשְׁתְּרָה ("Ashtoreth"), which was proper to the Syrian goddess; for the fact that it is also called עַשְׁתָּרוֹת ("Ashtaroth"), in the plural, denotes the multitude of her images, or the establishment of her worship in many places. Christians, too, instituting a feast tied to the observation of the lunar course, were thought by the pagans to be worshipping the moon, or Astarte, that is, Eostre; whence that name is still retained to this day.

XIV. Caesar affirms that the Gauls worshipped Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, assigning to them the same attributes as the Greeks and Romans did. But they drew that superstition from the Greeks of Massilia; it does not belong to the institutions of the Druids. Also, in the treaty made between the Carthaginians and Philip, king of Macedon, and others, against the Romans, as recorded in Polybius, Histories, book 17, the Carthaginians call the Sun and Moon the gods of their armies; by which, among the other false deities, they show that these were their most ancient gods, since almost all nations placed their origins in arms and war.

XV. Plato too testifies, in the Cratylus, that the Greeks themselves originally worshipped no other gods than the sun, moon, and stars: Φαίνονταί μοι οἱ πρῶτοι τῶν ἀνθρώπων τῶν περὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα τούτους μόνους τοὺς θεοὺς ἡγεῖσθαι, οὕσπερ νῦν πολλοὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ἥλιον καὶ σελήνην καὶ γῆν καὶ ἄστρα καὶ οὐρανόν· ἅτε οὖν αὐτὰ ὁρῶντες πάντα ἀεὶ ἰόντα δρόμῳ καὶ θέοντα, ἀπὸ ταύτης τῆς φύσεως τῆς τοῦ θεῖν θεοὺς αὐτοὺς ἐπονομάσαι ("It seems to me," Socrates says, "that the first men who inhabited Greece held as gods only those whom many of the barbarians now worship — the sun, the moon, the earth, the stars, and the sky; and since they saw these always moving and running in their course, they named them theoi [gods] from that nature of running [thein]"). Nor, as we shall see, is that etymology he offers for the name theos an inept one.

XVI. And hence it was that, in antiquity, all temples, being erected for the sun, faced toward the east, yet also had sacred doors on the south side. Thus Homer represents his sacred Ithacan cave as having two openings, the southern gate being sacred to the gods, Odyssey 13:109-112: Δύω δέ τε αἱ θύραι εἰσίν ("there are two doors" — one for men, and one, more divine, for the gods). Now the reason for the placement of these sacred sites was none other than this, that at noon the sun stands over the southern doorway, as Porphyry attests: Ἱστᾶσιν οὖν καὶ σύμβολον τῆς μεσημβρίας, καὶ τοῦ νότου, ἐπὶ τῇ θύρᾳ μεσημβριάζοντος τοῦ θεοῦ ("They set up, then, a symbol of noon and of the south at the doorway, since the god stands at midday there"). The same custom in the arrangement of the places they call sacred is still retained everywhere to this day.

XVII. Let it suffice to have said this much scattered (σποράδην) among several nations. We shall afterward show the same specifically of the eastern peoples. This, I say, was idolatry's beginning in the world. Statues or images had not yet been devised; no pillars or columns had been set up for religion's sake; the dead had not yet been enrolled among the ranks of the gods: the first error was committed with respect to the heavens and the sun. It has pleased God to shroud in dark night the principal authors of this sin, the precise time, and the places where it first arose.

XVIII. Wholly vain and trifling, however, is what Girolamo Cardano discourses concerning the origin of the worship of idols, in his commentary on Ptolemy's Astrological Judgments, book 2, text 17. "Mercury," he says, "joined with Venus, produced a weak law of idols, given over to luxury, in which all things are permitted, and manifold because of Mercury's power; and since Venus is weak, by comparison with the higher planets, it became a frivolous thing, full of many gods, full of superstitions, divination, and fables, which abound also in adulteries and other disgraces, and in the love of boys; for Mercury signifies all such things." And again: "The law of idols, since it had its origin from Venus, took its beginning from the south — that is, from Assyria, Babylonia, and the Chaldeans; for Belus, the first king of the Assyrians, was the first to command that he be worshipped." This, I say, is raving nonsense. And although these things are foolish and insipid, and utterly unworthy even of a man whose wits are somewhat unsteady in the head, still it would have been desirable if the learned man had set some limit to his madness in these matters, and had not spewed out what, in the same place, he vomited up impiously, stupidly, and blasphemously concerning the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ and his law.

XIX. All the ancients hold that Nimrod, after his labor in building the tower had come to nothing, fell not only into the worst of habits but also into idolatry. The learned Bochart, book 1, chapter 10, thinks he had no part in that work, since he was either not yet born, or still a child. But this conjecture lacks foundation; for although I believe that Nimrod did not seize his tyranny until after the dispersion of the peoples, yet, being the son of Cush, the eldest son of Ham, he could have been sixty years old when the tower was being built. "But he would then have placed the beginning of his empire in that very place from which he had been dispersed," says that most learned man, "had he been one of the builders." But there is no need for us to say that absolutely all men were driven from that place; and even if they were, it is quite certain that they immediately occupied it again. The ancients' opinion, then, is not altogether improbable; I have nothing to add. Among the scattered builders of the tower, who had cast off all reverence for the true God, this sin grew, first gradually and modestly, then broadly and headlong, and overran the world.

XX. Within the span of not many centuries, it is agreed, nearly all the nations took up the divine sovereignty of the sun. So the Phoenicians, according to Sanchuniathon: Τοῦτον θεὸν ἐνόμιζον μόνον οὐρανοῦ κύριον, Βελσάμην καλοῦντες, ὅ ἐστι παρὰ Φοίνιξι κύριος οὐρανοῦ ("They believed him" — that is, the sun — "to be the one god, lord of heaven, and called him Belsamen, which in the Phoenician tongue is 'lord of heaven'").

XXI. His worship thus attained universal currency, and he himself gained many names (πολυωνυμία). The same god was called הָאֵל עֶלְיוֹן ("God Most High"), Baal, Bel, Adonai, Chemosh, Baal-zebub, Baal-peor, Molech, Chiun, Adrammelech, Saturn, Jupiter, Hammon, Mithras, Horus, Dionysus, Mars, Apollo, Osiris, Pan, Bacchus, Liber, Jupiter Sabazius, Hercules, Janus, Belenus, Abellio, and who knows what else besides. Hence Plutarch calls the sun and moon μυριώνυμοι ("of countless names"). For men supposed that by heaping up praises and piling up titles they could capture the deity, and thereby win it the greatest honor; so that in the end, as error advanced, what had been merely different names of the same superstition came to be reckoned as different deities — as the most learned Rivet rightly observes on Hosea 2:8. In this multiplicity of names there was even a kind of worship in itself. Whence Ovid, Fasti, book 6, line 213: "I was asking whether I should refer the Nones to Sancus, or to Fidius..." And Horace, Secular Hymn, line 14: "Gentle Ilithyia, watch over mothers, whether you prefer to be called Lucina, or Genitalis." And in Satires, book 2, satire 6, line 20: "Father of the morning, or, if you would rather be called so, Janus." Catullus too, poem 34, lines 5, 13, 21: "O daughter of Latona... called Juno by mothers in labor." And Callimachus likewise, in his Hymn to Apollo. From the differing manner in which the sun was worshipped, from the ceremonies with which it was honored, from the benefits sought of it, from the favors it granted, and from the places where it was solemnly adored, it acquired, over the course of time, new names, new titles, and was even split into new and distinct deities. Hence, as a result, the Jews, perverting Scripture, assert that God granted the sun and moon to the nations, to be worshipped by them. This they gather from the words of Moses, Deuteronomy 4:19: "Lest perhaps thou lift up thine eyes to heaven, and, when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, thou shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven." This is a most powerful argument for restraining the minds of the nations from the worship of the heavenly bodies. That dominion which they imagine to belong to the sun and moon is in fact a servitude, appointed for the use of all the nations that are under heaven. But the Jews wrest this to another purpose, in their characteristic way. God, they say, in calling Israel to his own worship, set forth the sun and moon to the other nations as objects of worship. So Trypho, in Justin's Dialogue: "Tell us of some other God," he says, φυλαξάμενος λέγειν τὸν ἥλιον καὶ σελήνην ἃ γέγραπται τοῖς ἔθνεσι συγκεχωρηκέναι τὸν θεὸν ὡς θεοὺς προσκυνεῖν ("taking care not to name the sun and moon, which it is written that God permitted the nations to worship as gods"). The Vulgate best captures the sense of the passage: "which the Lord thy God created for the service of all nations" — compare Matthew 5:45.

Chapter 5

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter III.

The occasions of the origin of idolatry — the fame of the dominion of the sun and moon — the sun and moon, in what sense the two great lights — the monstrous fiction of the Targumist Jonathan — dominion made the ground of worship, wrongly conferred — the vain reasonings of idolaters, Romans 1:21 — the influence and operations of the sun and moon upon earthly things, Jeremiah 44:17-18, Acts 14:17 — God alone the author even of earthly goods — the adornment, course, glory, and allurements of the heavenly bodies — God who is above — some enclose God within the heavens; others assign an omnipresence (παντοτοπία) to Christ's human nature, Deuteronomy 4:19 — the opinion of Lactantius and of Diodorus Siculus concerning the occasions and beginnings of idolatry — the opinion of the philosopher Plotinus concerning the worship of the heavenly bodies, Psalm 19:4 — the Seventy and the Vulgate translator noted — the hallucination of Marsilio Ficino — the old Syriac translation — a summary of the vain reasonings (διαλογισμοί).

I. We have set out in the preceding chapter the beginnings of idolatry in the worship of the sun and moon. Before we proceed to set forth the further progress which this error made, as is plain from what followed, it will be worthwhile first to explain briefly some of the occasions and pretexts for the worship of the heavenly bodies which the first idolaters appear to have seized upon, and the vain reasonings by which they deceived themselves.

II. First, then, it seems to me that there settled in men's minds a tradition concerning the dominion over day and night committed to the sun and moon. For it was necessary that they should believe that the things they worshipped were established in a position of preeminence. The report spread widely of what is consecrated to eternal memory in the first chapter of Genesis: Genesis 1:16 ("And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night"). Here dominion is attributed to the sun and moon — that is, from the very origin of all things. But it is the Lord who is to be honored in all things. It is held that the sun and moon are called "two great lights" not properly, but by a kind of accommodation (συγκατάβασις) to the understanding and perception of the common people. Why so? Because, of course, certain stars are larger than the moon. But does it follow from this that the moon is not to be called a great light, or that it does not in a peculiar way preside over the government of the night? Indeed, a light is not called "great" with respect to its substance, but to its brightness — which, however borrowed, is greater than that of all the stars. To this knot, which in truth is no knot at all, the Jews apply the wedge of a most monstrous fiction. "God made," says the Targum of Jonathan, "two great lights, and they were equal in glory for twenty-one years, less six hundred and seventy-two parts of an hour" (by which we may know how very precisely he has here attained the truth!), "and afterward the moon brought an accusation against the sun and was diminished; and he set the sun, the greater light, to rule the day, and the moon, which was the lesser light, to preside over the night." In this fashion this paraphrast defiles the sacred page almost everywhere, as we have more than once noted; nor does he seem to have been born for any other end, so thoroughly does everything peculiar to him reek. No one will come away from reading him either wiser or better. But it is probable that the fame of this dominion became known to the nations. Satan made use of it as an inducement to idolatry, even while some knowledge of the true God had not yet been wholly effaced. For what would they honor, next after God, but those things to which God had committed rule over the days and nights, and thus over the whole life of man? Hence the poet represents Juno herself pleading as a suppliant before Aeolus, who is said to preside over the winds.

III. This, then, was the first occasion of idolatry in the worship of the sun and the whole host of heaven, for men who had willfully cast off the true knowledge of God. The report of the dominion over day and night delegated to the sun and moon, corrupted by depraved traditions, enticed into the deceit of error those who had cast off almost all true religion toward God. Hence the sun was called king, ἄναξ ("lord"), מֶלֶךְ ("king"), and בַּעַל ("lord, master") — in short, by whatever word denotes rule and dominion. Add to this that, whereas they had only heard other things by report, of this they were eyewitnesses (αὐτόπται): they saw with their own eyes that the movement and course of the sun and moon governed the rule of days and nights, and indeed of all things measured by time; so that all doubt seemed to be removed.

IV. They were also carried into this impious opinion by other vain reasonings. For the apostle traces the beginning of idolatry to this, that men became vain in their reasonings (διαλογισμοῖς), Romans 1:21. Since the minds of men were utterly empty of spiritual and heavenly things, and turned away from God, they burned beyond measure with desire for earthly things. They would never have worshipped the creature had they not first loved the creature (κτίσις) more than the Creator. They thought they had a thorough grasp of how much weight rested on the operations and influence of the sun and moon for earthly affairs to prosper and succeed favorably. Here, they supposed, there was no need for conjecture — they were eyewitnesses. And they easily persuaded themselves that whatever thing was above them, and thus able to help them in the matters of their greatest concern, must be a god. It was by no other reasoning (διαλογισμός) that the idolatrous Israelites were deceived into the worship of the host of heaven and of the queen — that is, the moon and the stars — than this, that from that religion they found all earthly things prospering: Jeremiah 44:17-18, "When we burned incense to the queen of heaven, we were filled with food, and were well, and saw no evil; but since we ceased to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have lacked all things." Hence God, in seeking to bring that people back to a better mind and to his own worship, recalls to their minds that the vanities of the nations could not give rain, Jeremiah 14:22. And the apostle Paul, sharply rebuking the Gentiles themselves for their wicked idolatries and charging them with folly, asserts that the one true God, the creator of all things, gave men rain from heaven (οὐρανόθεν) and fruitful seasons (καιροὺς καρποφόρους), Acts 14:17 — indicating clearly enough that the nations had been enticed into the worship of idols by the hope and expectation of the necessities of life (βιωτικά). And this was the second source of this most pernicious error.

V. Next, the Psalmist affirms that the adornment of the heavens, the course of the stars, and the order of the celestial bodies declare the glory of God, Psalm 19:1, as does the apostle in Romans 1:20. The apostates snatched all that glory from the Creator and assigned it to the creatures themselves; the adornment, which belonged to God, they took to be God himself. There is also an innate persuasion in the human mind that the deity which ought to be worshipped is in the heavens, above ourselves. Hence, when men found themselves in danger and needed God's presence, it was always their custom to stretch both hands toward the stars. So in Hesiod, God is he ὃς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει ("who dwells in the highest halls"). Our Lord Jesus Christ himself also taught us to call upon our Father in the heavens — where, that is, he makes his glory manifest in a wholly special manner. It is inept, on this account, for the Socinian Biddle, in his Catechism, to confine God within the bounds of the heavens, since this quite overturns the divine nature; while others, assigning either a being-in-many-places (πολυτοπία) or a being-in-every-place (παντοτοπία) to Christ's human nature — which the heavens contain — for the restoring of all things, no less effectively destroy it; this is, indeed, a disputatious itch common among a great many Christians. To those, then, who cared not to be wise beyond their own senses, the sun seemed most of all to occupy God's place in the heavens. The Holy Spirit himself points out this origin and allurement of the worship of the heavenly bodies, Deuteronomy 4:19: "Lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and, when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, with all the host of heaven, thou be driven to worship them." The impulse of the heart toward idolatry follows upon the sight of the eyes. Attracted by the beauty, glory, order, and motion of the heavenly bodies, and carried away by excessive admiration, since they did not know how to learn from them the glory of the true God which they declare — the knowledge of whom they had already cast away — they were gradually driven into the worship of them. Care was taken, here and elsewhere, that the same should not happen to the Israelites.

VI. Lactantius long ago uncovered this source of the error, book 2, chapter 24, of his On the Origin of Error: "Since in Egypt," he says, "because of the delightful climate of the land, people rarely kept indoors in houses and huts, but spent whole nights sleeping beneath a clear sky, exposed to no harmful influences, from their frequent sight of the heavenly bodies and the constant, orderly procession of the stars they gradually arrived at the opinion that the stars were gods, and the preservers of the universe, whom they venerated with various rites and ceremonies." Diodorus Siculus relates likewise, Library of History, book 1, near the beginning of chapter 11: Τοὺς δ' οὖν κατ' Αἴγυπτον ἀνθρώπους τὸ παλαιὸν γενομένους, ἀναβλέψαντας εἰς τὸν κόσμον, καὶ τὴν τῶν ὅλων φύσιν καταπλαγέντας, καὶ θαυμάσαντας, ὑπολαβεῖν εἶναι θεοὺς ἀϊδίους τε καὶ πρώτους, τόν τε ἥλιον καὶ τὴν σελήνην, ὧν τὸν μὲν Ὄσιριν, τὴν δ' Ἴσιν ὀνομάσαι ("The men who dwelt of old in Egypt, looking up at the universe and struck with wonder and amazement at the nature of the whole, supposed that there were two eternal and primary gods — the sun and the moon — of whom they called the one Osiris, the other Isis"). From this he himself declares that the first and eternal gods were two — the sun and the moon.

VII. From these facts the reason for the divine caution mentioned above becomes entirely plain. For since very many nations had been driven into the worship of the heavenly bodies by the mere sight, contemplation, and admiration of them, God sternly warns his own people lest the same befall them. And indeed it is not without cause that Maimonides affirms he learned the reasons for many of the laws from the idolatrous worship of the Sabians, Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chapter 29 — a work the reader with an interest in these matters should above all consult. How weighty the reasonings drawn from the contemplation of the order and motion of the heavenly bodies were, among men ignorant of the true God, for assigning a divine nature to them, Plotinus shows many centuries later, Enneads II, book 9: Ἄστρα, τὰ ἐν τοῖς ὑποκάτω σφαίραις, τά τε ἐν τῷ ἀνωτάτῳ, διὰ τί οὐ θεοὶ ἐν τάξει φερόμενα καὶ κόσμῳ περιιόντα ("As for the stars — those in the lower spheres, and those that shine in the highest — it cannot be thought why they should not be gods, moving as they do in order and circling in harmony"). Hence, after the Christian religion had spread its rays far and wide, the followers of Platonic philosophy — who, with the most absurd rivalry, tried to set up their own wisdom's authority against it — while rejecting the countless other fictitious gods of the ancient Gentiles, nevertheless contended that the sun and the other heavenly bodies ought to be worshipped, and accordingly attributed to them sight and hearing. This same Plotinus teaches us, Enneads IV, book 4: Νῦν δὲ, ἐπειδὴ μνήμας μὲν ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις περιττὰς εἶναι ἐθέμεθα, αἰσθήσεις δὲ ἔδομεν, καὶ ἀκούσεις πρὸς ὁράσεσι, καὶ εὐχῶν δὴ κλύοντας ἃς πρὸς ἥλιον ποιούμεθα, καὶ δὴ καὶ πρὸς ἄστρα ἄλλοι τινὲς ἄνθρωποι, καὶ πεπίστευνται ὡς δι' αὐτῶν αὐτοῖς πολλὰ καὶ τελεῖται ("But now, since we have held that memory is superfluous to the stars, we have granted them sensation, and hearing along with sight, and hold that they hear the prayers we address to the sun — and likewise certain other men address prayers to other stars — and people believe that many things are accomplished for them through these prayers"). To this idol-madness, I may add in passing, the most famous interpreter of Plotinus seems to lend his patronage, by adducing to that end the passage of the Psalmist, "In the sun hath he set his tabernacle," Psalm 19:4. For it is thus that the Vulgate translator renders the Psalmist's words, following the Greek translation of the Seventy, as it is called. But the Hebrew truth carries a far different sense: לַשֶּׁמֶשׁ שָׂם אֹהֶל בָּהֶם, that is, as our countrymen render the words, "In them" — that is, in those heavens — "hath he placed a tabernacle for the sun." This rendering greatly troubled the ancients. Question 63 of the Questions to the Orthodox runs thus: Ἐπειδὴ διαφόρως τινὲς ἡρμήνευσαν καὶ ἀσαφῶς τό, Ἐν τῷ ἡλίῳ ἔθετο τὸ σκήνωμα αὐτοῦ, τὴν σαφήνειαν αὐτοῦ δίδαξον ("Since some have interpreted variously and obscurely the words, 'In the sun hath he set his tabernacle,' teach us the clear sense of it"). The most learned author of the answers replies: Τό, ἐν τῷ ἡλίῳ ἔθετο τὸ σκήνωμα αὐτοῦ, ἵνα εἴπῃ τοὺς οὐρανοὺς ἔθετο σκήνωμα τοῦ ἡλίου· ἡ γὰρ ἐκ τῆς τῶν Σύρων γλώσσης μεταγωγὴ τῆς λέξεως οὕτω γεγένηται, ἐν αὐτοῖς ἔθετο τοῦ ἡλίου τὸ σκήνωμα ("The words 'In the sun hath he set his tabernacle' mean that he set the heavens as a tabernacle for the sun; for the phrase came about through a rendering out of the Syriac tongue, 'among them he set the sun's tabernacle'") — which reading, however, is not found in the Syriac version now extant, and which, for other reasons too, does not appear to be that ancient Syriac translation known to many of the ancients.

VIII. And these, then, were the heads of the most empty reasonings (διαλογισμοί) by which impious apostates seduced themselves into the worship of the heavenly bodies. First, a depraved and corrupted tradition of the sun's and moon's dominion over the days and nights took possession of their minds. Then they thought they perceived that the yield of all earthly goods — the necessities of life (τὰ βιωτικά), which alone occupied their care and pursuit — depended chiefly on the influence of these bodies. Entangled and hindered by these vain opinions, when they contemplated the wondrous adornment of the heavens, so full of august majesty, the course of all the stars, the splendor and efficacy of the sun, and its position in the sky, they rushed headlong into this idol-madness.

Chapter 6

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter IV.

Another corruption of natural theology — the pretext of some for worshipping natural things under the guise of dead men — whether the exposition of physical theology (φυσικὴ θεολογία) as mythical (μυθική) is allegorical — an innovated manner of philosophizing — the theology of the Stoics, of Zeno and Chrysippus, refuted by Philo of Byblos, and by Eusebius — idolatrous confusion — whether the sun and Apollo were the same — the tradition of Jacob's history in the servitude to Apollo — the follies of the philosophers in excusing the ancient idolaters — a comparison of ancient and more recent idolaters — the frauds of impostors, of the Pharisees, and of the Jesuits, in excusing men's sins — the art of exorcising demons, common to Gentiles, Jews, and papists.

I. We have shown that the sun, and the rest of the host of heaven, were the first in the world to occupy the place and dominion of deity through men's depraved superstition. From this, in the course of time, another and most pernicious superstition sprang up, which they call physical theology (φυσικὴ θεολογία). We shall relate its beginnings too, but only briefly, and as it were in passing (ἐν παρόδῳ).

II. According to the precepts of natural theology, the works of nature were designed to promote the true worship of the Creator of all things; we established this in expounding that theology in the first book. We also showed that the first idolaters taught that religious worship was owed to those very works themselves. They called this worship "natural theology," because it was things of nature that were worshipped — whereas in truth natural theology teaches us to take instruction from natural things in order to promote the worship of the author of nature. We shall see below that, as time went on, another kind of idolatry was introduced, one which took its rise from fabulous traditions and from the impious and imaginary deification (ἀποθέωσις) of wicked men. But after some began to philosophize a little more rigorously, and more refined opinions about the divine nature had come to prevail among many, the wise began to be ashamed of the gods which the iron ages, sunk wholly in ignorance and darkness, had produced. They therefore contended that everything commonly celebrated concerning the fictitious gods — Jupiter, that is, and the whole sacred apparatus of Hellenism — had, among the ancient mythologists, been merely a veiled picture of natural things. This theology they call "mythical," which, they say, was nothing but an allegorical account of physical (φυσική) doctrine. Diodorus Siculus, in book 1, and Plutarch, in his On Isis and Osiris, weave this web, as do very many others cited in Eusebius's most excellent Treasury (Preparation for the Gospel). For them Jupiter was nothing but the Sun, or the Air; Juno was the Moon, or the Earth; and the rest of the idols of earlier ages — whose origins we shall show hereafter — were either elements or natural causes of things. The more recent poets, too, hint at this everywhere. So Juvenal, Satire 5, line 78, speaking of Jupiter as the storm; and Lucretius the Epicurean, who preceded him, book 2, lines 654-658, to the same effect. And the older Greeks too: Orpheus: Γῆ μήτηρ πάντων, Δημήτηρ πλουτοδότειρα ("Earth, mother of all, Demeter, giver of wealth") — for Demeter was, according to Diodorus, "Mother Earth" (Γῆ μήτηρ). Empedocles too, in the verses which Athenagoras cites in his Embassy for the Christians, makes the same identification.

III. Such too were the opinions of the Stoics. So Velleius the Epicurean, in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 14, says of Zeno: "When he interprets Hesiod's Theogony, he does away entirely with the customary and accepted notions of the gods; for he does not count Jupiter, nor Juno, nor Vesta, nor anyone so called, among the number of the gods, but teaches that these names have been given, by a certain figure of speech, to lifeless and mute things." And shortly after, of Chrysippus: "The same man argues that the aether is what men call Jupiter; that the air flowing through the seas is Neptune; and that the earth is what is called Ceres." Hence, Seneca observes, Natural Questions, book 4, chapters 6-7, that sacrifices were offered to the clouds, so that they would not send down hail and storms.

IV. The more recent Platonic-Pythagoreans — Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Amelius, Eumenius, and others — pursued the same path. Take, for example, Porphyry's fable about Saturn's castration of his father Heaven, and its interpretation and application to the causes of celestial things. Ὁ Κρόνος δεθεὶς ἐκτέμνεται, ὡς ὁ Οὐρανός· τοῦ θεολόγου δι' ἡδονῆς δεσμεῖσθαι καὶ κατάγεσθαι τὰ θεῖα εἰς γένεσιν αἰνισσομένου, ἀποσπερματίζειν τε δυνάμεις εἰς ἡδονὴν ἐκλυθέντα· ὅθεν ἐπιθυμίᾳ μὲν συνουσίας τὸν Οὐρανὸν κατίοντα εἰς Γῆν ἐκτέμνει Κρόνος· πρῶτος τῶν ἀντιφερομένων τῷ Οὐρανῷ ὁ Κρόνος ἐστί, καὶ ἡ τούτου σφαῖρα· κατίασι δὲ δυνάμεις ἐξ Οὐρανοῦ καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν πλανωμένων· ἀλλὰ τὰς μὲν ἐξ Οὐρανοῦ δέχεται Κρόνος, τὰς δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ Κρόνου Ζεύς ("Saturn is bound and castrated, just as Heaven was; by which the theologian" — that is, Musaeus — "hints that the divine essences, lured by sweetness, are bound and drawn down into generation, and that, loosed by pleasure, they scatter forth certain powers as seed; whence Saturn castrates Heaven as he descends upon Earth out of desire for union — for Saturn, and his sphere, is the first that moves contrary to Heaven; and certain powers descend both from Heaven and from the wandering stars; but Saturn receives the powers of Heaven, and Jupiter in turn receives those of Saturn"). So he writes, in his book On the Cave of the Nymphs in Homer. He maintains that the fable hints that Saturn — who is nearest to Heaven and moves in a retrograde order opposite to it — receives Heaven's generative power in such a way that it cannot descend directly to the earth, but that Jupiter's power intercepts the influence of Saturn. By this contrivance, I say, they labored to smear a coat of paint over the stupidity of the first idolaters and the madness of Hellenism.

V. Philo of Byblos, as cited in Eusebius's Preparation for the Gospel, book 1, chapter 9, shows at length that the philosophers most ineptly invented all this, when the matter was something else entirely: Ἀλλὰ οἱ μὲν νεώτατοι τῶν ἱερολόγων, τὰ μὲν γεγονότα πράγματα ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἀπεπέμψαντο, ἀλληγορίας καὶ μύθους ἐπινοήσαντες καὶ τοῖς κοσμικοῖς παθήμασι συγγένειαν πλασάμενοι μυστήρια κατέστησαν ("But the more recent writers on sacred matters dismissed what had actually happened from the beginning, and, devising allegories and myths, and fabricating some kinship with the phenomena of the universe, established mysteries").

VI. Eusebius attacks this vanity at greater length, Preparation for the Gospel, book 3, chapter 1 — for this was, at that time, a matter of concern to Christians. For after the light of the gospel had struck the world with its rays so forcefully that the shameful madness of the old superstition had fallen into contempt even among the common people, the more clever sophists, as I have said, clung most stubbornly to this fiction — which all the credit of history contradicts — in order to lend a new coloring to that folly and make it appealing. Indeed, I may note in passing, the whole manner of philosophizing was renewed among the pagans themselves in the early days of the church. For after Ammonius of Alexandria, the leading philosopher of his age — whose pupils included Origen, Herennius, and Plotinus (this last the teacher of Porphyry, as Porphyry was of Iamblichus) — had, in his philosophical lectures, sown some seeds of heavenly wisdom into his hearers' minds, those who, because of inveterate prejudices and the world's hatred, were unwilling to embrace the Christian religion nonetheless did not cease to cultivate those seeds to the best of their ability, drawing little streams of truth into the gaps of Plato's system. Add to this that others, from reading our own books, had drawn out a great deal from the most hidden mysteries of the gospel. Among these were Numenius, Amelius, Plotinus, Herennius, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Hierocles, Marinus, Damascius, and others, who, although they did not abandon the curious speculations of the Platonists nor the magical incantations of the Pythagoreans, nevertheless mixed in with them a good many little sparks of heavenly truth.

VII. Among the ancients, however, everything was confused and uncertain. Plutarch discusses at length whether Apollo was distinct from the sun, in his treatise Why the Pythia No Longer Gives Oracles in Verse. But the most ancient poets, in the same hymns, teach that Apollo was the sun, and set out where and to what parents he was born — so much so that the Arcadians could claim to be older than not only the moon but even the sun. They add, too, fables patched together from ancient traditions. Such is what they write of Apollo's pastoral exile, which Callimachus celebrates in such a way that I could almost believe that Jacob's manner of life while serving with Laban the Syrian is represented in that very fable. Callimachus teaches that love was the cause of the journey and of the labor undertaken — just as love was the cause of Jacob's pastoral service. Now in assigning the cause of Apollo's servitude, Callimachus departs from the rest of the crowd of poets, and there can be little doubt that the report of some obscure tradition gave him occasion to do so. He then depicts, in fine detail, the increase of the flocks under Apollo's care. If one cared to examine the poet's words one by one, a great many things would be found that wonderfully fit Jacob's history; but since a reasonably attentive reader will perceive this at first glance, and since we are occupied with another matter, it does not please us to dwell on it here.

VIII. This new mystical natural theology was a most rotten fiction of men blinded by ignorance and malice. The great mass of mortals worshipped the sun, moon, and the rest of the heavenly bodies with divine honors long before the myths of Hellenism had their rise or occasion. Greece was, as it were, the homeland of gods sprung from human origin, and a workshop of idols. We have shown above, from Plato, that the Greeks themselves anciently worshipped no other gods than the sun, moon, and stars. But it pleased these new masters to take up the defense of the ignorance and darkness of earlier ages, though they were themselves not one whit wiser than the men they were so ashamed of. In just the same way, the Jewish rabbis today twist all the monstrosities of the Talmud into I know not what allegories; it is a wonder that the Jesuits have not done the same in reading their own legends. Perhaps it would have been wiser and more modest of them, imitating the philosophers and rabbis, to have devised ingenious falsehoods and thereby to have won those legends some credibility, rather than, after having led so many thousands of men, in every nation, astray through the foulest byways of error for so many years, rejecting them thoroughly and openly, as has now been done. But you will say this is an injustice, indeed a violence — that I should wish to compare and set alongside one another the most holy fathers of the Society of Jesus with philosophers and rabbis? Come, then, let us examine, by one example (or perhaps another), but a most weighty one, whether they follow in their footsteps or not. What masked priestly impostors accomplished to this end among the gentiles, the divine philosopher relates at length in the second book of the Republic: Ἀγύρται δὲ καὶ μάντεις ἐπὶ πλουσίων θύρας ἰόντες, πείθουσιν ὡς ἔστι παρὰ σφίσι δύναμις ἐκ θεῶν ποριζομένη, θυσίαις τε καὶ ἐπῳδαῖς, εἴ τέ τι ἀδίκημά του γέγονεν αὐτοῦ, ἢ προγόνων, ἀκεῖσθαι μεθ' ἡδονῶν τε καὶ ἑορτῶν, ἐάν τε τιν' ἐχθρὸν πημῆναι ἐθέλῃ, μετὰ σμικρῶν δαπανῶν ὁμοίως δίκαιον ἀδίκῳ βλάψειν, ἐπαγωγαῖς τισὶ καὶ καταδέσμοις τοὺς θεούς, ὡς φασί, πείθοντές σφισιν ὑπηρετεῖν ("Begging priests and diviners frequent the doors of the rich, persuading them that they possess a power, granted by the gods, of atoning by certain sacrifices and incantations for any wrong committed by a man himself or by his ancestors, with pleasures and festivities; and that, if one wishes to injure an enemy, for a small fee they will hurt the just and the unjust alike, since, by certain spells and bindings, as they claim, they persuade the gods to serve them"). In support of all these claims they adduce the poets as witnesses, some of whom speak of the ease of the path to vice, and of a road, long and steep, that leads to virtue; others cite Homer as a witness that the gods themselves can be bent by men and turned to a contrary judgment. They also raise up a great crowd of books from Musaeus and Orpheus, said to be sprung from the Moon and the Muses, according to whose prescriptions they perform their rites, and persuade not only private individuals but even whole cities that there are, through sacrifices and pleasurable games and spectacles, absolutions and purifications of wrongdoing, both for the living and for the dead — rites which they call teletai ("initiations"), which, they say, release us from the punishment of those evils in the world to come; while grievous punishments await those who fail to sacrifice. This superstition — inasmuch as it works confusion of all duties, and indeed the plague and ruin of the whole of life — the philosopher censures at length.

IX. Let the reader learn from this that there is scarcely anything new in the contrivances of those who, wearing the mask of religion, either serve the various lusts (ἐπιθυμίαι) of the flesh, or gape after riches, or after dominion over the consciences of blinded men. Our most holy Savior, who is the way, the truth, and the life, shows, Matthew 5-7, that the Pharisees among the Jews, most like these impostors in wickedness, audacity, and superstition, devised falsehoods twin to theirs, from which they might extract excuses for sin. And that among the Jesuits there is an equal greed, a like dishonesty, the same shamelessness, a twin audacity, in extenuating, excusing, and absolving the sins and crimes of the most wicked scoundrels, in whetting and inflaming men's minds toward vice, and in blunting every prick of conscience, was made plain not long ago by one who, in a book devoted to the purpose, uncovered their mysteries. Let the reader compare what we have adduced from Plato with what that learned man excerpted from the books of the Jesuits; he will scarcely find one egg more like another than their doctrines are to the tenets of those ancient impostors.

X. I will add another instance, which likewise looks to gain and to vainglory (κενοδοξία, "vainglory"). Let us take it from the exorcism of demons. Philostratus, in Book 4 of the Life of Apollonius, chapter 6, relating how a demon was cast out of a young man by Apollonius, having described the fury and debauchery of the possessed man, adds: Καὶ οἱ μὲν πολλοὶ τὴν νεότητα σκιρτῶσαν ᾤοντο ἐκφέρειν αὐτὸ ἐς ταῦτα... ἐπεὶ δὲ ὁ ἀνδριὰς ἐπεκινήθη πρῶτον, εἶτα ἔπεσε ("And most people supposed that the young man's wanton, luxurious youth was the cause of all this. But the youth was acting under the demon's prompting, and seemed all the more to rage whenever Apollonius fixed his angry, fearful gaze upon him. For the specter, uttering now the voice of one afraid, now of one enraged — such voices as are usual to those who weep and to those tormented by some anguish — swore that it would release the young man and enter into no one else. But Apollonius addressed it in the words masters are accustomed to use against slaves, calling it a shape-shifter, a scoundrel, and a shameless thing, and menacingly and angrily commanded that, upon giving some sign of its departure, it should leave the youth — namely, that it should throw down a certain statue, pointing out one of those standing in the royal colonnade near which these things were taking place. When this had been said, that statue, tottering a little at first, then fell.") Whether these things really happened so, I do not know. Eusebius, writing against Hierocles, has quite often caught Philostratus lying. But I know that things just like these happen — or are feigned — every day among the fathers of the Society [of Jesus]. It is remarkable, indeed, how closely these men and that man agree; one would think it was Menghi, Thyraeus, or Sprenger speaking. But just as that Apollonius was so much more discerning than other mortals that he could perceive a demon in a drunken young man, when everyone else saw in him nothing beyond what they judged should be ascribed to debauchery and wantonness, so it very often happens that the fathers of the Society detect unclean spirits in people — especially in young men and girls — in whom the rest of mortals, blinder indeed than moles, can discern nothing at all, except what they think should be imputed to the ravings of some, or to the impostures of others. Furthermore, the specter of Philostratus raged no more at the presence and gaze of the magician Apollonius than is customary for Jesuit specters at the presence, the gaze, or the touch of a popish priest. This is taught us, among others, by Edmunds himself, that mass-priest, in his miraculous history of things done in England around the year 1585 and afterward. "Scarcely," he says, "had I begun the exorcisms and laid my hand upon his head, when he" (the Jesuits' young man) "immediately began to rage, to be driven upward, to labor with hands and feet, to beat off the priest's hand, to fill the whole place with cries, oaths, and blasphemous curses" — so that that Philostratean youth was plainly no match for him. And as for the reproaches to be hurled at the demon, it will plainly appear, if Apollonius be compared with these men of ours, that he was a mere infant. He called the spirit ποικίλον, πανοῦργον, and ἀναιδή ("crafty," "villainous," and "shameless"). But if anyone wishes to consult Menghi, in the Fustis Daemonum, Exorcism 4, he will easily see how little these amount to, compared with the terms he teaches the fathers to use in their exorcisms: "Hear, says the priest, senseless one, false one, reprobate, master of demons, most wretched creature, tempter of men, deceiver of the evil angels, deluder of souls, leader of heretics, father of lies, fool, beastly one, witless one, drunkard, infernal robber, most iniquitous serpent, most ravenous wolf, lean, famished, filthiest swine, mangy beast, most savage beast, cruel beast, bloody beast, most bestial of all beasts, spirit of Acheron, spirit of soot, spirit of Tartarus." Away, then, with Apollonius's trifles; let the demon himself learn from this how to hurl abuse in return. It must indeed be an untamed and thoroughly stubborn spirit that is not terrified by such reproaches. Without doubt Saint Michael did not dare to use a "judgment of blasphemy" of this sort (Jude 1:9). These new masters also imitate the overthrow of the statue at the demon's departure — but here they shamefully fall short of Apollonius, for they very rarely proceed beyond snuffing out a candle or breaking a window. To throw down statues is not within the power of just any mass-priest. This art of exorcising demons the Jews received from the pagans, and the papists received it from both. Ἤδη μέν τοι οἱ ἐξ ὑμῶν ἐξορκισταὶ τῇ τέχνῃ ὥσπερ καὶ τὰ ἔθνη χρώμενοι ἐξορκίζουσι, καὶ θυμιάμασι, καὶ καταδέσμοις χρῶνται ("Indeed, even now your exorcists, employing a craft just as the pagans do, exorcise by adjurations, and make use of incense-offerings and bindings") — Justin Martyr, in the Dialogue with Trypho.

XI. But we must return from this digression to the main road. The worship of heaven and of the sun flourished across a long succession of years, before it had yet occurred to men to raise up their own likenesses to God's throne; nor did the man go unpunished, even among the Greeks themselves, who committed the blasphemy of calling the Sun "a great mass of fire" (πυρὸς ἄθροισμα μέγα).

Chapter 7

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 5

The beginnings of idolatry assigned by the ancients to the age of Serug, without reason or authority — Eusebius's Chronicle; Suidas interpolated — Serug, of the family of Shem, through Terah the father of Abraham; was he a statuary? — Epiphanius's opinion on the origin of idols, and Tertullian's — The arts of painting and statuary in the service of idolatry — The rude beginnings of the art of painting — According to Pliny and Athenagoras, who its inventors were — The distinction between "shadow" (σκιά) and "image" (εἰκών), Hebrews 10:1 — The sun and moon the first idols — The first worship of idols was simple adoration — Its progress — To worship God is natural — All superstition is full of fluctuation — The absence of new gods — Elijah's mockery of the idolaters on account of the absence of their idols — The ithyphallic hymn sung by the Athenians to Demetrius Poliorcetes — The occasion for making Aaron's calf — The general influences of the heavenly bodies — The madness and hardening of idolaters — The occasions of a new kind of superstition — The origin of pillars, obelisks, and images — The testimony of Maimonides, and of Plotinus — The manner of fabricating images; the idolatry of the astrologers — The folly of ancient and of more recent image-making.

I. Nearly all the ancients assign the beginnings of idolatry to the age of Serug. Serug was born in the sixty-third year after the dispersion at Babel. That span of time they hold to have been free of this crime. We, for our part, do not doubt that the greater part of the apostate crowd bade farewell to the worship of the one true God immediately from the dispersion itself; nor is any reason given why the age of Serug in particular should be believed to have given rise to this crime. Most follow Eusebius in his Chronicle. He asserts that Serug was of the tribe or family of Japheth, to whom Shem was his great-great-grandfather. Eusebius's words are cited twice in Suidas, and in both places Serug is said to be of the family of Japheth; for a great many things in that work are inserted two or three times over, being the additions of later hands. But what they ascribe to Serug belongs to Hellenism; for they imagine that he was the first to enter upon the practice of religiously worshiping the dead, a practice which, they say, Terah the father of Abraham advanced by the fabrication of statues. Epiphanius says this of Serug: Οὔπω δὲ ἐν ξοάνοις καὶ ἐν τορείαις λίθων ἢ ξύλων ἢ ἀργυροτεύκτων ἢ χρυσοῦ ἢ ἐξ ἄλλης τινὸς ὕλης πεποιημένων, μόνον δὲ διὰ χρωμάτων καὶ εἰκόνων ἡ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου διάνοια ἐφ ̓ ἑαυτῇ ηὕρισκε τὴν κακίαν ("Not yet had that superstitious worship attached itself to carved images or to stones or wood or silver or gold or any other material wrought into statues; there was nothing then but colors and figures, in which the mind of man devised for itself a new kind of wickedness"). At that time, as Tertullian says, all of idolatry's preparation consisted in pictures and colors.

II. It would be easy to prove that the arts of painting and statuary had their beginnings in the service of idolatry; but that the latter preceded the former in that service is not so easily shown. The art of drawing (γραφική) remained quite crude for several centuries, and was not fit to represent the gods unless they had first been fashioned out of some solid material. Pliny teaches that it had its beginning in "shadow-drawing" (σκιαγραφία) — a rough likeness traced from observing a man's shadow. So Athenagoras, in his Plea for the Christians: Καὶ σκιαγραφίας μὲν εὑρεθείσης ὑπὸ Σαυρίου, ἵππον ἐν ἠλίῳ περιγράψαντος ("Saurias invented shadow-painting, having traced the outline of a horse's shadow in the sunlight"). But to paint the Sun itself in shadow — which they especially, almost alone, held to be a god — was quite difficult. He adds: Γραφικῆς δὲ Κράσωνος ἐν πίνακι λελευκωμένῳ σκιὰς ἀνδρὸς καὶ γυναικὸς ἐναλείψαντος ("Craton first exhibited graphic art" — that is, the art which added colors to outlines — "when on a whitened tablet he painted in the shadows of a man and a woman"). Others added other refinements still. Hence arose that distinction the apostle draws in Hebrews 10:1: Σκιὰν γὰρ ἔχων ὁ νόμος τῶν μελλόντων ἀγαθῶν, οὐκ αὐτὴν τὴν εἰκόνα τῶν πραγμάτων ("For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things"). Terah, through his son Nahor, was the grandson of Serug; the Jews imagined that he practiced the potter's and statuary's arts and fabricated images, and most of the ancient Christians believed it.

III. Thus Terah's image-making (εἰκονοποιία) followed the idolatry of Serug by about eighty or a hundred years; and this is commonly assigned as the first advance of idolatry. We have followed other lines of inquiry into the beginnings of superstitious worship, and we shall press on further along the path we have begun. The "new gods" — אֱלֹהִים חֲדָשִׁים, as the Holy Spirit speaks (Judges 5:8) — which the apostates first procured for themselves after their dispersal from Babel were, as we have shown, the sun and moon and the other heavenly bodies. These they used, as it were, as guides for their wanderings. Simple adoration constituted their first worship. By degrees the human race slipped further into other seeds of error and into the most loathsome rites of superstition. This we shall set out briefly, as the matter and the occasion allow.

IV. That very reason by which we are human at all demands that some God be acknowledged and worshiped. Hence, until men take up false gods in place of the true one they have forgotten, the stings of conscience harass them. Thus the first apostates turned to the sun, the moon, and the heavenly stars. For a time the novelty of the thing, and the very name of "gods," pleased them. But driven, amid the peril of what was dearest to them, into new and rugged passages, the stings and horrors of conscience afflicted them with fresh anxiety and trouble; for no one can enjoy true tranquillity of mind where, by a depraved superstition, war is declared against the true God. At first, then, these deities did not seem sufficiently present to them; for unless a god is present, he is not to be reckoned a deity at all. By that same instinct of nature by which we are persuaded that God exists, we are also persuaded that he is present. Nor can the use of a deity — the greatest resource among men wise only in earthly things — suffice to ward off dangers, if that deity is not more present than every danger; and if he is not, then he is no God at all. Hence Elijah reproaches the Baal-worshiping Israelites with the absence of their idol, 1 Kings 18:27: "Cry with a loud voice, for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he sleeps." With biting irony he strips the idol of all divine nature, of every attribute befitting God, and so takes from it all power, and removes it from any divine dominion.

V. And this consideration kept all idolaters continually so anxious and uneasy that, although they attempted to remedy their fear and wavering by means of sacred pillars and images, as we shall presently see, it could not but be that this uncertainty of mind, which agitated them, would sometimes break out and betray itself. Hence it was that the Athenian people, receiving Demetrius Poliorcetes, the liberator of their city, with divine honors, inserted, among other things, the following into the ithyphallic hymn sung to him as he entered the city walls: Ὦ τοῦ κρατίστου παῖ Ποσειδῶνος θεοῦ, Καὶ θεᾶς ̓Αφροδίτης· Οὐ ξύλινον, οὐδὲ λίθινον, ἀλλ ̓ ἀληθινόν — "Hail, O son of Poseidon, mightiest of gods, and of the goddess Aphrodite! Other gods indeed are either far away, or have no ears, or do not exist at all, or give no heed to our affairs; but you we behold present with us — no god of stone or wood, but a true one." Athenaeus, in the Deipnosophists, Book 6, relates this from Duris of Samos.

VI. For this reason the Israelites in the wilderness forced Aaron to cast the golden calf, Exodus 32:1: "This Moses," they said, "is not here; rise up, therefore, and make us gods to go before us." They do not say "other gods," nor "gods" absolutely, but "gods to go before us," and to assist us with their help. For they did not demand a God other than Jehovah, but some visible sign of the divine presence, to which they might have recourse in doubtful and difficult straits. Signs of this kind were afterward indeed granted by God to that carnal people — yet instituted by himself alone. And this was the beginning of that fatal transgression for that people. Hence the proverb arose among them: אֵין לְךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל פֻּרְעָנוּת שֶׁאֵין בָּהּ אוּנְקִיָא מֵעֲוֹן הָעֵגֶל ("There befalls you, O Israel, no vengeance in which there is not an ounce of the iniquity of the calf"). It is a frivolous and thoroughly Jewish contrivance by which some of the rabbis attempt, from Aaron's words — "I cast the gold into the fire, and out came this calf" (as though it had leapt out unbidden, with no such thing in his mind) — to shift the sin of shaping the calf onto the rabble of Egyptians among them, among whom were certain magicians, by whose art it was brought about that, contrary to everyone's expectation, the calf came forth.

VII. This, then, was for the first idolaters — once they had resolved to hold the stars of heaven in the place of deity — the occasion of a new superstition. As every lie is full of, and fruitful in, further lies, so the greatest lie is the most fruitful of all. Nor is there any error that does not either supply those who err with the enticements of many further errors, or force such errors upon them by necessity. Those deities were absent ones; yet in dangers, and in doubtful and arduous circumstances, a present God was needed. Cast into these straits, right reason dictated that they must return to a God present everywhere. "But they did not see fit to retain God in their knowledge," as the apostle says (Romans 1:28), and so God gave them over to a mind void of all judgment. Possessed of such a mind, something had to be done to make the gods they had chosen present to themselves.

VIII. Furthermore, since the effects of the operations of the heavenly bodies were common and equal to all, it was quite difficult to understand how each individual might make himself a particular partaker of the benefits they believed flowed from them. For a god who is so much the god of all that he takes no care of individuals, and does good to none except as he bestows something on the whole, is in reality god to no one; for a god who is not "my God" is no god to me. And from this they might very easily have understood that they had plunged themselves into incredible difficulties. But the die was cast, and they had to press on along the course they had begun. Violence, then, had to be done to common notions (κοιναῖς ἐννοίαις) and to nature itself. The defection of the human race from the rule and government of the one God cost no less than this. Once new, sensible gods had been established, what remained of right reason cried out against it — that they were not present, that they took no care of individuals, and were therefore no gods at all, to be either worshiped or feared. A bad wedge was driven into bad knots, and lies were covered over with more lies, lest the roof should leak. To meet this twofold defect, arising from the first and greatest sin of idolatry, the idolaters, with Satan's help, devised new expedients by which they might exhibit their absent deities as present, draw down their beneficent influences, and enclose these within some present object set before each individual. And this was the origin of sacred pillars, obelisks, statues, and images, which we shall next set forth.

IX. There were, as we have said, two inconveniences under which the idolaters felt themselves burdened in the choosing of their new gods: first, that they were absent and far removed; second, that they took no care of individuals. These they sought to remedy by the erection of pillars and obelisks. For they supposed that, by relating these to the sun, moon, and stars — whether through diabolical incantations, or by the force imposed through dedication — the stars themselves could be made present through a certain Ethereal Spirit, and their salutary influences could be drawn down by anyone's vows and prayers, and enclosed within them. So we are taught, from the ancient monuments of the Sabians, by Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed, part 3, chapter 29: "According to the opinions of the Sabians," he says, "they erected images to the stars — golden images to the sun, and silver ones to the moon — and thus they divided the metals and the climes of the earth among the stars; for they said, 'such-and-such a clime belongs to such-and-such a god and star.' Then they built shrines and set up images in them, supposing that the powers of the stars flowed into those images, and that the images thereby possessed the power of understanding, could bestow upon men the gift of prophecy, and could, in short, indicate what was useful and salutary for them. So too they say of trees, which are bound by covenant to those stars: when a certain tree is dedicated to some star, it is planted in that star's name, and is cultivated on this or that condition, so that the spiritual powers of the star may be infused into that tree." Plotinus discloses the whole mystery, Enneads 4, book 3, chapter 11: Καί μοι δοκοῦσιν... μοῖραν τινὰ αὐτῆς — "And it seems to me that the wise men of old, whoever wished the gods to be present to them, in fashioning shrines and statues, fixed the eye of their mind upon the nature of the universe as a whole, considering that the nature of the soul is everywhere easily led, and that it would be most easily received of all, if someone should construct something capable of being affected, which might obtain some portion of it." This is what we have taught — namely, that the idolaters, those Plotinian "wise men," hoped to capture the power or virtue of the soul of heaven and of the stars, and to enclose it within pillars or statues, so that it might always stand present to them. And to show how this could come about, he adds: Προσπαθὲς δὲ τὸ ὁπωσοῦν μιμηθέν, ὥσπερ κάτοπτρον ἁρπάσαι εἶδός τι δυνάμενον — "Whatever is fashioned in imitation, in whatever manner, is easily susceptible; like a mirror able to seize hold of some form" — that is, wherever an ἄγαλμα, or image, is set up for some heavenly power, that power is prone to descend into it, so as to correspond to the imagination of its maker; and the image at once seizes that power, no differently than a mirror seizes the appearance of a body set before it. "For," he says, Καὶ γὰρ ἡ τοῦ παντὸς φύσις πάντα εὐμηχάνως ποιησαμένη εἰς μίμησιν ὧν εἶλε τοὺς λόγους — "the nature of the universe fashions all things by a certain wonderful artifice, in imitation of those things whose rational principles it possesses within itself" — that is, there is nothing among these lower things that has not been fashioned after the pattern of some power which existed beforehand in the mind of the universe; which is the Platonists' doctrine of Ideas. The philosopher continues: ̓Ἐπειδὴ ἕκαστον οὕτως ἐγένετο ἐν ὕλῃ λόγος... ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ εἶχε, ποιοῦσα — "Since, then, each thing thus came to be in matter as a rational principle, formed according to the principle that existed before matter, it is joined to that God according to whom it was made, and toward whom the soul looked, and which it possessed, in the making." These words unlock the whole mystery. There is a certain rational proportion given to the matter cast into an image, which exactly corresponds to that heavenly rational principle which existed before that matter; and hence arises a relation between the image and that very being to which it is consecrated. But why this image, or this portion of matter, should have this god, or this portion of heavenly power, attached to it rather than any other, is not yet clear. He shows that this comes about for a twofold reason. First, because it was fashioned according to that god: Συνήψατο τῷ Θεῷ ἐκείνῳ καθ' ὃν ἐγίνετο. But how could the maker of the image know according to the power of which god that matter, thus formed by him, emanated? This he can perceive from his own soul; for the god toward whom the soul looked when it made the ἄγαλμα is the god according to whom it is fashioned. Whether, however, the image-worshipers of our own day can give better reasons why this or that image should represent this or that saint rather than any other, I very much doubt.

X. But, to add this in passing: this idolatrous delirium still openly clings to a great many who peddle their unspeakable art under the name of judicial astrology. For they fashion figures and images which they pretend correspond to the shapes of the heavenly bodies, and thence persuade the credulous that these acquire power and marvelous effects from the heavenly figure. They also have statues and images in which they say the spirits of the stars are enclosed — though whether these spirits are the powers of the heavenly bodies themselves, or demons in attendance upon the stars, they do not know. But all of this savors of crass idolatry, though Albertus Magnus, in his Speculum, Marsilio Ficino, in De Vita Coelitus Comparanda, Girolamo Cardano, and others were not ashamed to thrust these most absurd portents of the heathen upon the Christian world, without either truth or modesty. Indeed, the whole rationale of magic consists in these things; and from this charge I can by no means exempt the papists' consecration of little images — which they call "Agnus Dei" — of candles, of holy water, and of other such things.

Chapter 8

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 6

The progress of idolatry — The visible objects of the first superstitious worship — What "pyramid-shaped pillars" (κίονες πυραμοειδεῖς), "rough stones" (λίθοι ἀργοί), "baetyls" (βαιτύλια), מַצֵּבָה, "pillars" (στῆλαι), and "image" (ἄγαλμα) mean — The testimony of Clement, of the author of the Phoronis, and of Eumelus — The origin of pillars according to Clement — A truer opinion — A pillar-stone in the county of Colchester — "Rough stones" — The testimonies of Pausanias, Maximus of Tyre, and Suidas — Theusares — Stonehenge — Elagabalus; the Idaean Mother — The Persians destroy images, and mock them — The image of Diana of Ephesus — The idols of the Germans; groves empty of images: oaks — The most ancient temples had no images — No images (ἀγάλματα) in antiquity — Rough, quadrangular stones — Baetyls — Sacred stones — The testimony of Sanchuniathon, who imagines Uranus to have devised living stones — Most of what Eusebius draws from him is ridiculous — The ancients imagined stones to be ensouled (ἔμψυχοι) — "Baetylus" in Hesychius; the proverb "you might swallow a baetyl," and its origin — "Baetyls" in Damascius as preserved by Photius — What θεραπεύω means — Anointed stones, in Clement and Arnobius — Whence "baetyls" are so called — Scaliger's conjecture — The setting up of the stone at Bethel by Jacob: what מַצֵּבָה signifies — The nature of Jacob's deed — And to what end — Why the Vulgate translator renders מַצֵּבָה as "pillar" — The "appearances" (ἐπιφάνειαι) of the gods, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cicero — A festival of the Christians — The Bethel-stone worshiped among the Phoenicians — The progress of idolatry — Statues fashioned in the likeness of a human face and dedicated to the sun, and several other matters.

I. What we have said about the progress of idolatry in the invention of present objects of religious worship is confirmed by what survives, from the monuments of antiquity, as a record of the earliest visible objects of reverence (σεβάσματα). These were anciently of two kinds: "pyramid-shaped pillars" (κίονες πυραμοειδεῖς), pointed columns; and "rough stones" (λίθοι ἀργοί), unformed and shapeless stones — to which "baetyls" (βαιτύλια) may be added. It was only much later, in the course of time, that images were fashioned in human form — namely, once the worship of the dead had been introduced through Hellenism.

II. The Greeks call sacred columns στῆλαι. Thus the Septuagint renders מַצֵּבָה, which is forbidden in Leviticus 26:1 and Deuteronomy 16:22. "מַצֵּבָה," says Kimchi, "is a stone set up for worship; from the root meaning 'it is set up.'" So too Apollo Agyieus was a pyramid, according to Hesychius — that is, a κίων εἰς ὀξὺ λῆγον, "a column tapering to a point." Concerning these, Clement of Alexandria, Book 1, writes: Πρὸν γὰρ οὖν ἀκριβωθῆναι τὰς τῶν ἀγαλμάτων σχέσεις, κίονας ἱστάντες οἱ παλαιοὶ ἔσιδον τούτους ὡς ἀφιδρύματα τοῦ Θεοῦ ("For before the forms of images were precisely fashioned, the ancients, setting up columns, regarded these as seats [ἀφιδρύματα] of God"). An ἀφίδρυμα of this kind is an image that is, as it were, the seat of a deity. This is what we have said: since images (ἀγάλματα) were not yet accurately fashioned, they set up columns to receive the power of the absent deities, and these thereby became, as it were, seats of the gods. Now an ἄγαλμα is an image artfully fabricated — Πᾶν ἐφ ̓ ᾧ τις ἀγάλλεται, says Suidas ("anything in which one delights") — that is, something that so feasts the eyes as to affect the mind with a certain delight.

III. To this purpose belongs what the same Clement relates, from the author of the Phoronis, concerning Callithoe, the first priestess of Juno: "Callithoe, doorkeeper of Argive Juno, whom they first adorned with fillets and headbands, about the queen's long pillar." The poet calls it μακρή ("long"), because the pillar (στήλη) was raised up lengthwise, unlike the rough stones (λίθοι ἀργοί). So in Homer a κίων is sometimes called μακρός ("long"), sometimes ὑψηλός ("lofty"). He adduces like matter also from Eumelus — though Eumelus perhaps meant nothing more than that the choicest spoils of war (ἀκροθίνια) were customarily hung from door-jambs and columns, a very well-known custom.

IV. Clement writes that demons devised these things in imitation of that pillar which went before the Israelites in the wilderness. Others may judge as they will; I, for my part, do not doubt that, at that very time when the tabernacle was erected, columns and pillars of this kind were already in common use among many nations. From this, perhaps, arose the "Gods of the Doorway" (Dii Anthelii), the guardians of doors — small columns set at the doors of temples and of other houses. Hesychius: ̓Αντήλιοι θεοὶ οἱ πρὸ τῶν θυρῶν ἱδρύμενοι ("the gods of the entrance are those set up before doors"); Athenaeus, Book 10: ἐπὶ τῆς αὐλῆς ("in the courtyard"), that is, at the front entrance of a house, under the open sky. It had not yet occurred to men to make images or statues (ἀγαλματοποιΐα, εἰκονοποιΐα) when they first set up columns and pillars for religion's sake. For since they held only the heavenly bodies to be in the place of deity, there was no reason for them to erect images fashioned and fabricated in human form to represent them. This indeed came to pass once superstition had gathered strength — the sun being now, so to speak, identified with some Apollo or other — but since the idolaters had nothing else in mind than to make their absent deities present by some visible sign, they had no need of the representation of any living creature upon that sign. I remember having seen a pillar of this kind in the county of Colchester, among the Trinobantes, upon which later ages set an image of a cross, and consecrated it anew for the use of a new superstition.

V. Next, alongside those pointed pillars, they used rough boulders for the same purpose. So Pausanias, in his account of Achaia: ̔Εστήκασι δὲ... ἀντὶ ἀγαλμάτων εἶχον ἀργοὶ λίθοι — "Near the image stand about thirty square-hewn stones; each of these the people of Pharae venerate, calling it by the name of some particular god; and indeed, in the most ancient times of all, rough stones held, for the Greeks generally, the honors of the gods, in place of images." A notable testimony. "Near the statue stand about thirty stones of quadrangular shape; the people of Pharae venerate each one, calling it by the fixed name of some god; and this was indeed native to the Greeks — to worship rough stones, in the place of images, as gods." He mentions stones of this kind also in his account of Boeotia. This, I say, was the custom among those most ancient Greeks whom we have shown, from Plato, to have worshiped the sun, the moon, and the other stars of heaven, and these alone. And Maximus of Tyre, on the Arabs, Discourse 38: 'Αράβιοι μὲν σέβουσι ὅντινα οὐκ οἶδα· τὸ δὲ ἄγαλμα ὃ εἶδον, λίθος ἦν τετράγωνος — "The Arabs worship I know not whom; but the image I saw was a square stone." The token of that unknown god was a quadrangular stone; and that god was called θευσάρης. "This is," says Suidas, "the god Ares" — in which explanation of the name he is without doubt mistaken; but, whoever that god may have been, he adds: Τὸ ἄγαλμα, λίθος ἐστὶ μέλας τετράγωνος... καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν αὐτοῖς ἡ σπονδή — "The image is a black, square, unshapen stone, four feet high and two feet wide, resting upon a base of beaten gold; to this they sacrifice, and pour out the blood of the victims, and this is their libation."

VI. Stones of this same kind, perhaps, were those huge, rough boulders here in England, in the county of Salisbury — the λίθοι ἀργοί, "rough stones," of which Pausanias speaks. Jones, the most skillful architect, proves in a special treatise that these were sacred objects. That the ancient Britons worshiped the Moon under the name of Andraste is attested by Dio Cassius, in Book 62 of his History. Stones of this kind, then, were erected to the Sun and to the Moon.

VII. We have shown above that the worshipers of the stars erected these stones and pillars so as to have present within them the power and energy (ἐνέργεια) of the deities they worshiped, for their protection and their benefit; they believed this could come about through the descent of a certain Ethereal Spirit. In time the stones themselves came to be called "gods," or "divine ones." Lampridius, in the Life of Heliogabalus: "He wished to carry off, out of Diana's own temple at Laodicea, the image — the stones which are called 'divine' — from that shrine in which Orestes himself had placed it." The historian means nothing other than rough stones (λίθοι ἀργοί) consecrated to the sun and moon, which in the course of time came to be reckoned under the name of "gods." Hence the custom arose of swearing "by Jupiter the Stone." And concerning the idol Elagabalus, from which that human monster, the false Antoninus, borrowed his own name, Herodian says: Λίθος τίς ἐστι μέγιστος, κάτωθεν περιφερὴς, λήγων εἰς ὀξύτητα — "It is a very great stone, round at the base, tapering to a point." Also, "the round Baal" denotes "the round lord," a name by which they denoted the sun itself — unless rather the sun was called, in Syriac, "the God of the Gabalites," a name taken from the place of his worship, as with Baal-peor. The Idaean Mother, which was conveyed to Rome from Pessinus with such great veneration, and which the whole city set up in the Temple of Victory, was, on Livy's testimony (Book 29, chapter 11), a stone of this very kind.

VIII. Thus in early times, among many nations, images (ἀγάλματα) were of no use at all, nor even known, and by some were even held in hatred. Herodotus, concerning the Persians, in his Clio, chapter 131: ̓Αγάλματα μὲν καὶ νηοὺς καὶ βωμοὺς οὐκ ἐν νόμῳ ποιευμένους ἱδρύεσθαι... κατάπερ οἱ Ἕλληνες, εἶναι — "It is not their custom to set up images, temples, or altars; indeed they impute folly to those who do so, because, as it seems to me, they do not hold the gods to be of human form, as the Greeks do." A notable testimony. We have shown above that the Persians paid religious worship to the sun and moon. Adhering to that superstition received from the first idolaters, they never admitted the deities that Hellenism introduced, and for that reason had no images at all. Hence, those who wrote the history of the Magi — as recorded in Diogenes Laertius, in the preface to his work — relate that Xerxes, on his European expedition, "fittingly purged away the images," that is, "removed the statues, in keeping with the tenets of his religion." Indeed, they not only removed such images, but mocked them pleasantly too. For when Cambyses entered the temple of Hephaestus at Memphis, "he laughed long and loud at the image" (Herodotus, Book 3) — "he greeted the image with much laughter" — and in the shrine of the Cabiri, "he burned the images, jesting a great deal over them" — "he burned up the images, mocking them extensively." He burned them in the manner of his own country, because they were images of men; he laughed, because they were ridiculously made. For this reason he gave over all the temples of Asia to the flames — on Solinus's testimony — the sole exception being that of Diana of Ephesus, whose image was a sharp-pointed trunk of elm, or of beech; so Callimachus teaches us, in his Hymn to Artemis. As for the rest, the Father of History does not say that the Persians had no statues whatsoever. They had no images (ἀγάλματα), because they did not believe the gods to be of human form (ἀνθρωποφυεῖς); but he does not say that they rejected pillars and obelisks altogether, nor is that true. Tacitus reports the same of the Germans, in his Germania, chapter 9: "For the rest, they judge it unfitting, given the greatness of the heavenly beings, either to confine gods within walls, or to liken them to any human countenance; they consecrate woods and groves, and call by the names of gods that hidden presence which they behold by reverence alone." But a little before he had said: "They believe that God is present with them in their wars, and carry into battle certain images and standards taken out of their groves" (same work, chapter 7). Their groves, then, were not empty of every effigy or standard, but only of such as were fashioned into any likeness of the human countenance.

IX. Perhaps, too, in place of the stones and columns which the peoples of the East erected, the Germans made use of living oaks, or the ancient trunks of oaks. For we have shown, from Maimonides, that the heavenly bodies were worshiped even in trees. Hence Claudian, in his Panegyric on Stilicho. So too: "Oaks that were held by the Greeks to give oracles" (Virgil, Georgics 2.16). And the Gauls, in Lucan, Book 3, line 412: "the mournful images of the gods..." Maximus of Tyre likewise teaches that the Celts, that is, the Gauls, worshiped Jupiter, whose token was a very lofty oak. Procopius of Caesarea, too, affirms, in Book 4 of his Gothic War, that the people of the Abasgi, situated between the Black Sea and the foothills of the Caucasus, "down to his own time" — that is, the time of the Emperor Justinian — "venerated groves and woodlands in their superstition, and, with barbarous simplicity, believed trees to be gods." Likewise, too, the Huns — the first to drive the Goths from their ancient Scythian homelands — of whom Jordanes, in his work on the origin and deeds of the Goths, chapter 24, carried away by a marvelous credulity, reports that they were begotten by unclean spirits out of certain sorceresses whom they called "Aliorumnae"; and historians relate that the remnants of this people, in Lithuania, worshiped trees down to a late age, until King Jagiełło cut them down with his own hand. Philostratus relates, too, that a most ancient temple was dedicated to Hercules at Cadiz; in it, he says, there were no images at all, but only unmarked altars. He shows that the inhabitants of that place had pillars inscribed with unknown letters, and that these were quadrangular, shaped like anvils (see the Life of Apollonius, Book 5, chapter 1). Silius Italicus writes of the same temple: "But there was no effigy, no recognized image of the gods." And Curtius relates, Book 4, chapter 1, that in this "Hercules" the Tyrians — from whom the people of Cadiz descended — venerated Apollo, that is, the sun. So true is what Themistius says, Oration 15: Καὶ πρὸ μὲν Δαιδάλου τετράγωνος ἦν... ἔμπνοα δημιουργεῖν ἐνομίσθη — "For before Daedalus, not only the fashioning of the images of Hermes, but that of the rest of the statues as well, was square-hewn; but Daedalus, since he was the first to separate the two feet of images from one another, was believed to fabricate living, breathing things" — "For before Daedalus, not only the images of Mercury but the rest of the statues as well were fashioned as a rude, shapeless mass; but once Daedalus had given distinct form to the feet of images, he was believed to fabricate things living and breathing." Of which more hereafter.

X. To these rough stones (λίθοι ἀργοί) belong the "baetyls" (βαιτύλια). The first to mention them, as preserved in Eusebius, is Sanchuniathon, in his Theology of the Phoenicians: ̓́Ετι δέ, Θεὸς ̓Ουρανὸς βαιτύλια, λίθους ἐμψύχους μαχανησάμενος — "Moreover, the god Uranus devised baetyls, having by his art contrived ensouled stones." A very learned man supposes that Sanchuniathon did not write "living stones," but rather — with two letters transposed — "anointed stones." For it is ridiculous, he says, to imagine that Heaven made "animated stones." And it is indeed ridiculous; yet it is far from certain that Sanchuniathon did not write it so, since — out of a horrid confusion in part, and in part out of a mixture of the most monstrous nonsense — everything that Eusebius draws from Sanchuniathon at that point is utterly absurd and ridiculous, nor is it recorded by him for any purpose other than to make plain how absurd these things are, and how abhorrent to all theology, indeed to reason itself. Moreover, Uranus devised these stones so as to have them at hand and to aid him in the war he was waging to recover his kingdom from Saturn — for which he had need of living stones rather than anointed ones. It is also very well known that the ancients no less imagined stones of this kind to be ensouled (ἔμψυχοι) than they imagined the statues of Daedalus to move of themselves (αὐτοκίνητα). Hesychius derives the word differently: Βαίτυλος· οὕτως ἐκαλεῖτο ὁ δοθεὶς λίθος τῷ Κρόνῳ ἀντὶ Διός — "Baetylus: this is the name given to the stone that was given to Saturn in place of Jupiter" — a very well-known fable. Hence the proverb Καὶ βαίτυλον ἂν καταπίνοις — "You might even swallow a baetyl" — which Erasmus, in his Adages, explains from this passage of Hesychius: "A 'baetyl,'" he says, "is the name given to that stone, wrapped in swaddling bands, which Saturn devoured in place of Jupiter."

XI. It is certain, however, that there were other stones destined for sacred uses, called "baetyls," besides the one given to Saturn in place of Jupiter. The author of the Life of Isidore the Philosopher, preserved in Photius — whom Suidas says was Damascius (Codex 242) — mentions them. He says he saw Τὸν βαίτυλον διὰ τοῦ ἀέρος κινούμενον... ὄνομα δ ̓ ἦν τῷ θεραπεύοντι τὸν βαίτυλον Ευσέβιος — "the baetyl moved through the air, at times hidden in garments, and sometimes even carried in the hands of its attendant; the name of him who attended the baetyl was Eusebius" — "the baetyl moved in the air, at times covered by clothing, sometimes even carried in the hands of the attendant. The name of the attendant who carried the Baetylus was Eusebius." Andreas Schott, a man otherwise learned, interprets those words quite absurdly, rendering "attendant" as "physician." For what has a physician to do with a baetyl? Children know what it is θεραπεύειν τοὺς θεοὺς ("to attend upon the gods"), and what ἡ περὶ τοὺς θεοὺς θεραπεία ("the service paid to the gods") means. This Eusebius was an impostor, who was in sacred attendance upon the baetyl; he sometimes carried it in his hands, and at other times pretended it had moved of itself through the air. "The name of him who attended the baetyl was Eusebius" — that is, the name of the one who served the baetyl in its rites was Eusebius. Julius Pollux, Onomasticon, Book 1, on occupations: "The names of those who attend the gods: attendants of the gods, priests, temple-wardens." Damascius further teaches how this Eusebius religiously worshiped the baetyl, and drew oracles from it. And this was one of those "ensouled" (ἔμψυχοι) stones; Isidore asserted that it was moved, and as it were animated, by a demon not of the worst sort: Εἶναι γάρ τινα δαίμονα, τὸν κινοῦντα αὑτὸν, οὔτε τῶν βλαβερῶν, οὔτε τῶν ἄγαν προσύλων — "for there was, he said, a certain demon that moved it, neither one of the harmful sort, nor one overly attached to matter." For we shall show afterward that, in the course of time, wherever an idol of this kind was set up, demons at once took possession of it. Damascius, a little further on, mentions other stones too, dedicated to the Sun, which he calls "companions of the road" (συνοδῖται).

XII. It must be admitted, however, that the ancient idolaters were accustomed to anoint these stones, so that they might no less fittingly be called "anointed" than "living." Clement, Stromata, Book 7: Πάντα λίθον, τὸν δὲ λεγόμενον λιπαρὸν προσκυνοῦντες ("worshiping every stone, and especially the one called 'oily'"). And Arnobius, speaking of himself when he was still a pagan: "If ever I caught sight of a stone made smooth and glistening, anointed with the oil of olives, I would flatter it, as though some present power dwelt within it."

XIII. The first, so far as I know, to conjecture very acutely that these stones were called "baetyls" after the stone which Jacob set up at Bethel — or from "Bethel" itself, the name by which the place where he set it up was thereafter called — was that admirable man Joseph Scaliger; from which others suppose that the whole practice of erecting rough stones for superstitious purposes proceeded from Satan's wicked imitation (κακοζηλία) of the true thing. Jacob's deed is recorded in Genesis 28:18–19. He took the stone which he had used as his pillow and set it up as a "pillar" — so the Vulgate translator renders it — what the Greeks call a στήλη. From the root meaning "to set up" comes the word for "pillar," as we said before — the very word used in the prohibition of idolatry (Leviticus 26:1; Deuteronomy 7:5; 12:3). It was a rough stone, found by chance in the field; having set it up in this manner, he anointed it with oil, and was the first of mortals to utter, in precise words, a solemn vow to God. Among other things, he promised that this stone would in future be to him "God's house" (Genesis 28:22) — that is, that he would solemnly perform the worship of God at that place, once he should have at hand the things needed to offer to God, of all of which he was then in want. Afterward, being admonished by God, he discharged his vow (chapter 35:6–7).

XIV. Whether Jacob did rightly or otherwise, in setting up a pillar, is a question the commentators raise. Abulensis gives two answers: first, that this was lawful before the law, though afterward forbidden; second, that Jacob erected this pillar to commemorate the event, not in order to worship it. Most others acquiesce in his opinion. There is no doubt that, before the law was given, it was lawful for godly men to erect altars in any place, and to offer sacrifices upon them. That Jacob set up this stone as a memorial of the angelic vision granted him there, and did not put it to religious worship, is clear from the fact that, a long time afterward, being reminded by God of his vow, he built an altar at that very place (chapter 35:7). The Latin translator renders "מַצֵּבָה" as "pillar," from the custom usual with sacred stones of this kind of inscribing upon them titles indicating to which god they were dedicated. So Damascius: Καὶ γράμματα ἀνέδειξεν ἡμῖν τῷ λίθῳ γεγραμμένα χρώματι τῷ καλουμένῳ τιγγαβαρίνῳ κατακεχρωμένα — "he also showed us letters written on the stone — on the baetyl, that is — colored with the pigment they call 'tingabarine.'"

XV. From this deed of Jacob's — likewise recalling to memory a vision of the true God — there afterward flowed a superstitious custom of erecting pillars to commemorate feigned "appearances" (ἐπιφάνειαι) of the gods. Many writers mention such "epiphanies" of the gods. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Book 2, chapter 68: Πάνυ δ ̓ ἄξιον καὶ τὴν ἐπιφάνειαν ἱστορῆσαι τῆς θεᾶς, ἣν ἐπεδείξατο ταῖς ἀδίκως ἐγκληθείσαις παρθένοις — "It is well worth relating, too, the appearance of the goddess which she showed to the virgins who had been unjustly accused" — "That is memorable: how the goddess, appearing, brought help to the virgins in danger." To this he adds a refutation of the Epicureans: ὅσοι μὲν οὖν τὰς ἀθέους ἀσκοῦσι φιλοσοφίας... ἀπάσας διασύροντες τὰς ἐπιφανείας τῶν θεῶν — "as many as pursue those godless philosophies — if indeed they are even to be called philosophies — ridiculing all the appearances of the gods" — "mocking the presences of the gods," as Cicero explains that word. Athenaeus too, Book 12, citing Carystius of Pergamum, relates that Demetrius of Phalerum religiously observed "the epiphany" of his brother Himeraeus, who had been slain by Antipater — which stirred up great ill-will against him among the Athenians. For after he had, it seems, pretended that his dead brother had appeared to him, he paid him religious worship, and thereby "introduced a strange deity," which was forbidden at Athens (Acts 17:18). Cicero speaks of these epiphanies in the second book of On the Nature of the Gods, chapter 2: "And so, both among our own people and among others, the worship of the gods and the sanctities of religion grow day by day greater and better; and this comes about not rashly, nor by chance, but because the divine ones often make known their presence." And let us note from what workshop that Christian festival came forth which they call "Epiphany" — concerning which a certain priest doubted whether it was masculine or feminine, yet fearlessly pronounced it a great saint!

XVI. The Jews affirm that the Phoenicians afterward worshiped that Bethel-stone; and it is quite probable that those rough boulders which they erected to their gods were called "baetyls" after Bethel.

XVII. In this way, then, grew the worship of the sun: to simple adoration were added pillars and baetylic stones; to these was first joined anointing, then the offering of crops and flowers, and finally sacrifices of animals.

XVIII. It came to pass, indeed, in process of time, that the sun itself came to be worshiped under statues fashioned in the likeness of a human face. Of this kind was the Colossus of Rhodes, seventy cubits high. Macrobius, too, records that the Egyptians and Assyrians were accustomed to carry the image of the sun in procession, holding a thunderbolt and ears of grain in its left hand, and raising its right hand with a whip, in the manner of a charioteer (Saturnalia, Book 1, chapter 23). And Pliny, Book 34, chapter 7: "Zenodorus," he says, "made the Colossus intended for the emperor Nero, an image a hundred and ten feet in length, which, once that prince's crimes had been condemned, was dedicated to the worship of the sun." This was done under Vespasian, on Suetonius's testimony (Life of Vespasian, chapter 18): "He rewarded," he says, "the restorer of the Colossus with a notable gratuity and a great fee." Once restored, a head of the sun bearing seven rays was set upon it in place of Nero's; this was afterward removed by Commodus, who set his own head there instead, on the testimony of Herodian, chapter 48: Τοῦ μεγίστου ἀγάλματος κολοσσιαίου ὅπερ σέβουσι ̔Ρωμαῖοι, εἰκόνα φέρον ̔Ηλίου, τὴν κεφαλὴν ἀποτεμὼν, ἱδρύσατο ἑαυτοῦ — "Cutting off the head of the greatest colossal image, which the Romans venerate, bearing the likeness of the Sun, he set up his own instead." Scaliger fills out the defective passage with "and setting his own in its place." This, however, was not done until after dead men had been taken up into the number of the gods, and some Apollo or other had come to be substituted for the sun.

XIX. Just, then, as Jeroboam set up golden calves lest the people, left destitute of every visible sign of the divine presence, should return to Jerusalem to perform the true worship of God — not without, perhaps, the utmost damage and ruin to his own kingdom — so too Satan, taking thought for his own kingdom, which he had gained in the world by such various arts and manifold deceit, engendered upon idolaters this second, further error, lest, set in the midst of dangers and anxious for help, attending to the very voice of nature crying out to the Lord of nature, they should begin to "seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and find him — though indeed he is not far from every one of them" (Acts 17:27), and so should withdraw themselves from his dominion; that, raised up instead to a false hope, they might not be freed from their wicked prejudice.

XX. Clement of Alexandria, in his Exhortation to the Greeks, sets forth this progress of superstition admirably: "The Scythians," he says, "of old worshiped a scimitar; the Arabs, a stone; the Persians, a river; and among other peoples, those who were more ancient still, set up wooden emblems and erected pillars of stone, which were also called ξόανα ('carved images'), because they were scraped and smoothed out of raw material. Among the Icarians, certainly, the image of Diana was an unworked piece of wood; the image of the Cithaeronian Juno at Thespiae was a hewn trunk; and the image of the Samian Juno (as Aethlius says) was at first only a plank, but afterward, when Procles was archon, it was wrought into the form of a statue. Once statues began to be formed, they were called βρέτη, from βροτός ('mortal'), because they resembled men. At Rome, in ancient times, the statue of Mars was, so the writer Varro says, a spear, since the craftsmen had not yet arrived at this showy but wicked artifice. But once the art flourished, error increased. That they made images resembling men out of stones and wood is therefore now plain." So he says; and thereafter he recounts in order who, in each place, were the first fabricators of images.

XXI. And this was Satan's first success — his first good fortune (εὐτυχία) — in his war against the human race, once it had been left destitute of divine revelation and given over to itself. This is the origin of that total defection from the foundation of natural theology. Here the prince of darkness laid the foundations of that dominion which, over an untold succession of years, he has exercised far and wide over the greater part of mankind.

Chapter 9

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 7

The further progress of idolatry — Polytheism (πολυθεϊσμός) ending in anti-theism (ἀντιθεϊσμός) — What Hellenism is — Its beginnings uncertain and obscure — The opinion of the author of the book called the Wisdom of Solomon — Gods and goddesses made by flattery — The mother of Demetrius worshiped by Adimantus, and Lamia, the mistress of Poliorcetes, worshiped by the Athenians and Thebans — Demetrius's jibe against the Athenians — The opinion of Lactantius, and of Eusebius — The manner of "deification" (ἀποθέωσις) — The Jews imagine Terah, Abraham's father, to have been the first image-maker — The origin of the fable — The agreement of the ancient Christians in it — The testimony of Epiphanius, of Suidas, of John of Antioch — Haran died before his father — Not the first since the foundation of the world, as Epiphanius supposed — Terah was a holy man — Pindar ascribes the invention of automatons to the Rhodians; Isidore, to Prometheus; most, to Daedalus — Why he is said to have made self-moving images (ἀγάλματα αὐτοκίνητα) — The statue of Memnon in Philostratus — Several other matters.

I. Satan had not yet brought to its final conclusion what he had been impiously contriving against God and men. With the success we have just described, a still keener and loftier lust for seizing God's throne came upon him. In Hellenism — that is, in the worship of dead men — he gets his wish. By means of this superstition, the object of religious worship, without any further roundabout means, set itself directly before wretched little men. And thus polytheism (πολυθεϊσμός) ends in anti-theism (ἀντιθεϊσμός). Yet it was only after the passage of many years, perhaps even of centuries, that men arrived at this pinnacle of impiety and spiritual wickedness; for the human race did not procure for itself gods of human origin (θεοὺς ἀνθρωποφυεῖς) immediately upon its first defection. Hellenism consisted in the worship of these. Wearied of the heavenly bodies — which, being driven by an inviolable law, could not satisfy the vanity and fluctuation of the human mind — they chose for themselves gods like to themselves, easy, well-disposed, whose ways they might imitate, and whose honors they might in turn obtain. Although, then, the whole idol-madness of the ancients may rightly be understood by means of Hellenism — a certain gathering (συλλογή) and confusion of false religions, in the worship of heaven, of the sun and the other stars, of demons, of dead men, of images, and of fictitious specters — nevertheless we shall here consider it separately from Sabaism, that is, from the superstitious worship of the heavenly bodies, insofar as it introduced the worship of dead men and of images fashioned in the likeness of the human countenance.

II. All confess that the origins of this superstition are doubtful, indeed most uncertain. Having related the opinions of others — opinions which either the standing of their authors, or their own plausibility, has brought into repute — we shall add a few points that still seem wanting, for drawing the truth up out of the well.

III. Well known is the opinion of the author of the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 14:13–20: "For it was not from the beginning, neither shall it be for ever. For by the vanity of men it entered into the world, and therefore was a short end devised for it. For a father, worn out by untimely mourning, having made an image of his child so quickly taken away, then honored as a god the man who had once been dead, and delivered to his household mysteries and rites of initiation. Then, in the course of time, this ungodly custom, having grown strong, was kept as a law, and by the commands of tyrants carved images were worshiped." To this opinion he adds a good deal more. And indeed what afterward happened lends credit to this opinion. Flattery made countless gods and goddesses. Let us cite an example or two: Τῶν δὲ Δημητρίου τοῦ βασιλέως κολάκων οἱ περὶ ̓Αδείμαντον τὸν Λαμψακηνὸν... ὡς φησι Διονύσιος ὁ τοῦ Τρυφῶνος — "Among the flatterers of King Demetrius, Adimantus of Lampsacus and his circle, having built a temple at Thryum, named it 'of Venus Phila,' and called the place Philaeum, after Phila, Demetrius's mother, as Dionysius, son of Tryphon, relates." These are Athenaeus's words, Book 6: "Adimantus of Lampsacus, one of King Demetrius's flatterers, built a temple and set up statues at Thryum under the title of Venus Phila, and named the place Philaeum after Phila, Demetrius's mother." The historian Demochares — Demosthenes's cousin — also wrote that the whole Athenian people consecrated temples to Lamia, the mistress of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and paid her divine honors, and that the Thebans did likewise; Demetrius himself detesting the foul flattery, and openly declaring "that among the dead there would never be found any Athenian citizen of great and lofty spirit."

IV. There are, accordingly, those who suppose that human affection first set up images for the dead, lest they be buried in oblivion along with the common run of men, and that some, in the course of time, seized from this an occasion of superstition in worshiping them; and there are others who suppose that men first numbered the dead among the gods, and only afterward, out of that same superstition, set up images for them. Lactantius traces the beginning of setting up images, and of worshiping dead men with divine honors, to the foolish devotion of peoples toward their dead kings — so that to set up an image for someone and to number him among the gods appear to be one and the same thing. Eusebius, in Book 1 of his Chronicle, relates matters of like probability: ̓Ἐκ τῆς φυλῆς ̓Ιάφεθ ἐγενήθη Σερούχ (a slip we have noted above) ὅτις πρῶτος ἤρξατο τοῦ ̔Ελληνισμοῦ... καὶ ἐθυσίαζον — "From the tribe of Japheth was born Serug, who was the first to begin Hellenism and the doctrine of idolatry. For he and those with him honored, with statues upon pillars, those men of old who had been warriors or leaders, and who had done in their lifetime anything worthy of valor or virtue to be remembered, honoring them as their forefathers" (we have shown above that idolatrous pillars were erected long before it had entered anyone's mind to pay dead men divine honors) "— and worshiped them as gods, and sacrificed to them. But the men who came after, not knowing the intention of their forefathers — namely, that they had honored them, as their forefathers and as the discoverers of good things, with mere memorials — honored them as heavenly gods." What he adds at that point concerning the manner and form of "deification" (ἀποθέωσις) is well worth the consideration of those acquainted with the ecclesiastical diptychs, and of the depraved superstition that flowed from them: "Now the manner of deification," he says, "was this: in their sacred books they entered the names of the dead after their decease, and at that time celebrated a festival for them, saying that their souls went to the isles of the blessed, and were no longer to be judged, or burned with fire." Having inserted the names of the dead into their sacred books, they instituted festival days in memory of them — anniversaries, that is — believing their souls to have been received into the seats of the blessed, and no longer to be tormented by purgatorial fire.

V. The Jews imagine that Terah, Abraham's father, was the first fabricator of images and statues. By this fable they lend support to that no less fabulous story of Abraham being cast into the fire for refusing to worship an image of Nimrod. It is remarkable, indeed, with how great a consensus of the ancients this stale fiction is confirmed. Epiphanius: Ναχώρ δὲ γεννᾷ τὸν Θάῤῥα... διὰ τῆς τοῦ Θάῤῥα τούτου τέχνης — "And Nahor begot Terah; from this point statue-making arose, out of clay-working and the potter's art, through this Terah's craft" — "Terah was begotten of Nahor; from that time images made of clay and by the potter's craft were invented, with Terah as their artificer." Likewise Suidas: Θάῤῥα ἦν ἀγαλματοπιός... ὡς αἰτίους ἀγαθῶν — "Terah was a maker of images, fashioning statues out of various materials, and declaring these to be gods and that they ought to be worshiped, as the authors of good things" — "Terah was a fashioner of images, making images out of diverse materials, and affirming that these were gods and ought to be worshiped, as the causes of good things." And John Malalas of Antioch, Book 2: Ἧν γὰρ Θάῤῥα ἀγαλματοποιὸς πλαστουργῶν... τὰς τέχνας — "For Terah was an image-maker and modeler, making gods out of stones and wood, and selling them, and he introduced among men the error of images and of idolatrous worship, through likenesses of their forefathers — especially of those who had been the discoverers of letters and of the arts" — "Terah was a statuary, who fashioned gods out of stones and wood, and kept them for sale. He entangled men in the superstitions of image-worship and idolatrous cult, by fabricating images in memory of their ancestors, especially of those who had been the inventors of letters" (not one of whom, in fact, existed anywhere at that time) "and of the arts."

VI. Scripture teaches us that Haran, Terah's son, died before his father. Epiphanius notes that this had never happened since the foundation of the world, and that it came about as a punishment upon his impious father: Οὐδεὶς πώποτε τῶν προτέρων ἀνθρώπων πρὸ πατρὸς υἱὸς ἐτελεύτα, ἀλλὰ πατέρες πρὸ παίδων τελευτῶντες τοὺς υἱοὺς διαδόχους κατελίμπανον (Against Heresies, Book 1, chapter 1) — "Never before, among earlier men, had a son died before his father, but fathers, dying before their children, left their sons behind as their successors" — "Nor had any son of the earlier men yet died before his father, but fathers departed this life leaving their children surviving them." To the case of Abel, he answers that he was cut off by a violent death. But this learned man is plainly mistaken; for not only did Lamech, before the Flood, die some years before his father, but the very same thing happened also to Peleg, Terah's own great-great-grandfather, who died about two hundred years before his father Eber. But this was the common opinion of the ancients. I do not doubt that grave injury is done by these fables to the memory of a pious and holy man, who had left his homeland with the intention of going to Canaan (having doubtless received a divine instruction to do so, Genesis 11:31). For the accusation has no color of truth at all, and is plainly a Jewish fiction. Pindar seems to ascribe to the Rhodians a particular skill in image-making, Olympian 7, lines 91–98: Αὐτὰ Δε σφισιν ώπασε τέχναν... Ἦν δὲ κλέος Βαθύ — "Grey-eyed Athena herself bestowed upon them the skill to excel all men upon earth with hands that work most excellently, and their works resembled living, creeping things upon the road, and their fame was deep" — "Grey-eyed Minerva herself furnished them with a craft whereby they might surpass all mortals in the skill of their hands; and their works resembled living and creeping creatures in their movement, and their glory was great." The poet suggests that the Rhodians were such craftsmen that they were accustomed to fashion lifelike images of living creatures and reptiles, so that they seemed almost to move along the road as they went. Isidore, Origins, Book 8, affirms that Prometheus was the first to fashion images of men out of clay, and that from this the art of erecting images and statues was born; and for this reason, he says, the poets invented the story that men were made by him.

VII. More famous still is the opinion of those who ascribe this craft to Daedalus. Hence the ancients called all statues "Daedala." Others write that he invented self-moving and automatic images (αὐτοκίνητα καὶ αὐτόματα). These too are spoken of in the proverb "the works of Daedalus" (τὰ Δαιδάλου ποιήματα). Most of the ancients held this opinion. So Plato, in the Meno: ΣΩ. Οτι τοῖς Δαιδάλου ἀγάλμασιν οὐ προσέσχηκας τὸν νοῦν... ἀποδιδράσκει καὶ δραπετεύει — "SOCRATES: Because you have not paid attention to the statues of Daedalus; but perhaps you do not have them among you. MENO: What do you mean by this? SOCRATES: Because these, unless they are tied down, run off and escape" — "S. Since you have not noticed the images of Daedalus; perhaps indeed you do not have them among you. M. To what purpose do you say this? S. Because these, unless they have been bound fast, depart and run away." Hence the statue of Hercules among the Tyrians, and that of Bacchus among the Chians, were fixed in their seats with chains, because they were believed to be self-moving (αὐτοκίνητα). Aristotle mentions this too, Politics, Book 1: Εἰ γὰρ ἠδύνατο ἕκαστον τῶν ὀργάνων κελευθὲν ἢ προαισθανόμενον ἀποτελεῖν τὸ αὐτοῦ ἔργον, ὥσπερ τὰ Δαιδάλου φασίν — "For if it were possible that each instrument, whether commanded or of its own foresight, could accomplish its own work, just as they say the works of Daedalus did" — "If it could come about that each instrument, whether commanded, or of its own accord anticipating what was needed, should perform its own task, in the way they say the statues of Daedalus did." That he achieved this, they say, by pouring quicksilver into the statues; and the same Aristotle shows this, in the first book of On the Soul, where a certain Philip is quoted as saying: Τὸν Δαίδαλον κινουμένην ποιῆσαι τὴν ξυλίνην Αφροδίτην ἐγχέοντα ἄργυρον χυτόν — "that Daedalus made the wooden Venus move by pouring in liquid silver" — "that he fashioned a wooden Venus that could move, by pouring in molten quicksilver."

VIII. The occasion of the fable was without doubt that Daedalus was the first among the Greeks to fashion images in the likeness of the human countenance and form, distinguishing the feet in particular, and setting one forward beyond the line of the other, as though they were preparing themselves to walk. So Tzetzes resolves the riddle. And so it is: the first images were rough stones (λίθοι ἀργοί), without hands, feet, or eyes; but once Daedalus had impressed upon them all the features belonging to the outward form of man, the story grew up that he had made self-moving images (αὐτοκίνητα). Diodorus Siculus, Palaephatus, and others have similar accounts.

IX. Indeed, Plato sufficiently indicates that the images fashioned by Daedalus were quite crude — as are the beginnings of all things, discovered in an imperfect state — in the Hippias Major, near the beginning, in the voice of Socrates: Εἰ ἄρα, ὦ Ἱππία, ὁ Βίας ἀναβιῴη... καταγέλαστον ἂν εἶναι — "If indeed, Hippias, Bias should now come back to life, he would raise a laugh among you, just as the statuaries of these times say of Daedalus — that if, coming to life now, he should produce such works as those from which he got his name and fame, it would be ridiculous" — "If indeed now, O Hippias, Bias should come back to life, he would incur laughter among you; just as the statuaries of these times relate concerning Daedalus, that if he were now alive and should produce such works as those were from which he got his name and reputation, it would be a laughingstock."

X. It was, however, a great step to erect images in human form, with the hands extended and the feet set apart; since, after the columns, standing-stones, rough-hewn rocks, and baetyls dedicated to the sun, moon, and stars, the most ancient images of this kind appear to have been of the sort shown on the monuments of the Egyptians — with no hands at all, or with the hands glued to the sides, and the feet joined together, or rather terminating in a plain base like a pillar. Hence Philostratus, in the sixth book, third chapter, of his Life of Apollonius, ascribing something peculiar to the statue of Memnon, says: Λίθου δὲ εἶναι μέλανος· συμβεβηκέναι δὲ τὰ πόδε ἄμφω κατὰ τὴν ἀγαλματοποιΐαν τὴν ἐπὶ Δαιδάλου ("It is made of black stone, and both its feet stand together, after the manner of statuary that came after Daedalus"). The translator renders these words thus: "The statue is fashioned of black stone, and touches the ground with both feet together, in accordance with the statuary's art of Daedalus." Of this rendering Scaliger, in his Animadversions on Eusebius, at number 737, uses the phrase οὐδὲν ὑγιές ("nothing sound"); he himself renders it "having the feet joined together." He interprets in like manner the words of Apollodorus concerning the Palladium — Ην δὲ τῷ μεγέθει τρίπηχυ, τοῖς δὲ ποσὶ συμβεβηκός ("it was three cubits in size, and its feet were joined") — "tricubital," "with feet joined," say some; others render it "with the feet so arranged that it seemed to be walking." From the force of the word, or its usage in this subject, nothing certain can be gathered. But if the statue of Memnon had truly been made with its feet joined — that is, in fact with no distinct shaping of the feet at all, as the figures the Egyptians commonly made (which they call "termini," boundary-pillar images) show was the general practice among them — there would have been nothing peculiar about it, nor anything memorable in that respect. Moreover, since it was of the kind made ἐπὶ Δαιδάλῳ ("after Daedalus"), not πρὸ Δαιδάλου ("before Daedalus"), Philostratus seems to me to indicate clearly enough that it differed from the other Egyptian images in this: that it was fashioned with the feet set apart, in the manner of Daedalus.

XI. These, then, are in general the things that occur among the ancients concerning the origin of Hellenism and of image-making (ἀγαλματοποιΐα, "statuary"). More of the same kind might be added to these, were it our purpose to relate everything rather than what suffices. What seems to us to come nearest the truth, or at least to be most like the probable, we shall state in the following place.

Chapter 10

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — The gods sprung from men, all of them Easterners; the restorers of the human race after the flood; the leaders of the Babylonian companies; Greece, the workshop of the gods; for them the East was the abode of the gods above, the West of the gods below; the eastern regions sacred to the gods, the western to demons; the placing of idols in their temples; the Capitoline Jupiter; the testimony of Porphyry; the fame of deeds done in the East; the acts of the gods; nectar, the wine of Babylon; the first gods of the idolaters themselves the first apostates from the true God; some memory of the names of the true God retained after the confusion of tongues; these names ascribed to idols; on the pronunciation of the name of the Tetragrammaton; the fables of Sanchuniathon — אֲדֹנִי ("Adoni"), אֲדָמָה ("Adamah"), and יָהּ ("Yah"); תהו and בהו ("Tohu" and "Bohu") — Thoth, Theoth, Θεός ("Theos"), and Bau; עֶרֶב ("Erev") — Ἔρεβος (Erebus); אֶרֶץ ("Eretz") — Earth; and so forth.

I. It can be demonstrated by sure arguments that all those who were first reckoned into the number of the gods had lived in the East. From that quarter of the world, as soon as the confusion of tongues took place, the leaders of the tribes and families led out colonies into every part of the earth. These men, in the course of time, became אַנְשֵׁי הַשֵׁם ("men of renown," men celebrated in fame). Wherever they made their way, there can be no doubt that the new bands of settlers retained some report — however faint and obscure — of their great forefathers as well, namely Noah, Shem, Ham, and the rest. Recalling these men in memory as the founders of their own stock, and those others as the fortunate guides (ὁδηγοί) of their migrations, and being by now given over wholly to every kind of superstition, they gradually — as tends to happen — enlarged, through tradition, the account of the estate and deeds of these men, and imagined for themselves that they had possessed some divine quality (θεῖον) beyond the common lot of the human race. But since they knew that these men had lived on earth and passed their lives in the company of everyone else, they thought it fitting to suppose either that they had come down from heaven to accomplish outstanding deeds among men, or that, by the merit of their achievements, they had somehow been carried up into the heavens after death.

II. The Greeks were the chief fabricators of gods — so much so that Greece may not unfittingly be called the homeland and workshop of the gods, and that superstition which consists in their religious cult is Hellenism itself, the very subject of our discussion. For them, the East was the dwelling of the gods above; the West, however, and whatever lay toward the northern regions of the world, they called the underworld. Those who crossed over into those parts of the earth were reckoned to have sailed to the underworld, or to have passed through it in some fashion — for no other reason than that they had received all their gods from the East. The river Lethe is in Gallaecia in Spain; Avernus is in Italy; the Cimmerians were Scythians dwelling by the Maeotic marsh, afterward called Huns; and certain others were placed in Italy itself. Hence, in their religious cult, θεοῖς τὰ ἀνατολικά, δαίμοσι δὲ τὰ δυτικά ("the eastern parts belong to the gods, the western to demons") — "the eastern regions were assigned to the gods, the western to demons," as Porphyry attests in his work on the Cave of the Nymphs at Ithaca, in Homer. And so, although, as we have taught above, the ancient temples dedicated to the sun had their sacred doors facing south, the sacred precincts set up for these idols always had their entrances facing east, and the images which worshippers venerated as they entered faced toward the east, while the worshippers themselves, entering, looked toward the west. The single exception was the Capitoline Jupiter, who from ancient times had stood with his face turned toward the west, but was turned to face the east on the advice of the haruspices, in the consulship of Cicero, as Cicero himself testifies in his oration against Catiline addressed to the citizens. Porphyry teaches us the same thing: Ὡς ἂν σχεδόν, πάντων τῶν ἱερῶν τὰ μὲν ἀγάλματα καὶ τὰς εἰσόδους ἐχόντων πρὸς ἀνατολὰς τετραμμένας· τῶν δὲ εἰσιόντων πρὸς δύσιν ἀφορώντων, ὅταν ἀντιπρόσωποι τῶν ἀγαλμάτων ἑστῶτες τοῖς θεοῖς τιμὰς καὶ θεραπείας προσάγωσι ("since almost all the temples have their images and entrances turned toward the east, while those who enter look toward the west, so that, standing face to face with the images, they may render honor and service to the gods") — "Almost all temples have their statues and entrances facing the sunrise; but those who enter look toward the sunset, and, standing with their faces turned toward the statues, render honor and worship to the gods." It was the custom of some of the ancient Christians, in supposed opposition to this superstition, nevertheless, upon entering their churches facing east, to bow themselves and — with no less devotion — to adore I know not what.

III. Accordingly, the first gods of the nations sprung from men — whom they reckoned into the number of the gods only after the stars of heaven had been worshipped for some centuries — were the leaders of families and tribes: either men who had won renown in the East, or who, coming out of the East, had served as guides to peoples in search of new homes. The fame of these men, mixed with fables, gradually passed over into belief, and their memory into worship. And so, whatever they had received — by rumor or by any tradition whatsoever — concerning the life, deeds, character, and wars of these great men, true mixed with false (for the most part false mixed with true), was reported as the deeds and acts of divine beings, as though it had fallen down from heaven. Nectar itself, the drink of the gods, was Babylonian wine. Χαίρειας ἐν Βαβυλῶνι οἶνον φησὶ γίνεσθαι τὸν καλούμενον νέκταρ ("Chaereas says that in Babylon there is produced a wine called nectar"), says Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, book 1 — "Chaereas relates that there is a wine in Babylon which the natives call nectar." Hence nectar is the "divine drink" (πόμα θεῖον), which Suidas foolishly supposes to be called as it were νέοκταρ ("young-nectar"), διὰ τὸ νέους ποιοῦν τοὺς πίνοντας ("because it makes those who drink it young") — "because it makes those who drink it youthful." And the author of the Etymologicum writes: Νέκταρ τὸ τῶν θεῶν πόμα οἱονεὶ τὸ συνέχον τοὺς πίνοντας αὐτὸ ἐν νεότητι ("nectar, the drink of the gods, being as it were that which keeps those who drink it in youth") — "it keeps those who drink it in their youth." Others give other Greek derivations of the word, all of them inept, since it came into Greece from the East together with the gods themselves. Hence Strabo wisely warns that in the names of barbarian peoples, Greek etymologies are not to be sought. That Noah was Saturn, Janus, and Bacchus; that Ham was Jupiter Hammon; that Japheth was Iapetus and Neptune; that Shem was Pluto and Dis — this has long since been shown by others. There is no need to trace here, out of the commonest fables, the transformations of these and other figures. As for those who afterward, in Greece itself, added to the number of the gods, their history is more recent, and better known, than that I should need to dwell on it.

IV. Hellenism, then, laid its foundations in obscure traditions and in the thin and corrupted report of famous men — men who had either first restored the human race after the flood, or had led the Babylonian companies into the various regions of the world. These men idolaters first exalted to the sky by admiration and praise, and then by superstitious worship, though most of them had in fact been the authors and ringleaders of the most shameful defection from the true God. Hence, in all that confusion which we shall show gradually crept into the superstition of the nations, many things are found in which almost all peoples conspired with one accord; for rumor handed down to posterity a good deal concerning these great founders of the various stocks. After, then, superstitious men had thus, by their vows and by a kind of vain opinion, raised their great forebears to the sky, they set up for them images fashioned in human form — partly so that the memory and praise of these men should not fall out of mind, and partly so as to make them present to the senses (whereas, in worshipping the heavenly bodies, men had been content with columns and rough stones). And so, for the reasons given above, this cult of images too became universal.

V. Furthermore: after the confusion of tongues, the builders of the tower, scattered here and there, retained in some fashion a few names of the true God in their memory, intending to hand them down to their sons and grandsons. These men, however, in the course of time, being ignorant of what or to whom those great and venerable names referred, applied them all to those new gods whom they had taken up for themselves. Thus Sanchuniathon, among the forefathers of the Phoenicians who were afterward reckoned into the number of the gods, mentions Ἐλιοῦν, or Ὕψιστος ("the Most High"), that is, עֶלְיוֹן ("Elyon"); he writes that this being begot heaven and earth; and he mentions Ilus, who is nothing other than אֵל ("El"). יְהוָה ("YHWH") was the source of "Jovis," "Jova," and "Jupiter"; that name Sanchuniathon renders as Ἰευώ ("Ieuo"), relating that he had learned much παρὰ Ἱερομβάλου τοῦ ἱερέως θεοῦ τοῦ Ἰευώ ("from Hierombalus, priest of the god Ieuo"). Diodorus, in his first book, says that the God to whom Moses ascribed his laws was called Ἰάω ("Iao"); with which agrees the oracle found in Macrobius, Saturnalia 1: Φράζεο τὸν πάντων ὕπατον θεὸν ἔμμεν Ἰάω ("Know that Iao is the highest god of all"). By this Satan attempts to ascribe the incommunicable Name to other idols. Eusebius, in the Demonstratio Evangelica, book 4, last chapter, writes: Ἰωσύς δὲ ἔστιν Ἰάω σωτηρία, τοῦτ᾽ ἐστὶ θεοῦ σωτήριον ("and Joshua is 'Iao salvation,' that is, 'the salvation of God'") — "Joshua indeed is 'Iao is salvation,' that is, 'the salvation of God.'" From this it is likely that in that other passage Eusebius wrote, following Sanchuniathon, Ἰάω, not Ἰευώ. In Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5, we find Ἰάου, perhaps likewise corrupt for Ἰάω; and in Origen, Ἰαωΐα, but without doubt corrupted. He writes: Ἀπὸ τῶν Ἑβραϊκῶν γραφῶν τὸν Ἰαωΐα παρ᾽ Ἑβραίοις ὀνομαζόμενον, καὶ τὸν Σαβαώθ, καὶ τὸν Ἀδωναῖον, καὶ τὸν Ἐλωαῖον· τὰ δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν γραφῶν ληφθέντα ὀνόματα ἐπώνυμά ἐστι τοῦ καὶ ἑνὸς Θεοῦ· ὅπερ μὴ συνιέντες οἱ ἐχθροὶ Θεῷ, ὡς καὶ αὐτοὶ ὁμολογοῦσιν, ᾠήθησαν ἄλλον μὲν εἶναι τὸν Ἰάω, ἕτερον δὲ τὸν Σαβαώθ ("From the Hebrew scriptures, the one named Iaōia among the Hebrews, and Sabaoth, and Adonaios, and Elōaios — but the names taken from the scriptures are surnames of one and the same God, which, not understanding, the enemies of God — as they themselves confess — supposed Iao to be one being and Sabaoth another"), Against Celsus, book 6. He is speaking of the heretics, who had drawn their monstrous fictions out of the cesspools of paganism. For the rest, whether they learned these names — epithets of the one true God — from the Scriptures or from ancient tradition, it comes to the same thing: out of each name a new deity is built up. As for "Ἰαωΐα," it is read corruptly for "Ἰάω." The corruption was first suspected by Reynolds, On Idolatry, book 2, chapter 3. The true reading was restored by Sandford, in the first book of his work On the Descent of Christ into Hell; after him, Grotius, on Matthew 22, and others.

VI. And from this it appears — a point worth noting in passing — that the pronunciation of the name of the Tetragrammaton was once known. The Jews today, and for many centuries past, are ignorant of it, and have thus utterly forgotten the name of their own God of old. Indeed, they have been so completely cast off by him that they can no longer even call upon his name. This was what he first made known to them when he adopted the whole nation as his peculiar people and church, in Exodus 3. For although the name יְהוָה ("YHWH") had been known to all the faithful since the foundation of the world, God had nevertheless never used it in confirming his covenant, or in any promise, but had employed only the name אֵל שַׁדַּי ("El Shaddai"). After, therefore, that nation ceased to be the people and church of God, it has either willfully cast away all memory of that name of God — which he graciously revealed in the covenant-compact by which he took them up as his peculiar people — or has been punished with forgetfulness of it.

VII. Further, עֶלְיוֹן ("Elyon") and הָאֵל אֵל ("the mighty God"), "the strong God, the Most High," were turned into "Helios," the sun. אֲדֹנִי ("Adonai") became "Adonis." "Evan" and "Evius" derived from אֶהְיֶה ("Ehyeh," "I Am"); "Eleleu" from הַלְלוּיָהּ ("Hallelujah") — that cry which, as Plutarch says in his Theseus, men were accustomed to shout out in haste and in triumph. "Hieron" (ἱερόν), the word denoting everything sacred, is said by some to be derived from "Is," which signifies nothing at all in Greek, and is nothing other than יָהּ ("Yah"). From אֲדָמָה ("Adamah," "ground") came "Hades" — since, after God had said to Adam, "you shall return אֶל־הָאֲדָמָה" ("to the ground"), that is, εἰς Ἅιδην ("into Hades"). Jupiter Sabasius comes from "Jehovah Sabaoth." I would weary the reader were I to recount everything of this sort that occurs.

VIII. Sanchuniathon pretends that the names of the principal things recorded at the creation of the world were the names of men, of sages, and of kings, and from this he spins out lengthy fables. Hesiod wove his Theogony from no other source. From אֶרֶץ ("Eretz") comes "Earth," the great goddess among the English and the other peoples of Germany, as Tacitus attests, Germania 40: "In common," he says, "they worship Erthum" — that is, Mother Earth. תהו ("Tohu") and בהו ("Bohu") are Thoth and Theoth (whence also Θεός, "Theos"), and Bau. עֶרֶב ("Erev") is "Erebus"; and from that order of words found in Genesis 1 — וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד ("and there was evening and there was morning, one day") — many peoples came to put night before day. Of the Germans, Tacitus says: "They reckon not by the number of days but of nights; thus they fix their appointments, thus they set their meetings — night is held to lead the day." And in truth it does lead it, for light comes out of darkness. The same custom still holds among the English to this day: instead of "a week" we say "sennight" ("seven-night"), and "fortnight," that is, "fourteen nights," for two weeks. And the ancient Britons too, whom we now call the Welsh, for whom a week is "wythnos," that is, "eight nights," and two weeks "pymthecnos," that is, "fifteen nights" — which is likewise a monument of Celtic origin. The same custom prevailed among the ancient Gauls, flowing from the same fount of tradition, and not, as Caesar supposed, because they imagined themselves sprung from Father Dis. Such, then, were the beginnings of Hellenism, or of that confused superstition which invaded almost the whole world.

Chapter 11

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — British idolatry; the most ancient inhabitants of the island unknown, and whence Britain got its name; the origins of peoples and nations obscure; the causes of that obscurity; how great the ignorance in investigating them; the ignorance and malice of the Greeks and Latins; the ancients buried Jewish antiquities under lies; hence little credit is due them concerning the rest; the particular causes of our ignorance of British origins; the island's situation; the ambition and cunning of the learned in concealing past matters; the islands of Europe occupied by the descendants of Japheth, Genesis 10:5; from the first settlement to Caesar's arrival on this island, everything wrapped in darkness; the testimony of Caesar; the interior of the island unknown to the Gauls; he holds the interior inhabitants to be αὐτόχθονες ("natives sprung from the soil"); Tacitus, a mixture of many peoples — both inaptly; the attempts of Camden and Boxhorn to prove that the Britons and Gauls used the same language and were the same people; Gomer, the eldest son of Japheth; the Cimbri descended from him; the Britons call themselves "Komeroes" or "Cymry"; what "Gomer" or "Cimbri" signifies; the Britons, Cimbri; another etymology of the name "Cymro"; Camber, son of Brutus; hence "Cambria"; whence "Britannia" is named; the derivations of various writers rejected; Πρυτανεία ("Prytaneia"); Brytona, a Cretan nymph; "Britannia" in Gaul; "Bridanium"; "Prid Cain"; most think it so named from Brutus the Trojan; that opinion assailed by Camden; Camden's conjecture; "Brith," "Tania"; learned men who agree with it; arguments against it; Bochart's conjecture the most probable; this island known to the Tyrians; בָּרָת אֲנָךְ ("barat anac"), called "the field of tin"; a defense of the conjecture, against Hornius; British idolatry; the priests of the British rites, very well known; Origen writes that the Druids worshipped one God; that God, the sun; Tacitus reckons them the same as the Gauls; the custom of pouring out prayers with hands spread toward heaven; Andraste and Andate — Astarte, the Moon; a vow made to her by Boadicea; the gods of the Gauls in Caesar, received from the Greeks of Massilia; unknown to the Britons; the most ancient Gauls had no images; their gods, Teutates, Hesus, and Taranis; "Teutates" from "Duw Taith," "guide of the way"; the sun, his worship; "Hesus," and "Haud"; "Taranis" — hence "taran," thunder, among the Welsh: "Thunder," "Donder," "Thursday"; images of these gods; the Druids as their priests; the spread of their superstition into Gaul and Germany; its origin in Britain; whence the Druids were named; Druis, king of the Celts; Bardus his successor; "Dry," a magician; "Dru" and "Trou," true, divine; the true etymology, ἀπὸ τοῦ δρυός ("from the oak"); "derw" in British, "oak"; groves of oak the seat of this superstition; they were also called Saronidae for the same reason; who the Bards were; their office; their memory and name among the Cambro-Britons; noted by Strabo; the Druids' peculiar dress — white garments at the rites; their academy and studies; the flocking of youths to their instruction; its methods, privileges, and authority; the custom of teaching in their schools, the time of study, and the advancement of students; the philosophy they taught; magic; the kind of medicine they practiced; their peculiar theology; its chief doctrine — the immortality of souls, the end of the world; they also taught rhetoric, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, and ethics; the order they kept among themselves; their authority in the commonwealth; under pretext of religion, they meddled in every affair; the excommunication of offenders; their rites — human sacrifice, two kinds of human victims; the custom of human sacrifice, from Diodorus, Caesar, Strabo, Dio, and others; the Romans' vain attempt to abolish the superstition; Britain freed through the gospel; the beginnings of the Christian religion on this island; Joseph of Arimathea; Claudia; Pudens; concerning King Lucius; an exchange of letters between him and Eleutherius; Bede, the source of the history; an error in the dating assigned; Henry of Erfurt; Ado; the sequel of the letter of Eleutherius, according to Geoffrey and Leland; whether Lucius undertook an apostleship; Camden yields to prejudice; the falsity of the history shown; a summary of the history of Britain under the Romans; conquered by Claudius; reduced to the form of a province, nearly wiped out by Suetonius Paulinus, pacified by Agricola; the name and authority of kingship abolished throughout the whole province; in the time of the Emperor Commodus, no king in Britain, not even Lucius; Baronius's defense of the history examined; no Lucius holding a kingdom, either within or beyond Hadrian's Wall; who this Lucius was; the letter of Eleutherius a forgery.

I. That the superstition of idolatry was carried into these British islands after the flood, together with the first inhabitants, is as certain as it is uncertain who those first inhabitants were, or whence the islands themselves came to be called Britain or British. For the very earliest origins of almost every nation and people have been so obscured by the lapse of time, by the vicissitudes of human affairs, by the barbarism of the most ancient ages, and by the lack of writers concerning what followed immediately upon these earliest times — together with the boldness of empty fablers — that the finest minds generally toil in vain to dig them out. There are, accordingly, a great many things which learned men candidly confess they simply do not know; and of those things some think they understand quite well, I fear they are in fact ignorant with a greater loss both to themselves and to the truth than in the case of what they openly own they do not know at all — since the acceptance of falsehoods for truths drives us further from the truth than mere ignorance of it does. In most such matters, beyond what we learn from the Greeks and Romans, sheer conjecture reigns. But with what good faith, religious scruple, and skill in ancient matters the most celebrated of their writers have handled themselves in reporting the origins of peoples, we know well enough from those cases where we have from elsewhere the most certain information. No one is unaware with what lies — as though with one voice — they try to overwhelm the origins of the Jews: with the most monstrous fables, concocted out of empty traditions, or spun, like spiders' webs, out of their own brains. That I should place any confidence in them, in matters uncertain where I myself stand doubtful at every turn, when I have found them, in everything of which I have certain knowledge from elsewhere, to have lied splendidly — indeed, monstrously — I am not easily persuaded to do. It is no wonder, then, that the origins of the British peoples lie hidden in darkness, since the same night of obscurity presses upon the beginnings of almost every nation, with the sole exception of those which the sacred page has placed beyond the reach of controversy.

This, however, is peculiar to the Britons, along with a few others: that to the common misfortune a double inconvenience has been added, each of them only too apt to deepen the darkness of the most ancient times. For being islanders, and cut off from intercourse with the rest of the world, they had no means either of sharing the memory of their own name with others, or of gathering for themselves the traditions or reports of others. Then, further — if it is permissible to believe so great a wickedness — after the use of letters had become known, those among them who were reckoned the most sharp-sighted and wise, so that they might remain objects of perpetual wonder, and so that nothing might be known by anyone except through their own agency (a design which Cicero, in his speech for Murena, shows the ancient lawyers to have entertained), were unwilling to commit anything of their antiquity to writing. Since, therefore, most things — if not all things — necessary for accurately tracing the origins of these nations have been utterly blotted out by oblivion, it will be enough for me to press upon whatever traces remain, whether of what is true or of what is most probable.

II. That the inhabitants of these islands drew their descent from the posterity of Japheth, all agree, relying on the words of the Holy Spirit, Genesis 10:5: "By these" — that is, by the sons of Japheth — "were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands, every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." From these words down to the time of Caesar — so vast an emptiness of centuries — one may fitly apply the poet's phrase: whatever vestiges of the truth remain must be dug out by conjecture. For although it is quite certain that these islands, contrary to what the most learned Camden thinks, were known to the ancient Greeks and Tyrians, no one, however, is found who has committed anything about them to the memory of the ages. "What sort of men," says Tacitus, "originally inhabited Britain, whether natives or immigrants, is, as usual among barbarians, but little known" (Agricola, chapter 11). And in how great an obscurity all the affairs of Britain lay hidden even from Caesar himself — a man of the greatest wisdom, and most thoroughly furnished with all the world's stores of learning, who spent several years in neighboring Gaul — Caesar himself testifies, book 4 of the Gallic War, chapter 20: "He judged," he says, "that it would be of great use to him if he should merely visit the island, examine the character of its people, and learn about the places, harbors, and landing-points — all of which were almost entirely unknown to the Gauls. For no one goes there readily except merchants, nor is anything known even to these except the seacoast and those regions which lie opposite Gaul." This same author, in book 5, chapter 12, holds the interior inhabitants to be natives, that is, αὐτόχθονες, sprung from the soil itself. "The interior part of Britain," he says, "is inhabited by those who are said, by tradition, to have been born on the island itself" — as though, that is, the earth had sprouted men, like mushrooms or wild herbs. Tacitus is fuller, in the Life of Agricola, chapter 11: "For the rest, what sort of men originally inhabited Britain, whether natives or immigrants, is, as usual among barbarians, but little known. Their physical characteristics vary, and from this arguments are drawn. For the reddish hair and large limbs of those who inhabit Caledonia proclaim a German origin. The swarthy faces of the Silures, and their hair generally curled, together with the fact that Spain lies opposite them, make it credible that ancient Iberians crossed over and occupied these territories. Those nearest to the Gauls resemble them too — whether through the continuing force of a common origin, or because, the lands running out in opposite directions, the climate has given a similar bodily type to both. But taking the matter as a whole, it is credible that the Gauls took possession of the neighboring shore." It is a foolish notion that would suggest these islands were inhabited by a mixed rabble of neighboring peoples; nearer the truth is the view that the inhabitants crossed over from Gaul. Indeed, most of the more learned have long since come round to the opinion of Camden, who asserts that the Gauls and the Britons sprang from the same stock, and that the latter crossed over hither from Gaul. He maintains that the language of both nations was the same, although Caesar and Tacitus agree on this only reluctantly, judging from various words which ancient writers attest were in use among the Gauls and which the Welsh — the genuine remnant of the ancient Britons — still retain. The same web Boxhorn has lately attempted to weave afresh, with the help of Davies's Lexicon, in his Origines Gallicae.

III. We have said that the inhabitants of the islands of Europe drew their descent from the sons and posterity of Japheth. Now his eldest son was called Gomer. Most think the Cimbri sprang from him. The Welsh, indeed, who alone are the genuine descendants of the ancient Britons, call themselves "Kymroes" — that is, "Gomerians" — call their nation "Cymru," and their language "Cymraeg." From this Camden argues that the ancient Britons were Cimbri, and that they crossed over hither from neighboring Gaul, since the Gauls, the Cimbri, and the Celts are the same people. Add to this that "Gomer" signifies "one who finishes," from גמר, "to finish" — as though there had been something ominous in the giving of the name, and it had been foretold that this people would come to occupy the very ends of the earth. These things are, indeed, quite probable, and I shall embrace them until someone teaches better. It should not, however, be passed over in silence that most of the Britons, in saying that they are called "Kymroes" or "Cambri," think "Cambri" derives rather from "Cambria" — the name given to that part of the island which fell by lot to Camber, son of Brutus. All these matters, however, we leave just where we found them, content to have reported them as things for which nothing more certain is available.

IV. So much for the inhabitants themselves. The name "Britannia" is exceedingly ancient. Many derivations of it have been devised by various writers — most of them false, if not all; some of them ridiculous. Elyot, a noble and learned man, in the dictionary which Cooper enlarged and published, supposes "Britannia" to be named from the Greek word πρυτανεία. "Prytanis" at Athens was the presiding officer of the marketplace, and "prytaneia" was that Prytanic dignity; by "prytaneia" they also sometimes meant the public markets. Since, then, the Greeks perceived that this island abounded in commodities useful for trade, they called it "prytaneia," whence "Britannia" was born. But this conjecture errs in many ways: first, it makes these islands not merely known but quite familiar to the most ancient Greeks, whereas Herodotus testifies that he did not know whence the tin was brought, which in fact they had from nowhere but these islands. Furthermore, although I would by no means say, with Camden, that these regions were utterly unknown to the Greeks before Caesar's arrival, I have no doubt at all that they were called "British" long before any Athenian could be imagined to have touched these shores, since their naval supremacy (θαλασσοκρατία) was itself of recent date. Bale derives the British name from Brytona, a Cretan nymph, who, to escape the violence of Minos attempting to ravish her, threw herself headlong into the water. Lying Greece will supply anyone who asks for them with six hundred fables of this sort. Bede derives it from "Britannia" in Gaul — the region formerly called Armorica — which took its name from Britons who had crossed over there. But the delirium of Goropius Becanus surpasses the folly of them all; he would have "Britannia" so called as though it were "Bri-danium," that is, as he himself interprets it, "free Denmark" — though the name "Britannia" was famous throughout the whole world long before that of Denmark or the Danes was either known or had come into being. Humphrey Lhuyd derives this name from "Prid" and "Cain," two small British words signifying "fair form." To this conjecture no one, so far as I know, subscribes, although it is scarcely more absurd than others which have found their advocates.

V. With all these rejected, two etymologies of this name remain, which, still fortified by the votes of learned men, hold their ground. The first is that which rests on the story of the arrival on this island of Brutus, of Trojan blood; from him, it was once believed, the island was called Britannia, and its inhabitants Britons. It is an old opinion, and one which found a place in some of the public records of the kings of this island. But this whole history, having been assailed by Camden and Elyot and dislodged from its place, most of the more recent writers judge should no longer be reckoned at all. I myself shall go wholly over to their opinion, at least until I have something certain to offer concerning another account of the name. The second etymology is Camden's own, who asserts that the name flowed from the British word "Brith." "Brith," as he says, signifies "painted," and is indeed rendered by Davies in his dictionary as "party-colored" or "spotted." To this word was added the Greek termination "-tania," producing "Britannia." Certainly, that the Britons were accustomed to paint themselves, and that for this reason they were called "Picts" by the Romans, a great many writers have handed down to memory. Caesar himself, book 5 of the Gallic War, chapter 14, relates: "All the Britons dye themselves with vitrum" (a word variously emended by various editors, as nitro, luteo, glauco, glasto, ultro, guasto), "which produces a blue color, and makes their appearance in battle the more terrible." Most, accordingly, have gone over to this opinion of Camden's. George Horn, a most learned man, in his preface to Boxhorn's Origines Gallicae, boldly asserts — as though the matter were beyond controversy — that the inhabitants were called Britons because they were painted over their whole bodies, since in their own tongue, that is, the Cimbric, "Prith" (he means to say "Brith") signifies "painted." But if it is permitted to dissent from that greatest promoter of British antiquities, I confess I am not able to subscribe to this conjecture — both for other reasons, and also because, in propounding it, that man — otherwise great and profoundly learned — has contradicted himself. For by whom, I ask, were the inhabitants of these islands called "Britten," from "Brith," or "the painted ones"? By themselves? But Camden himself has shown earlier — and it is perfectly true — that they neither call, nor ever called, themselves or their language by any other name than "Cymry" and "Cymraeg," and from this the same learned man proves that they are descended from the ancient Cimbri. By the Greeks themselves, then? But he pronounces that these islands were utterly unknown to the Greeks before the age of Caesar — at least in the days of Polybius of Megalopolis — and he maintains that none of the Greeks knew what sort of men possessed these shores, whether painted or handsomely clothed. He would have us believe, then, that the Greeks, on catching sight of the inhabitants of this island staining their bodies with a blue dye, learned from them how "painted" was said in their language, and added to that word the termination "-tania," from which flowed "Britannia" — although the Greeks did not yet even know what sort of mortals, fair or dark, had settled there! Nor would the Greeks have lacked, in their own tongue, words for "painted" and for "a painted people," had the derivation of the word been sought from them. Since, then, it is certain that the Britons never called themselves "Britten" or "the painted," from "Brith," but constantly called themselves "Cymry"; and since this island was called Britannia long before the Greeks knew what sort of men, or of what kind, possessed it; and since the composition of the name seems absurd, in which the Greek termination far outweighs its Cimbric foundation — to say nothing of the fact that it does not seem to me altogether true that all Britons were, or were called, painted (for although Caesar testifies that all of them dyed themselves with a blue color, he does not for that reason say they were called "painted," and it is well known that there was a particular people inhabiting Caledonia who were peculiarly called "Picti," "the painted") — I cannot deny that all the hope I had entertained for some while, of gathering something certain about the origin of the British name from this conjecture of that most eminent man, has been utterly cut off.

VI. To disentangle the truth, a new conjecture is offered by that most learned man in every respect, Samuel Bochart, Geographia Sacra, part 2, chapter 39. For after he has shown that these islands, surrounded by the ocean, were known to the Greeks, and were called the Cassiterides from the lead and tin with which they abound, he teaches further that this island was likewise known to the Tyrians, and was called, for the same reason, בָּרָת אֲנָךְ, "barat anac," that is, "the field" or "land of tin." From this it may well appear that among the Greeks and Latins the name "Britannia" arose. The matter is too lengthy for me, occupied as I am with other things, to dwell upon it here. I shall say briefly what I think: whether because — when all the others have been long and carefully weighed, and either displeased me altogether or pleased me less — this conjecture of that great man commends itself by its very novelty, or because my mind senses some glimmer of truth shining out of it amid the thickest darkness, I confess that it appeals to me above all the others. I am aware that this derivation of the British name has been derided and rejected by that most learned man George Horn, in his Introduction to Ancient Geography, and in his preface to Boxhorn's Origines Gallicanae. On what ground? On the ground, namely, that the Phoenicians attained maritime supremacy, and sailed these seas, only very late — indeed only in seventh or eighth place after other nations, among whom were some Greek peoples. And so, by this same stroke, he both rejects the etymology of "Britannia" and undertakes to overthrow and cast down the foundation of a great many other things which Bochart seems to me, by heroic effort and with wonderful success, to have dug up out of darkness. I have no wish to put my sickle to another man's harvest; I will only say that it seems strange to me that anyone, relying on the good faith and authority of the Greeks, could bring himself to believe that the Phoenicians — who had planted colonies in Greece itself many centuries before the Greeks had ever set foot outside their own homes — should, relative to the Greeks, have gained a clear knowledge of the maritime parts of the world only late.

VII. But whatever, in the end, may be the true origin of the name of this island, and whoever its most ancient inhabitants may have been, it is quite certain that the Britons were most thoroughly stained with idolatrous superstition. From the remotest antiquity, however, the priests presiding over the British rites were better known than were the deities themselves whom the Britons, through their ministry, worshipped. These were the Druids, or Druidae, of whom we must treat hereafter. That they "taught the worship of one God" is affirmed by Origen, on chapter 4 of Ezekiel. If this be true, that one God was in fact the Sun — not the most holy Founder of heaven and earth, from the knowledge of whom the savage superstition of the Druids stood at the greatest possible remove. To this was added the Moon, worshipped by women. Hence Dio, History, book 62: Ἡ Βουνδουΐκα τὴν χεῖρα ἐς τὸν οὐρανὸν ἀνατείνασα εἶπε, χάριν τέ σοι ἔχω, ὦ Ἀνδράστη, καὶ προσεπικαλοῦμαί σε γυνὴ γυναῖκα ("Boudica, stretching her hand toward heaven, said, 'I thank you, Andraste, and I call upon you, woman to woman'") — "Boadicea, with her hand raised to heaven, said, 'I thank you,' Andraste" (perhaps Astarte) "'and I call upon you, woman to woman.'" The Moon, moreover, was commonly the queen of heaven, and among the Britons the bestower of victory. And because they worshipped the heavenly bodies, they poured out their prayers, Tacitus tells us in the Life of Agricola, with hands lifted up to heaven — as Dio likewise reports of Boadicea. That the superstition of the Druids arose in Britain, Caesar affirms, book 6 of the Gallic War, chapter 13: "This discipline," he says, "is thought to have been discovered in Britain, and to have been carried thence into Gaul; and even now those who wish to become more thoroughly acquainted with it generally go there, to Britain, for the purpose of learning it." Tacitus too, in order to prove that the Gauls took possession of the neighboring shore, adds: "You may detect their rites by the persuasion of their superstitions." That the Gauls, however, worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva, Caesar reports; and we have shown elsewhere that they received both the names and the worship of these gods from the Greeks of Massilia. From them, too, they learned the use of images and idols — a thing unknown, on Lucan's testimony, to the ancient Gauls: "and the sad images of the gods..."

This superstition, then, never invaded Britain. The most ancient deities of the Gauls, held in common with the Britons, were those which the same Lucan mentions, book 1, line 444: "...and those who with blood poured out upon cruel altars propitiate Teutates, and Hesus dreadful with his savage shrines, and Taranis, whose altar is no gentler than that of Scythian Diana." Some think that "Teutates" flowed from "Duw Taith" — words in British signifying "the guide of the journey." Now we have shown above that nearly all the peoples scattered from Babylon worshipped the sun as the guide of their travels and migrations. Moloch, the idol of the Ammonites, all the learned agree, was the sun; we shall relate his rites in our exposition of Jewish idolatry. Almost nothing in the superstition of the nations anywhere matches or resembles this, except what Caesar has handed down to memory concerning the Gauls — who received all their religious worship from the Britons — in the Gallic War, book 6, chapter 16: "They have images of immense size," he says, "whose limbs, woven of wicker-work, they fill with living men; these being set on fire, the men, surrounded by the flame, are put to death." Teutates, then, is the Sun. Who Hesus was is uncertain; and, to see the uncertainty of conjectures, Gosselin, in Bochart, derives the name from the Hebrew word חָזָק, which signifies "strong"; Camden derives it from "Haud," a British word denoting a dog.

VIII. "Taranis" is derived from "Taran," that is, "thunder"; so it is called by the Welsh, as "thunder" among the English, "donder" among the Dutch, whence "dondersdag," and "thundersday," or "thursday." They understood by it some deity presiding over the air; unless, perhaps, we should suppose it named instead from "Tarian," which means a shield or buckler. But I should rather prefer the derivation from "Taran," since it was their custom to appease this god with the harshest of victims.

IX. That they worshipped any gods in human form there exists no testimony or memory at all. Yet in the course of time, they set up various images to these idols, as Gildas testifies: "In Britain," he says, "there are diabolical monstrosities, well-nigh outnumbering those of Egypt, some of whose misshapen outlines we still behold, within or beyond the deserted walls, stiff after their wonted fashion, with grim visages." No more than this is recorded of the idols of the Britons, though without doubt the chaos of superstition among them was very great. But the superstition of these islands was better known through its ministers than through its gods; of these, then, we must treat.

X. The British rites were presided over by the Druids, or Druidae. By this name they were renowned throughout the whole Celtic, or Cimbric, nation. Παρά τε Κελτοῖς καὶ Γαλάταις τοὺς καλουμένους Δρυΐδας ("among the Celts and the Galatians, those called Druids"), says Diogenes Laertius in the proem to his work. That the British nation gave its origin to this order and its superstition, we have already shown from Caesar. Concerning the etymology of the word, the learned are not agreed. Most uncertain are the tales told of Druis and his successor Bardus, kings of the Celts, and other matters which Bale has collected. Montanus says that "dry" signifies a magician, and that "Druydes" were so called by the Greeks on this account, since they were magicians. Vossius thinks the name flowed from "dru," or "trou," a German word which, like the English "true," signifies "truthful" and "faithful." The more common, and without doubt the truer, derivation of the word is that which Pliny first handed down, book 16, last chapter: "The Druids," he says, "hold nothing more sacred than the mistletoe, and the tree on which it grows, provided only it be an oak. Of themselves they choose groves of oak, and perform no sacred rite without the foliage of that tree, so that from this they may seem even by a Greek interpretation to be called Druids." Δρῦς is "oak," and "Druids" are named ἀπὸ τῆς δρυός, "from the oak." Add that "dru" in British sounds the same. That the Druids performed their rites in groves of oak, and in oak-woods, all acknowledge. "Groves hallowed by savage superstitions were cut down," says Tacitus, Annals, book 14, chapter 30. For the same reason, too, they were called Saronidae. "They call their theologians Saronidae," says Diodorus, book 5, chapter 31 — namely, from the oaks. Hence Callimachus, in his Hymn to Zeus: "...many a Saronid oak did the flowing river Ion lift up." On this passage the scholiast writes, "Saronides" means "oaks," and adds his reasoning for the word. Maximus of Tyre likewise attests that the very image of Jupiter among the Celts was a very tall oak.

XI. Whether the Bards were of the order of the Druids, assigned to a particular office, or a distinct class of men altogether, is uncertain. Lucan celebrates their office, book 1, line 447: "You too, O Bards, who by your praises immortalize the brave that fall in war, poured forth in safety your abundant strains." And Marcellinus: "The Bards sang, to the sweet strains of the lyre, the glorious deeds of brave men composed in heroic verse." And before him, Diodorus, as above: Εἰσὶ δὲ παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς καὶ ποιηταὶ μελῶν, οὓς Βάρδους ὀνομάζουσιν ("among them there are also composers of songs, whom they call Bards"). Similarly Posidonius, in Athenaeus, book 6: Τὰ δὲ ἀκούσματα αὐτῶν εἰσὶν οἱ καλούμενοι Βάρδοι, ποιηταὶ δὲ οὗτοι τυγχάνουσι, μετ᾽ ᾠδῆς ἐπαίνους λέγοντες ("their entertainers are those called Bards, who are poets, and who utter praises with song"). There are still, even today, among the Cambro-Britons, certain men occupied with composing verses and genealogies, whom they call bards.

XII. Strabo, book 4, distributes the priests among the Celts into three classes: Bards, Vates, and Druids. He would have spoken more correctly had he named two classes of the priesthood, Bards and Druids; for what he assigns to the Vates was properly the office of the Druids. Οὐάτεις δὲ ἱεροποιοὶ καὶ φυσιολόγοι ("the Vates are sacrificers and students of nature"), he says: "the Vates offer sacrifice and contemplate, or teach, the nature of things." For we have shown from Caesar that the Druids presided over all sacred rites.

XIII. The Druids also made use of a peculiar dress, by which they drew the veneration of the common people to themselves. John Theophilus reports that he found this dress represented on six stone images. "Each," he says, "was seven feet tall, with bare feet and heads uncovered; wearing a Greek-style cloak and hood, with a long mantle, and a beard reaching down to the groin, forked about the nostril-openings; in their hands a book, and a staff after the manner of Diogenes; with a stern brow and a gloomy countenance, and their heads bowed, fixing their eyes upon the ground." At their sacred rites they wore white vestments, on the testimony of Pliny, book 16, last chapter: "The priest, arrayed in a white robe, climbs the tree; cuts it with a golden sickle; it is caught in a white cloak." They established academies, for the sake of their studies, in the groves: "you dwell in lofty groves, in remote glades" (Lucan, book 1, line 453).

XIV. In these groves they had schools crowded with studious youth. "To them," says Caesar, in the place cited above, chapter 13, "a great number of young men flock together for the sake of instruction." Mela likewise, book 3, chapter 2: "They teach many things to the noblest of the nation, secretly, and for as long as twenty years." That they spent so many years in study before being advanced to their doctorate, Caesar attests: "Some," he says, "remain twenty years under instruction." Next come the allurements of these studies, the privileges of the students, and the very great authority of those who had advanced in them. "The Druids," says the same Caesar, "are accustomed to be exempt from war, nor do they pay tribute along with the rest; they have exemption from military service, and immunity in all things. Roused by rewards so great, many come of their own accord to be instructed, and are sent besides by their kinsmen and parents." Their authority we shall see at once. Caesar likewise describes their method of instruction: "They are said to learn by heart a great number of verses, nor do they think it lawful to commit these" (their sacred teachings) "to writing, although in almost all other matters, in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. This, it seems to me, they have established for two reasons: because they do not wish their teaching to be spread abroad among the common people, and because they do not wish those who learn it, relying upon writing, to cultivate their memory the less — as generally happens to most people, that through reliance on letters they relax both their diligence in learning thoroughly and their memory besides" (Caesar, as above, chapter 14). They cultivated a varied philosophy, and one that was almost all-embracing. Pliny ascribes magic to them, book 30, chapter 1: "But why," he says, "should I recall these things, when this art has crossed even the ocean, and been carried to the very void of nature? Britain to this day celebrates it in wonder, with ceremonies so elaborate that she might seem to have taught it to the Persians."

XV. They were physicians as well, on the testimony of the same Pliny, book 30, chapter 1: "The principate of Tiberius Caesar abolished the Druids, and this class of seers and physicians." That they practiced a medicine mixed with magic, the same author teaches, book 16, chapter 44.

XVI. In theology they taught many things peculiar to themselves, and some of great excellence. Lucan notes that in this they were wise in a manner singular and apart from all others, book 1, line 450. Their chief doctrine in theology was that souls do not perish, nor does the world. Ἀφθάρτους δὲ λέγουσι τὰς ψυχὰς καὶ τὸν κόσμον ("they say that souls and the world are imperishable"), says Strabo — "they hold souls and the world to be immortal." And Caesar, as above, chapter 14: "Above all, they wish to inculcate this: that souls do not perish, but pass after death from one body to another; and they think that by this belief men are especially spurred on to virtue, the fear of death being set aside." These words of Caesar's, Lucan expresses so splendidly, book 1, line 454: "Vobis auctoribus, Umbræ..." ("Through your teaching, O shades...") — the citation breaking off in our source at this point. They taught, further, that the world would at last be destroyed by fire and water. Ἐπικρατήσειν δέ ποτέ φασι καὶ πῦρ καὶ ὕδωρ, as Strabo has it; it is doubtful whether the true sense of their teaching was rightly grasped by those who supposed — perhaps drawing on some ancient tradition — that they taught the world had once been destroyed by water, and would hereafter be consumed anew by fire.

XVII. They also devoted effort to eloquence and rhetoric. "They have, nevertheless," says Mela, book 3, chapter 2, "their own eloquence, and the Druids as teachers of wisdom." And the symbolic image of the Ogmian Hercules is unknown to no one.

XVIII. To theology they also joined geography and astronomy. The same Mela: "These men profess to know the size and shape of the earth and of the universe, and the motions of the sky and of the stars." And Caesar himself, as above, chapter 14: "They discuss, and hand down to their youth, many things concerning the stars and their motion, the size of the universe and of the earth, and the nature of things" (that is, natural philosophy). To these they added ethics, on the testimony of Diogenes, Proem to his work, section 6: Καί φασι τοὺς Δρυίδας αἰνιγματωδῶς ἀποφθεγγομένους φιλοσοφῆσαι, σέβειν θεοὺς, καὶ μηδὲν κακὸν δρᾶν, καὶ ἀνδρείαν ἀσκεῖν ("and they say the Druids philosophized by speaking in riddles: to worship the gods, to do nothing evil, and to practice courage") — "They say the Druids philosophized obscurely and by maxims" (that is, ones to be learned by heart), "teaching that the gods are to be worshipped, that no evil is to be done, and that courage is to be practiced."

XIX. Although they were very numerous, they observed among themselves such an order that one presided over all the rest as a kind of pope. "When this one dies," says Caesar, as above, chapter 13, "if any of the rest excels in dignity, he succeeds; but if there are several equals, he is chosen by the vote of the Druids — sometimes they even contend for the primacy by arms" — which, as we know, has also happened at Rome among Christians.

XX. With what favor and authority they prevailed among the peoples, the same author instructs us. "They take part," he says, "in divine matters, conduct public and private sacrifices, and interpret matters of religion. They decide almost all public and private controversies; and if any crime has been committed, if a murder has taken place, if there is a dispute over an inheritance or over boundaries, the same men decide it, and fix the penalties." Thus, busying themselves with other people's affairs, they thrust themselves, under the pretext of religion, into every public and private matter, while remaining themselves exempt from every duty owed to the commonwealth, tending their own dominion within another's. Since, however, they did not ordinarily hold the office of magistrate, and so had neither the fasces nor the axes, nor the power of life and death — things altogether necessary for exacting obedience — one may rightly ask how they compelled the peoples to keep within the bounds of duty, and to be obedient to them in all things. To this inconvenience, accordingly, a remedy was found in the invention of a political-religious excommunication, and thus a kind of Caesaro-papal authority was rendered complete. "If anyone," the same Caesar says, "whether private person or public official, does not abide by their decree, they forbid him the sacrifices. This penalty among them is the most severe. Those on whom this interdict has thus been laid are reckoned among the impious and the wicked; all men withdraw from them, avoid their approach and their conversation, lest they catch some harm from the contagion; neither is justice granted them when they seek it, nor is any honor shared with them." There is no one — or none but a fool — who does not perceive that this whole mystery of iniquity has long since been carried over into Christianity.

XXI. There remain the rites and the worship of the gods. These were various, and almost all of them monstrous. When Caesar, after his first landing on this island, had returned — or rather, been put to flight — "the Britons, performing various sacrifices, gave themselves over to the slaughter of cattle; they there sacrificed forty thousand oxen, a hundred thousand sheep, and birds of various kinds not easily numbered; besides thirty thousand wild beasts of every sort, gathered together." These are the words of Geoffrey, book 1, chapter 24 — that is, of a man of the most reckless audacity and shamelessness in inventing whatever he pleased. The principal thing recorded by trustworthy authors concerning the sacrifices of the Druids is human sacrifice (ἀνθρωποθυσία). There were, indeed, two kinds of human victims among them: the first private, when someone would devote either himself or another for the safety of a third party. "Those afflicted with more serious illnesses, and those engaged in battles and dangers, either sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice themselves, and employ the Druids as ministers for these sacrifices; because they believe that, unless a man's life is rendered up in exchange for a man's life, the divine power of the immortal gods cannot otherwise be appeased," says Caesar, as above, chapter 16. This, as is clear from Strabo and others, was the form that immolation took: the victim having been brought to the altar, the priest sprinkled its forehead with wine, or, where this was lacking, with some other liquid; then, seizing the forelocks with his left hand, he poured libations upon the fire, at the same time offering prayers or vows to the gods; and presently the victim itself was struck with the sword, as Cluverius observes. The other kind was public, and, as we have already observed, not unlike that by which Moloch was worshipped in the East. "And publicly," says Caesar, as above, "they have established sacrifices. Some have images of immense size, whose limbs, woven of wicker-work, they fill with living men; these being set on fire, the men, surrounded by the flame, are put to death." This he says of the Gauls, who received the Druids themselves, and this whole superstition, from the Britons. Strabo, book 4, says likewise: Ἄνθρωπον γὰρ κατεσπεισμένον παίσαντες εἰς νῶτον μαχαίρᾳ, ἐμαντεύοντο ἐκ τοῦ σφαδασμοῦ, ἔθυον δὲ οὐκ ἄνευ Δρυϊδῶν, καὶ ἄλλα δὲ ἀνθρωποθυσιῶν εἴδη λέγεται· καὶ γὰρ κατετόξευόν τινας, καὶ ἀνεσταύρουν ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς, καὶ κατασκευάζοντες κολοσσὸν χόρτου, καὶ ξύλον ἐμβαλόντες εἰς τοῦτον, βοσκήματα καὶ παντοῖα θηρία καὶ ἀνθρώπους ὡλοκαύτουν ("For having struck a man consecrated by libation on the back with a sword, they divined from his convulsions, and they sacrificed only in the presence of the Druids; and other kinds of human sacrifice are also related: for they shot some with arrows, and impaled others in their shrines, and, having fashioned a colossal figure of straw and cast timber into it, they burned cattle and every kind of wild beast, and men, together in it"). Besides the kind mentioned by Caesar, Strabo here reports three other kinds of public victims by which men were sacrificed: for they were either struck down with the sacrificial sword, or transfixed with arrows, or even driven onto crosses; and to these he adds that custom of burning men shut up within colossal images. Diodorus records yet another kind of death employed in these sacrifices, book 5, chapter 32: Τοὺς κακούργους κατὰ πενταετηρίδα φυλάξαντες ἀνασκολοπίζουσι τοῖς θεοῖς, καὶ μετ᾽ ἄλλων πολλῶν ἀπαρχῶν καθαγίζουσι πυρὰς παμμεγέθεις κατασκευάζοντες ("Keeping the guilty in custody for a period of five years, they impale them as offerings to the gods, and, building enormous pyres, consecrate them together with many other first-fruits") — "They keep the guilty for five years, then, having fixed them upon stakes, sacrifice them to the gods, and immolate them, along with other first-fruits, upon enormous pyres." By fire, then, by the sword, by arrows, by the cross, by sharpened stakes — as it pleased them — they put their victims to death. Nor was this crime perpetrated only against the guilty: "they even descend to the punishment of the innocent," says Caesar, as above. With what monstrous savagery the Britons conducted themselves in their public sacrifices, Dio testifies, Histories, book 62: Τοῖς τε ἁλισκομένοις ἀνθρώποις ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν οὐδὲν τῶν δεινοτάτων ἐστὶν ὅ τι οὐκ ἐγίνετο. Καὶ ὃ δὴ δεινότατον καὶ θηριωδέστατον ἔπραξαν· τὰς γὰρ γυναῖκας τὰς εὐγενεστάτας, καὶ εὐπρεπεστάτας, γυμνὰς ἐκρέμασαν, καὶ τοὺς τε μαστοὺς αὐτῶν περιέτεμον, καὶ τοῖς στόμασι σφῶν προσέρραπτον, ὅπως ὡς καὶ ἐσθίουσαι αὐτοὺς ὁρῶντο. Καὶ μετὰ τοῦτο πασσάλοις ὀξέσι διὰ παντὸς τοῦ σώματος κατὰ μῆκος ἀνέπειραν· καὶ ταῦτα πάντα θύοντές τε ἅμα, καὶ ἑστιώμενοι, καὶ ὑβρίζοντες, ἔν τε τοῖς ἄλλοις σφῶν ἱεροῖς, καὶ ἐν τῷ τῆς Ἀνδάτης μάλιστα ἄλσει ἐποίουν — that is: "On the men taken captive by them there was nothing, however terrible, that was not done. And this indeed was the most terrible and most savage thing they did: they hanged up naked the noblest and most comely women, cut off their breasts and sewed them to their mouths, so that the women might appear to be eating them; and after this they impaled the women lengthwise through the whole body upon sharpened stakes; and they did all these things while at once offering sacrifice, feasting, and behaving wantonly, in their other shrines, but above all in the grove of Andate." Such, then, were the sort of slaves of Satan that we Britons once were.

XXII. On account of these unspeakable sacrifices, the Romans attempted to abolish the whole superstition of the Druids. Strabo, on the Gauls, book 4, chapter 4: Τούτων δ᾽ ἔπαυσαν αὐτοὺς Ῥωμαῖοι, καὶ τῶν κατὰ τὰς θυσίας καὶ μαντείας ὑπεναντίως τοῖς παρ᾽ ἡμῖν νομίμοις ("The Romans put a stop to these practices of theirs, and to the sacrificial and divinatory rites that ran contrary to our own customs") — "The Romans drew them away from these things, and from the rites of sacrifice and divination which warred against our own laws." And Suetonius, Claudius, chapter 25: "He utterly abolished among the Gauls the religion of the Druids, of a dreadful savagery, which under Augustus had only been forbidden to Roman citizens." That is, he wished to — in Gaul; but in vain: Britain, the seat and origin of the superstition, remained untouched. Only on the island of Mona were the Druids slain, and the groves cut down, by Suetonius Paulinus. Tacitus relates the deed, Annals, book 14, chapter 30: "There stood along the shore," he says, "a strange and varied battle-line, dense with arms and men, with women running to and fro among them.... And round about, the Druids, pouring out fearful curses with hands raised to heaven, struck the soldiers with terror at so unfamiliar a sight, so that, their limbs as it were frozen, they offered their motionless bodies to wounds. Then, roused by the exhortations of their general, and spurring one another on lest they should quail before a throng of women and fanatics, they advanced their standards, cut down all who opposed them, and wrapped them in their own fire. A garrison was afterward set over the conquered; and the groves, hallowed by savage superstitions, were cut down — for they held it lawful to drench their altars with captive blood, and to consult the gods through the entrails of men."

XXIII. This impious superstition, however, the heavenly truth of the Christian religion, by God's mercy, gradually abolished at last. Although, indeed, this island was "wholly cut off from the whole world," and from the fountain of the water...

...of the sanctuary, which went forth to heal the nations — though most remote, yet by God's gracious provision, messengers and heralds of divine grace were carried to it almost from the very cradle of the gospel itself. That Peter preached here is asserted by Simeon Metaphrastes and the Menology; that Paul did, by Theodoret and Sophronius; that Simon the Zealot did, by Dorotheus; that Aristobulus — whom Paul mentions in his Epistle to the Romans — did, by Nicephorus; that Joseph of Arimathea did, almost all writers assert, especially the more recent among our own countrymen — Bale, Parker, Foxe, Camden, and others; and concerning Joseph scarcely anyone doubts it. Hence the most ancient Christian writers, Tertullian and Origen, record that Britain received the Christian faith: the latter in his Commentary on Ezekiel, chapter 4; the former in his book Against the Jews, chapter 7. Martial too celebrates Claudia Rufina, a British woman of the noblest birth and the greatest learning, book 11, epigram 54: "Though Claudia Rufina is sprung of the blue-painted Britons..." Learned men judge that she was that Claudia of whom Paul makes mention in 2 Timothy 4:21, and the dates agree. Add to this that he links her with Pudens, whom this same Martial likewise celebrates, book 7, epigram 10.

XXIV. Many have written that King Lucius too — of whom a letter is reported to have been sent to Pope Eleutherius, along with a reply from that same Eleutherius — was the first of all kings to embrace the Christian faith, just as no fewer have related that Philip the Arab was the first Christian emperor. But to deal freely, as befits one to whom nothing is more venerable than truth, I confess candidly that for a long time now — if not the credibility of the entire history of this Lucius, then certainly that of this exchange of letters, and of many other things commonly appended to the history — has seemed to me quite suspect.

XXV. So far as I know, Bede was the first to commit this story to memory, Ecclesiastical History, book 1, chapter 4. He says that Lucius wrote to Eleutherius in the year of the Chronicle 156. Nauclerus follows him; but Baronius, in his Annals, shows that Eleutherius did not preside over the Roman church before the year of Christ 178. There is therefore an error in the dating. Henry of Erfurt relates that it happened in the year 196, the nineteenth of the emperor Verus (who never in fact reigned so many years). Ado, in his Chronicle, arranges the time more correctly, and writes that Eleutherius lived and ruled the Roman church under the emperor Commodus, which is true; for the end of Eleutherius's third year falls at the beginning of Commodus's reign. Let this, then, be the time — if ever — at which this exchange of letters between King Lucius and Eleutherius took place. Geoffrey of Monmouth narrates at length the success of the undertaking. "Without delay," he says, "the peoples of the nations, flocking together from every side, followed the king's example, and, washed in the same font, were restored to the heavenly kingdom. The blessed teachers, then" (that is, Fugatius and Damian, sent from Rome by Eleutherius), "when they had abolished paganism throughout almost the whole island, dedicated to the one God and his saints the temples that had been founded in honor of many gods, and filled them with companies of ordained ministers. There were at that time in Britain twenty-eight flamens, and three archflamens. To their authority the other judges of the island were subject. These, by the apostle's command, they rescued from idolatry, and where there had been flamens they set bishops, and where there had been archflamens, archbishops. Now the sees of the archflamens had been in the three noblest cities — namely London, York, and the City of the Legions, which, they testify, was situated on the river Usk in Glamorgan, its ancient walls and buildings still standing. To these three, then, once the old superstition had been cleared away, twenty-eight bishops were made subject." So he writes — a man who knew nothing whatsoever of what it is to be ashamed. How childishly he invented all this will appear at once. British superstition never had more flamens or archflamens than it had Geoffreys of Monmouth. Yet I would not deny that he has rightly uncovered the origin of this distinction among the ministers of Christian worship, as the Roman church itself admits, Decretum, Part I, Distinction 21: "Among priests," they say, "a certain distinction has been observed, so that some are called simply priests, others archpriests, others chorepiscopi, others bishops, others archbishops or metropolitans, others primates, others patriarchs, others supreme pontiffs; and this distinction was introduced chiefly by the pagans, who called some of their flamens simply flamens, others archflamens, others protoflamens." So says the author of the distinction, plainly and openly. More modestly, and within the bounds of decency, the more learned Leland writes: "It remains," he says, "that I relate the occasion which swept away so great a superstition. It was provided by Roman edict that no practice or regard for the religion of the Druids should be shown in the provinces. Yet the barbarous nations clung tenaciously to the ancestral rites handed down and received from the Druids themselves so many ages before, until Christ the Savior, best and greatest, having dispersed the darkness of error and gross ignorance, poured forth upon the world, by the counsel of his Spirit, a light visible to all. Then that great Lucius, the undying glory of the Britons, spurning the discipline of the Druids, willingly resolved that the evangelical doctrine should be shared by all his people. Eluanus, then, and Meduinus, noble British orators, were sent by Lucius to Eleutherius at Rome; and Fugatius, together with Damian, sent back thence from Rome, firmly established, God being gracious and willing it, a religion that would never die." Certain Bavarians add, on Bale's testimony (Scriptores Britannici, Century 1, chapter 29), that this Lucius later undertook an apostolate and converted their own nation to the faith, and count it to their credit that they were converted by so great a king; but our own countrymen protest, affirming that Lucius never set foot outside his own kingdom, but died at Gloucester in the twelfth year of his reign. The most learned Camden (whose footsteps Selden follows in his Anglo-British Analecta) yields to the common prejudice. For after he had most carefully woven together the history of those times from the most approved historians, and had set clearly before everyone's eyes that the condition and state of British affairs, from the days of Claudius Caesar (who had reduced the island to the form of a province), left no room whatever for such a king as this Lucius is imagined to have been, one who held the whole island under his sway — he nevertheless judged it prudent to weave this story into his work, though the very sequence of events and times which he himself set forth cries out that it should be utterly rejected.

XXVI. To root out of men's minds so great an opinion, so deeply implanted, so ancient, is beyond my talent and beyond my purpose. But since falsehood nowhere has much firmness or strength, if I can first obtain from my readers what is only fair — that they bring no prejudice to the matter — I have no doubt I shall persuade even the φιλαρχαίοις ("lovers of antiquity") that I have, for my suspicion, which is not mine alone, reasons that are sufficiently just, indeed exceedingly weighty.

XXVII. Britain — twice attempted almost in vain by Julius Caesar, neglected by Augustus and Tiberius, and the island whose ocean shells, cast up on the Gallic shore, Caligula, attended by a vast army, paraded in triumph — worn down by civil wars and factional rivalries, its inhabitants obeying various kings, was attacked by Claudius Caesar through the praetor Aulus Plautius, reduced by him to the form of a province, and handed over to Plautius to govern. Dio and Suetonius relate at length the history of what he accomplished on this island. So great was the glory of this victory in those days that the senate decreed not only the title "Britannicus" and a most splendid triumph to Claudius himself, but also an ovation to Plautius, and triumphal ornaments to Vespasian, who pursued the remnants of the war. Nor do the poets triumph any less over the addition of this province to the empire. Thus Seneca the tragedian, in the Octavia, Act 1: "To whom the whole world was obedient beyond the ocean, and to whom the Britons turned their backs in flight — a people till then unknown to our generals, and their own masters." To which he soon adds: "Behold him who first placed the yoke upon the Britons, who covered with so great a fleet seas unknown before, and was safe amid barbarous nations and savage seas." The first little verse was commonly read: "Behold him who first upon the shore of the Tanais..." etc. Scaliger, in his notes on Tibullus, restored it to "Behold him who first placed the yoke upon the Britons"; but without doubt it should be read, "Behold him who first placed the yoke upon the bank of the Thames" — since Claudius was the first to cross the Thames, as the most learned Camden has observed. Concerning this same Claudius, Annaeus Seneca had earlier sung, in his Apocolocyntosis ("The Pumpkinification") of Claudius Caesar. Elegant too are those epigrams which the great Scaliger set forth in his Catalecta. It is fitting to append a few of them: "The land never violated by Ausonian triumphs, struck by your thunderbolt, Caesar, has fallen." But when the Britons rose again in tumult, on account of civil discord among the petty kings who had accepted the Roman yoke (for that a single king ruled the island in Caesar's day, or afterward, is a Geoffrey-dream, one that no one but he ever dreamed), this same Claudius subdued them through the propraetor Publius Ostorius. Tacitus has recorded that war accurately for posterity. Under Nero's rule, the whole nation — roused by the wrongs done to Boadicea, queen of the Iceni, and by her own great spirit, both alike immense — and all the peoples within it, strove bravely and vigorously, though in vain, to throw off the Roman yoke from their necks and recover their ancestral liberty. The end of the war, under the command of Suetonius Paulinus, brought the nation partly destruction, partly servitude. After Nero's death, while the civil war of Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian held almost the whole world torn apart, the Silures and Ordovices, and other peoples, took such courage that they gave occasion to that most disastrous war in which Julius Agricola, the propraetor and father-in-law of the historian Tacitus, reduced the whole island to the power of the Romans and compelled it to live by Roman law and right — only a single petty king being left in some part of the island with precarious authority, namely Cogidumnus, so that even here they might have a king as an instrument of servitude. In that war Galgacus, the last of the Britons, was defeated. Leaving some part of the northern island — as rough and unfruitful — to the barbarians, Agricola reduced the rest fully and completely into a province, to use Camden's phrase, and, as Tacitus testifies, handed it over to his successor quiet and secure. With the name of king abolished, and all that authority of the petty kings which the peoples had formerly venerated, Britain became a praesidial province — that is, a province of the Caesars. Under Nerva's reign it was quiet; Spartianus relates that Trajan brought back into order some who had fallen away. Hadrian restrained the barbarians, who were assailing the province from the northern parts of the island with wars and raids, by building a wall eighty miles long; Spartianus relates this too. Nor was the rule of the Antonines — Pius and the Philosopher [Marcus Aurelius] — free from wars and disturbances on this island; yet all of these were suppressed by the valor of Lollius Urbicus and Calpurnius Agricola. Under Commodus's rule too, the province itself was for a time full of seditions; and the barbarous nations, crossing the wall, gave the Romans and Britons a great deal of trouble, and more than once inflicted heavy slaughter on the inhabitants who dwelt nearest the wall. But with the arrival of Ulpius Marcellus, as Dio and Lampridius relate, everything was so thoroughly pacified that, right up to the death of Commodus, nothing seems to have been attempted against the Roman peace. Given this state and condition of British affairs, I confess candidly that, such is my dullness, I cannot see where this Lucius could have been — the one who, as he is called in the letter of Eleutherius, held this whole island ἀνυπεύθυνος ("unaccountable to any") and vicar of God alone; for it is only too likely that he was not in this Britain of ours at all. It seems to be an altogether different island that he divided among archbishops and bishops, by the consent of the British nobles; a different London, a different York, over which he ruled — for ours here were subject to the empire of the Romans.

XXVIII. Cardinal Baronius replies with much to this, at the year of Christ 183, where he sets forth and defends this history of Lucius. First, then, he says: "Never before this time did the Romans possess the whole of Britain; rather, it is clear that a great many untamed peoples remained in it, who often gave the Roman armies trouble; and again, it is certain that those same peoples in Britain who had been subdued by the Romans very often revolted afresh and rebelled outright. For, to say nothing of more remote times, it is established, on the authority of Julius Capitolinus, that under Marcus Aurelius a British war broke out, but that it was suppressed by Calpurnius Agricola, who was sent there by Marcus. Again, after the death of Marcus, under Commodus's rule it broke out anew, so much so that the Britons (as Lampridius writes) wished to set up another emperor against him, utterly refusing to obey Commodus; but the same author affirms that everything was settled by his generals. Dio adds further to this that the British war in these times of Commodus was the greatest of all, but that it was utterly extinguished by Ulpius Marcellus."

XXIX. It is astonishing that Baronius, a most learned and cautious man, did not notice that these statements are both ἀσύστατα ("inconsistent, incoherent") with each other, and, where they do hold true, strike at the very throat of the cause he undertook to defend. Inconsistent they are, in that he implies Lucius reigned among peoples who were untamed by the Romans, and who often revolted from the Roman empire, and who wished to set up another emperor against Commodus. For these were plainly distinct groups. The peoples said to be untamed by the Romans were the barbarians beyond the wall, and they alone. Those who rebelled repeatedly against the Romans were the provincial Britons; and those who wished to set up another emperor were the Roman garrison soldiers — so that it is plainly impossible for one and the same man to have ruled over all of these. Indeed, he cuts his own throat with his own sword when, on Dio's authority, he teaches that the British war was utterly extinguished under Commodus's reign by Ulpius Marcellus, and that the whole province thus submitted peaceably to Roman power. For given that state of affairs, as we showed above, it was impossible for Lucius to hold a kingdom in the province; nor will anyone ever believe it who is not ignorant of what a Roman praesidial province is. Furthermore, no writers, trustworthy or untrustworthy, have recorded anything of any such defection of the Britons from the Roman empire in which they set up a king to hold the whole island under his rule — such a king as they never had even when they were free and their own masters. We have shown that war was stirred up against the Romans on several occasions, now by one people, then by another or by several joining their forces; yet it was always extinguished within a short time. To suppose that, amid these tumults, there arose such a king as the most mendacious Geoffrey — and the Eleutherian letter as well — imagines Lucius to have been, can only be the opinion of men blinded by excessive prejudice. Well known is that saying of Tacitus concerning the condition of the Britons in these times: "Rarely," he says, "did two or three states come together to repel a common danger; so, while each fights alone, all are conquered" (Agricola, chapter 12). "But within the province itself there were always some untamed peoples," says Baronius, over whom Lucius could have ruled. But who, pray, were these untamed peoples? Wretched barbarians, driven from their own dwellings, without king or law, inhabiting groves and mountains and the most desolate corners of the island — over whom no reliable history teaches that any king presided with supreme authority; nor would it teach so, even if Geoffrey came back to life. Add, too, that this conjecture contradicts the whole tradition, whether of what actually happened or of what was invented; for it supposes that rude and untamed barbarians received the faith before the provincials did — a fiction against which all the monuments of antiquity, and all the historians, cry out, who write that in the time of Lucius it was not some wild and rustic folk but the province itself that embraced the faith. Hence Sabellicus says that "Britain was the first of all the provinces to receive the name of Christ publicly, together with due order"; against which the Eleutherian letter protests, which represents Lucius as ruling the whole British kingdom by the counsel of his nobles. Since, then, these arguments are altogether weak, the cardinal proceeds, in his answers to the objections, as follows: "Dio relates," he says, "that the Britons crossed that wall which stood midway between them and the Roman camps. By which it is plainly signified that Britain was at that time so divided that the Romans held that part which lay on this side of the wall, while the Britons freely possessed the other part, beyond the wall, from which they would often issue forth to provoke the Romans to battle. Thus, then, nothing prevents Lucius from having been king of Britain; for however much the Romans held part of the island, he could still have been king of that further part which the Britons freely possessed." But οὐδὲν ὑγιές ("nothing sound") in this: for, in the first place, the most learned man was misled by Dio's translator; for Dio did not write that the Britons crossed the wall, as the Latin version has it, but that certain nations of the island — bitterly hostile to those properly called Britons — crossed the wall. For, he says, τῶν γὰρ ἐν τῇ νήσῳ ἐθνῶν ὑπερβεβηκότων τὸ τεῖχος ("since the nations in the island had crossed the wall"; book 72); and writers always distinguish these peoples from the Britons — though there is no doubt that many of the Britons, the island's most ancient inhabitants, lived their lives beyond the wall as well. The cardinal therefore would have this Lucius reigning in that part of the island situated beyond Hadrian's Wall. But how many of our own countrymen, I ask, even know where this wall was built and traced? Only such a one would believe that what is said of Lucius and of the British kingdom could fit some unknown petty barbarian king beyond the wall. Nor is it called into doubt whether some Lucius, somewhere in the world, was converted to the faith of Christ, but whether such a king — one who ruled the kingdom of Britain answerable to God alone, whom Eleutherius, bishop of Rome, was to instruct in the administration of the kingdom — publicly embraced the Christian faith. Not to mention Geoffrey's archflamens and flamens, whom this fiction, together with London and York and the City of the Legions, or Caerleon, thrusts out beyond Hadrian's Wall. Who, I ask, ever heard that Fugatius and Damian passed by the Roman province — which embraced almost the whole of what is now the kingdom of England and Wales — and betook themselves to the barbarians beyond the wall? This too utterly overturns that fable: it is most certain and well known that those barbarous nations who held the parts of the island beyond the wall did not submit to the yoke of Christ until long afterward, and only after provincial Britain had for several centuries publicly received the Christian faith — a fact sufficiently established from Gildas alone, in his On the Ruin of Britain. In the third place, therefore, but only in passing, and as though he himself scarcely believed it, the cardinal adds: "Moreover, Lucius could also have been some petty king, placed under Roman dominion in Britain, and obedient to the Roman empire." Though he dispatches this answer in a single phrase, as though scarcely to be compared with what he had set down above, it is nevertheless most certain that the whole history lacks not only credibility and probability but even plausible color, unless it is drawn from this source. Let us then see briefly whether even this can in any way be reconciled with what is said of Lucius, and with what the Eleutherian letter proclaims about him. First, then, among the approved historians who wrote of British affairs — Dio, Julius Capitolinus, and Lampridius — there is the deepest silence concerning this petty king; nothing is said by them that would suggest such a petty king possessed royal authority in the whole province; indeed, they describe the state and condition of those times in such a way as to indicate that there was none. Next, the letter asserts that Lucius wrote to Eleutherius asking that he arrange to have the Roman laws sent to him — a thing that none of the peoples beyond the wall, most hostile as they were to the very name of Rome, would do; and equally, none of the provincials had any need to send envoys to Rome to bring back such laws as accepted, since they could see them expounded and administered by the highest officials throughout the whole province. Indeed, the poet implies that long before these times the Britons were thoroughly versed in Roman law: for indeed, "eloquent Gaul taught the Britons to be pleaders at law." Nor did those petty kings whom the Romans anywhere tolerated as instruments of subjection have such power over their subjects that it lay in their discretion which laws they should use; and it is likewise absurd that a petty king under Roman dominion — one who, as the cardinal puts it, "obeyed the Roman empire" — should have sought the imperial laws from the bishop of Rome. But what has this to do with the Lucius of Eleutherius, not to say of Geoffrey, who, as vicar of God, subject to him alone, ruled over the whole kingdom of Britain, and administered it by the counsel of his subjects? Furthermore, this supposititious Eleutherius, whose letter smacks not at all of the spirit of those most ancient times, condemns and rejects the imperial laws as unfit for the civil administration of the kingdom — something the real Eleutherius neither would have done, nor would have dared to do. For my own part, I would by no means deny that a certain Lucius, perhaps sprung of royal blood and of very great authority among the Britons, took up the profession of the Christian religion around that time, and did what he could to promote the faith. But that the story-tellers transformed him into a supreme king, and — since it was very well known that no one succeeded him in the kingdom — ἄτεκνον ("childless"), and that the so-called letter of Eleutherius to him is fictitious, no one, I think, will deny, who turns his mind away from inveterate prejudices toward the knowledge and consideration of the truth.

Chapter 12

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 10.

Knowledge of the true God — He alone who can be known was called unknown — The well-known δεισιδαιμονία ("superstition") of the city of Athens — The city's division into the names and worship of idols — Twin superstition among the Jews — What Πάγος means — Very many acknowledge one God by nature — Antisthenes, the Brahmins — Sophocles — Menander — The books of Numa found, and burned — Valerius Soranus — Orpheus — Homer — Prudentius — The seven-lettered name.

I. In the midst of this darkness, and this confusion of all things and all religions, it is clear that very many retained some knowledge and memory of the one true God — infinitely distant from all those fictitious gods whom they superstitiously worshiped. This the writings of almost all historians and philosophers teach. For how few of the ancient sages are there who do not celebrate some divine nature existing above all things, ruling, preserving, and disposing all things by its own will? Yet since this one true God alone displays τὸ γνωστόν ("the knowable") of himself in all things — to such a degree that he alone can be known, because he alone is, and cannot be wholly unknown, because he is God — nevertheless, because it did not seem good to them to retain the knowledge of this one true God alone, he alone was called ἄγνωστος ("unknown"). Hence, whenever mention had to be made of the God of the Jews, it was customary to add, Ὅστίς ποτε οὗτός ἐστιν ("whoever he finally is"), as in Dio the historian, book 36. And, Νὴ τὸν ἄγνωστον ἐν Ἀθήναις ("by the unknown god in Athens"), is found in Lucian's Philopatris; and, Καὶ ταῦτα Ἀθήνῃσιν, οὗ ἀγνώστων δαιμόνων βωμοὶ ἵδρυνται ("and this at Athens, where altars to unknown deities have been set up"), as Philostratus has it in the Life of Apollonius, book 6, chapter 2. The inscription had Θεῶν ("of gods"); Philostratus substituted δαιμόνων ("of deities"), after the manner of the Pythagoreans. The origin of this cult is attributed to Socrates. He, as Justin testifies in his First Apology, urged the Athenians πρὸς θεοῦ τοῦ ἀγνώστου αὐτοὺς διὰ λόγου ζητήσεως ἐπίγνωσιν προυτρέπετο, "exhorted them to the knowledge of that unknown God, through the inquiry of reason."

II. But whatever Socrates may have done, it is quite certain that Paul seized his opportunity for preaching the true God from the inscription on the altar of Epimenides, which, among others, was dedicated θεῷ ἀγνώστῳ ("to the unknown god"). And such was Athens, where there was scarcely anything that was not sacred, since the city itself was ὅλη βωμὸς, ὅλη θῦμα θεοῖς, καὶ ἀνάθεμα ("wholly an altar, wholly a sacrifice and offering to the gods"), as Xenophon testifies in his Republic of the Athenians. For they divided the whole city into districts marked out by the names of gods: 1. the Hill of Cronus; 2. the Hill of Pan; 3. the Hill of Poseidon; 4. the Hill of Ares [the Areopagus]; 5. the Hill of Hermes — these made up the city. Now Πάγος among the Greeks signifies not the Latin pagus ("district"), but a rock. The city's quarters were so named because on each one some rock (that is, a pillar or stela), consecrated to this or that idol, was set up; and from this the word's use was first transferred to signify some part of the city. The same thing happened not only at Athens but also at Jerusalem: Jeremiah 11:13, "For according to the number of your cities were your gods, O Judah! and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have you set up altars to that shameful thing, altars to burn incense to Baal."

III. Nor were altars to the unknown God set up at Athens alone: Πρὸς αὐτῷ δὲ ἐστὶν ἀγνώστων θεῶν βωμός ("and near it stands an altar of unknown gods"), Pausanias, in his Eliaca. That this unknown God was one, they have sometimes confessed. "Many gods by common opinion, one by nature," said Antisthenes, as recorded by Cicero in On the Nature of the Gods, book 1, chapter 13; "that great living being, and soul of the world," said the Pythagoreans. To him they all assigned, at the very least, the supreme place in the heavens. Thus the Brahmins instruct Apollonius, in Philostratus, book 3, chapter 11: Τὴν μὲν γὰρ δὴ πρώτην καὶ τελειωτάτην ἕδραν ἀποδοτέον θεῷ γενέτορι τοῦδε τοῦ ζώου, τοῖς δὲ ὑπ' ἐκείνῃ θεοῖς, οἱ τὰ μέρη αὐτοῦ κυβερνῶσι ("for the first and most perfect seat must be given to the God who begot this living creature, and the second to the gods beneath him who govern its parts") — "The first and most perfect seat is to be assigned to God, the begetter of this living creature; the second, to the gods who govern its parts."

IV. Indeed, some, under the auspices and guidance of reason, went so far as to judge that, for the sake of this one maker-God, all idolatrous worship ought to be cast away. Excellently Sophocles — see the fragments of Sophocles: Εἷς ταῖς ἀληθείαισιν, εἷς ἐστιν θεὸς ("In truth there is one, only one, God"), etc.

V. It is probable, too, that those books of Numa Pompilius — found beneath the Janiculum in the year 556 from the founding of the city, and which the senate ordered burned in a public assembly (because, once they were read, Quintus Petilius, the urban praetor, swore that they tended to the dissolution of religion) — taught that one God should be worshiped, and worshiped without images.

VI. Lactantius shows that the pagans of his time maintained that this one God ought to be called supreme Jove. Hence Valerius Soranus wrote thus, and again elsewhere. This is he of whom Virgil, echoing Homer, so often repeats that familiar line: "Father of gods and king of men." They also wished him to be Serapis, as in the epigram: Ἡρμοσάμην δίνης οὐρανίοιο μέλη ("I fitted together the members of the heavenly whirl"). For "Serapis" is a name ἑπταγράμματον ("of seven letters"), and was so called, as Hesychius testifies — unless one supposes that the name "Jehovah" is indicated through its ἑπτὰ φωνήεντα [γράμματα] ("seven vowel letters"). Rightly, then, does Tertullian teach, in his Apology, chapter 17, that "even the worshipers of idols, when they are in straits, lift their eyes to heaven, and, forgetting their gods, call upon the one God according to nature." Similar things are found in Justin's On the Monarchy of God, and in his Apologies; in Athenagoras's Embassy; in Clement, Stromata 3; in Arnobius, Against the Nations, book 2; in Lactantius, Divine Institutes, book 1, chapter 9; and in Theodoret's Cure of the Greek Maladies, book 2. Prudentius, excellently, in the Apotheosis, lines 268–277: "Consult the ravings of bearded Plato: his arguments, by their very method, conclude in a single deity." But the apostle, in his Epistle to the Romans, chapter 1, shows plainly that the wisest of the pagans held all these notions of the one God shut up within themselves, and did not glorify him as God with worship and obedience.

Chapter 13

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 11.

A new and pestilent corruption of the notions of the one supreme God — Homer's Jupiter takes his place — Contempt of the true God — Cicero's judgment on the religion of the Jews — The Cretan Jupiter: where born, and where he died — The opinion of Statius and Callimachus — The sepulcher of Jupiter in Crete — Callimachus's scholiast — The shade of Jupiter — Summanus — Father Dis, and what and what sort of thing the manes are — Images fashioned after the likeness of bodies — Souls in the heavens and shades among the dead — Remnants of Sabaism — Notions of the true God confused with the superstition of Jupiter and the Sun — The twelve gods — The origin of the superstition — The worship of δαιμόνια, ancient and recent — The banquet of the δωδεκάθεον ("twelve gods") — The nameless crowd of gods.

I. The ancient enemy of the human race, abusing this obscure notion of the one supreme God, assailed idolaters with a new and remarkable delusion. He substituted one of the fictitious gods in his place, and feigned that all the others either sat beside that Most High one, or served him. This was Homer's Jupiter, who most foolishly boasts of his power over the lesser deities, Iliad 8:5–27.

II. So he says — words which Eustathius vainly labors to fit to natural things by the doctrine of the Stoics, of Plato, and of others. But he often twists Homer's sayings to a meaning Homer himself never suspected — not unlike what Donatus does in explaining the endings of Terence's plays. Excellently does Plato say in the Phaedrus: "If a man, having no confidence in the poetic fables, should wish to reduce them by force to a plausible sense, relying on a kind of rustic cleverness, he will certainly need a great deal of leisure." Now this Jupiter, to whom they assigned the prerogative of supreme dominion and whatever they judged proper to the supreme God, was none other than that most notorious Cretan rogue — or rather the devil himself, masked under the tradition of that Cretan Jupiter. The greatest of orators, in his speech to the pontiffs concerning his house, chapter 57: "You, Capitoline Jove, whom the Roman people have named 'Best' on account of your benefits, and 'Greatest' on account of your power; and you, Queen Juno," etc. Statius, with the most shameful confusion, imagines this same being as the Best and Greatest God, the Capitoline image, the husband of Juno, Thebaid, book 4, line 782: "Even as the Berecynthian Mother, when she bids the trembling Curetes dance about the infant Thunderer."

III. Thus, although they professed one supreme deity, they utterly spurned the one God as he had revealed himself. Hence came their contempt for the religion of the Jews, who alone possessed the knowledge of the one true God. Cicero, in his speech For Lucius Flaccus, is an ample witness. "Every nation has its own religion, Laelius," he says, chapter 28, "and we have ours. While Jerusalem stood" (that is, while Judea was still its own master, not yet subject to the Romans — for the city was by no means yet overthrown at that time) "and the Jews were at peace, still the religion of their rites was repugnant to the splendor of this empire, to the dignity of our name, and to the institutions of our ancestors; and now all the more so, because that nation showed by arms what it thought of our empire; how dear it was to the immortal gods it showed by being conquered, farmed out for tribute, and enslaved."

IV. Hence, concerning this Jupiter of theirs, whom they knew to be a man born of men, they could never work out what to think. The most learned poet, who admits that his Thunderer was once a little child, nevertheless denies that he died, Thebaid 1:277: "Yet here, for you, a temple..." — words he had drawn from Callimachus's Hymn to Zeus: Ζεῦ, σὲ μὲν Ἰδαίοισιν ἐν οὔρεσί φασι γενέσθαι, Κρῆτες ἐτεκτήναντο, σὺ δ' οὐ θάνες, ἐσσὶ γὰρ αἰεί ("Zeus, some say you were born on the mountains of Ida; the Cretans fashioned that tale, but you did not die — for you are forever"). But so that the Cretans might be cleared of the charge of lying about the sepulcher of Jupiter, they devised a not unclever fiction, which the old scholiast on Callimachus records: Ἐν Κρήτῃ, ἐπὶ τῷ τάφῳ τοῦ Μίνωος, ἐπιγέγραπτο· Μίνωος τοῦ Διὸς τάφος· τῷ χρόνῳ δὲ τὸ τοῦ Μίνωος ἀπηλείφθη, ὥστε περιλειφθῆναι Διὸς τάφος· ἐκ τούτου λέγουσι Κρῆτες τὸν τάφον τοῦ Διός ("In Crete, on the tomb of Minos, was inscribed: 'Tomb of Minos, son of Zeus'; but with the passage of time the name 'of Minos' was worn away, so that only 'tomb of Zeus' remained; from this the Cretans say it is the tomb of Zeus") — "In Crete, on the tomb of Minos, an inscription had been written, 'the tomb of Minos, son of Jove'; but as time went on, the name of Minos was erased, so that only 'the tomb of Jove' remained; and from this the Cretans said that it was the tomb of Jove."

V. Athenagoras, in his Embassy, mocks Callimachus for this very reason: that although he believed his Jupiter to have been born of human parents, he would not admit the tomb of a mortal man. Callimachus was foolish, too, when he asked which were lying, the Arcadians or the Cretans, each claiming Jupiter's birth for themselves — since Cicero, in the third book of On the Nature of the Gods, teaches that there were three Jupiters, of whom, he writes, the first two were begotten of Aether and Heaven, in Arcadia, and the third, born of Saturn, in Crete. Philostratus, too, in his Lives of the Sophists, book 2, records that the sophist Antiochus pleaded the Cretans' cause concerning the tomb of Jupiter; and Lactantius, following Euhemerus, proves that he was indeed buried there. Pluto himself, too, was nothing but the shade of the dead Jupiter; and from this he was called Summanus, that is, the highest of the manes. Hence the opening of the devotional hymn: "Father Dis, or the manes of Jove, or by whatever other name it is lawful to call you." For Salmasius rightly notes, in his Diatribe on Loans, that the manes of those whose souls had been received into heaven were nevertheless placed among the dead below. For these manes were, as it were, images of bodies lacking a soul, which the Greeks called σκιαί ("shades") and εἴδωλα καμόντων ("phantoms of the dead"); on which the most learned Reynolds discourses excellently at length in his Lectures against Bellarmine, who contends that an εἴδωλον is only the image of something false, or something that never existed. This shade is, for Lucretius, "air deprived of light," book 4, line 369. Thus the image of Hercules, though he had long since been counted among the gods, is placed by Homer among the dead below. And that image of Achilles, roused from the dead by Apollonius the Magician, demanded that the Thessalians establish sacred rites for him as though he were some god. The soul, therefore, was not the shade which they placed on high; nor was it the body, which they saw perish in the earth; but rather an image fashioned to the likeness of the body, such that it could be seen and recognized by those to whom the one whose shade it was had been known — but not touched. So Aeneas, in Virgil, Aeneid 2:771, as he sought her; and the shade of Deiphobus, too, was mutilated, in the likeness of the body which Menelaus had cruelly maimed, Aeneid 6:494. This Jupiter, then, whom all confessed to have been born, and most held to have been buried, and whose shade they placed among the dead, they nevertheless strove to raise to the throne of the supreme God, and to exhaust in him the whole notion of the one true God. Hence too, in the worship and all the sacred rites of the nations, there was always a wonderful confusion — no less than, and no less ridiculous than, that which Plautus imagined in his double Amphitryon and double Sosia.

VI. Nor does the heap of confusion end there. Among almost all idolaters everywhere, Sabaism — the worship of the heavenly bodies — firmly held on to some place, at least, if not the one it had held from the beginning. In this, the Sun alone was supreme, highest, almost the sole God. This too usurped the place of the Most High God, as we have shown at greater length before. Hence arose a new delusion, a new frustration — as though it gave the ancient serpent pleasure to make sport of wretched little men enslaved to blindness and wickedness. The notions of the true God, the Cretan Jupiter (that is, Satan masked under that idol), and the Sun, a heavenly body — the best and the worst — were all jumbled together into a single idol.

VII. But this wretched confusion of idolatrous superstition advanced even further. The angels, noblest of creatures, serve the true God in the heavens, awaiting his nod in all things; and the nations retained some knowledge of this too, as is found in Orpheus. But here too holds true that word of Jude, verse 10, concerning that ray of divine light: "Whatever they understand naturally, as irrational animals do, in these things they are corrupted." These angels they changed into I know not what lesser gods, makers of the world and inferior governors, to be adored and worshiped with the highest religion and divine cult. In Hellenism they substituted for these the gods they call "of the greater nations" — who always stood by Jupiter — the chief among deified men; embracing, in place of God and his angels, the shades of Jupiter and of the gods of the greater nations.

VIII. They also imagined that lesser deities, minor gods, served the Sun. Above all, they invented the twelve signs of the zodiac; from these they also admitted, in Hellenism, twelve gods of the second rank — or eleven, together with Jupiter himself. Ennius summed them all up in a couplet. Others say that there were twelve besides Jupiter himself, assigned to him as counselors and assessors. So Seneca: "Jupiter indeed sends the second thunderbolt, but by the advice of his council; for he summons twelve gods." Hence they were called the "consenting gods," because in every decision to be made in heaven, their consent was sought. Whence that saying of Augustine: "Who can bear it, that felicity has a place neither among the consenting gods, whom they say are called into Jupiter's council, nor among the gods they call 'select'?" Others reckon eleven besides Jupiter himself: "If Jupiter should bring with him eleven gods besides himself." Plautus, Epidicus 5.1.4: "Twelve gods — more than there are immortal gods in heaven — now help and assist me" (ibid., 5.2.10), by which he implies that there are just that many in heaven. And Demochares: Ὦ Θεόφραστε, Ἀθηναῖοι ἦσαν ἀλλ' οὐχ οἱ δώδεκα θεοὶ οἱ δικάζοντες ("O Theophrastus, it was Athenian men who judged, not the twelve gods") — "O Theophrastus, it was the men of Athens who were the judges, not the twelve gods." To all these together altars were erected everywhere, as in the territory of Ilium: Ἐπὶ τῷ Λεκτῷ βωμὸς τῶν δώδεκα θεῶν δείκνυται· καλοῦσι δ' Ἀγαμέμνονος ἵδρυμα ("At Lectum an altar of the twelve gods is shown; they call it the foundation of Agamemnon"), Strabo, Geography, book 13, chapter 1. And again: Εἶτ' Ἀχαιῶν λιμὴν ὅπου οἱ βωμοὶ τῶν δώδεκα θεῶν ("then the harbor of the Achaeans, where the altars of the twelve gods are"). And at Athens, in the very marketplace, by Pisistratus the Tyrant, as Thucydides testifies, History, book 6. These, on Apollodorus's testimony, were called in as arbiters between Neptune and Minerva, disputing over the naming of Athens; and before them Mars, accused of the murder of Halirrhothius, pleaded his capital case at the Areopagus — that is, "at the rock," so called afterward from that trial. Hence Augustus's banquet of the δωδεκάθεος ("twelve gods"), in Suetonius, at which so many guests were present adorned in the garb of the gods.

IX. Herodotus relates that the origin of this superstition was Egyptian, book 2, chapter 4: Δώδεκα θεῶν ἐπωνυμίας ἔλεγον πρώτους Αἰγυπτίους νομίσαι, καὶ Ἕλληνας παρὰ σφέων ἀναλαβεῖν ("They say the Egyptians were the first to devise the appellations of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks took them over from them") — "They say that the Egyptians were the first to invent the naming of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks received it from them." But among the Egyptians the twelve gods were nothing other than the twelve signs of the zodiac.

X. Among these they preferred one, as we have said, infinitely above all the rest, and imagined that the others arranged themselves according to his will. Hence that line of Plautus in the Casina, Act 2, scene 5, verse 23. And Ulysses, speaking of Hector to Achilles, in Homer: Μαίνεται ἐκπάγλως πίσυνος Διΐ, οὐδέ τι τίει Ἀνέρας οὐδὲ θεούς ("He rages terribly, trusting in Zeus, and honors neither men nor gods") — "He rages beyond measure, relying on Jove, and reveres neither mortals nor gods." These lesser gods, then, they judged to perform a certain mediatorial office, in the place of mortals, before that supreme God. No scene recurs more often in the poets than that of second-rank gods entreating the supreme god on behalf of those with whom they had some bond of kinship or connection. So Venus, on behalf of the endangered Trojans, in Virgil, Aeneid 10:18–20. And these mediators themselves — mortals — they honored with prayers and petitions, just as is still practiced today among the followers of the Papacy in the worship of δαιμόνια ("deities," i.e. departed saints); on which the most learned Mede should be consulted, in his Diatribe on the Apostasy of the Latter Times. And so, with God and the angels, the sun and the signs of the zodiac, the Cretan Jupiter and other dead men, all jumbled together by the dreadful madness of superstition, all notions of the one God were rendered utterly corrupt, vain, and useless.

XI. There is no need for us to say anything of the rest of the crowd of gods, whose origin is most uncertain. Plautus divides them into "gods above," "gods below," and "gods in between" — elsewhere into "great," "least," and "household" gods. Ovid calls them the "common people of heaven," in the Ibis, line 79. In patching together fables about these, the ancients scarcely ever agreed among themselves anywhere; hence Pausanias, in his Boeotica, after recounting some opinion of the Thebans concerning the gods, adds: Καὶ Μεγαρεῦσι ἐς αὐτὴν οὐχ ὁμολογοῦσι· διάφορα καὶ τὰ λοιπά, ὡς τὸ πολύ, ἀλλήλοις λέγουσιν Ἕλληνες ("and the Megarians do not agree with it; and in most other matters too the Greeks generally contradict one another") — "The Greeks generally disagree among themselves about these matters." They distributed them all into fixed classes, assigning some to heaven, who were called ὑπερουράνιοι ("above heaven"), ἐνουράνιοι ("in heaven"), and ἐπουράνιοι ("upon heaven"); some to the air, called ἐναιθέριοι ("in the upper air") and ἐναέριοι ("in the air"); others to earth and sea, called in general ἐπίγειοι ("earthly"), and specifically ἐπιχθόνιοι, ἐνάλιοι, θαλάττιοι, ἐνθαλάττιοι ("of the earth," "of the sea"); others to the underworld, called ὑπόγειοι, χθόνιοι, ὑποχθόνιοι, καταχθόνιοι ("under the earth," "earthly," "beneath the earth," "down under the earth"); and they were named too from their particular offices and cares: ἑστιοῦχοι ("hearth-keepers"), πολιοῦχοι ("city-keepers"), πατρῷοι ("ancestral"), ξένιοι ("of hospitality"), πάτριοι ("paternal"), ἀγοραῖοι ("of the marketplace"), ἐπικάρπιοι ("of the harvest"), στράτιοι ("of the army"), τροπαιοῦχοι ("trophy-bearing"), ἱκέσιοι ("of suppliants"), τρόπαιοι, ἀποτρόπαιοι ("averting"), λύσιοι ("releasing"), καθάρσιοι ("purifying"), σωτῆρες ("saviors"), ἀσφάλειοι ("of safety"), παλαμναῖοι, προστρόπαιοι ("of supplication"), γενέθλιοι ("of birth"), γαμήλιοι ("of marriage"), and so on. There is scarcely anyone, however, who does not know that Popery has carried this whole apparatus of the pagan stage into the Christian religion.

Chapter 14

Or, Concerning the Origin and Progress of Idolatry — Chapter 12.

The progress of idolatry into utter confusion — The nations' own peculiar gods, adopted by themselves — The αὐτοθεϊσμός ("self-deification") of very many — The ἐκθέωσις ("deification") of Alexander among the Lacedaemonians — The fable of Tiberius wishing to enroll Christ among the number of the gods — In the fashioning of images and the painting of gods, the contempt of all religion — The madness of the Egyptians — Penalties against foreign gods established by law, inflicted only on worshipers of the one true God — The truly golden words of Justin Martyr.

I. We have spoken of those whom the mass of idolaters, by common and general consent, religiously venerated throughout almost the whole world. As polytheism grew stronger, every nation, every city, all peoples, adopted for themselves whatever gods they wished. In earnest and in jest, publicly and privately, from ancient tradition or on present authority, out of empty affections — everywhere there sprang up a most abundant harvest of deities. Pausanias relates these origins of new gods, in his Attica: Θεὸν δὲ Ἀμφιάραον πρώτοις Ὠρωπίοις κατέστη νομίζειν· ὕστερον δὲ καὶ πάντες Ἕλληνες ἤγηνται· καταλέξαι δὲ καὶ ἄλλους ἔχω γενομένους τότε ἀνθρώπους, οἳ θεῶν Ἕλλησι τιμὰς ἔχουσι, τοῖς δὲ ἀνάκεινται πόλεις ("It was the Oropians who first held Amphiaraus to be a god; and afterward all the Greeks too came to think so. I could list others besides, who, having once been men, are held by the Greeks in divine honor, and to whom cities have even been dedicated") — "The Oropians were the first of all to enroll Amphiaraus among the number of the gods, and the rest of the Greeks followed them. I can list others too, who, though they had formerly been men, the Greeks held in divine honor, and to whom cities were even dedicated." For everywhere, at last, the custom prevailed that whoever had pleased mankind became a god; for every people had the right to enroll whomever they wished among the number of the gods. And from this arose no small dispute between the Roman tax-farmers and the Greeks. For since it had been provided by the censorial law that land belonging to the immortal gods should pay no tribute, the tax-farmers stoutly denied that any who had once been men were immortal, as Marcus Tullius Cicero testifies, book 3 of On the Nature of the Gods.

II. Alexander too, and Caligula, Claudius, Domitian, and other monsters of wickedness, wished to be reckoned gods while still alive — feeling secure, perhaps, because they would be dead once among the shades below. Callisthenes, in Curtius, wittily mocks this madness: "So then," he says, "do you and I, Cleon, make gods? Is the king to receive the authority of his own divinity from us? I should like to test your power — make someone a king, if you can make a god; it is easier to give an empire than heaven" (Quintus Curtius, book 8, chapter 5). Against the Lacedaemonians, force was employed because they refused the right of deification, until Alexander was admitted by that ritual whose legitimacy Cicero denies — the very man who so vigorously attacks Clodius's dedication of his house. "Since," they were saying, "Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god." Athenaeus, book 5, testifies that the Athenians of that time fined the orator Demades ten talents, because he had tried to persuade them to recognize Alexander as a god — although they themselves afterward paid divine honors to Demetrius Poliorcetes, a man scarcely a fraction of what Alexander was, while he was still alive and present. Claudius's αὐτοθεϊσμός ("self-deification") vanished at the sound of thunder; for, fleeing into his tent, he said, "This is a god, not Claudius."

III. From this custom among the nations was born the fable that Tiberius attempted to enroll Christ among the number of the Roman gods, but, the senate opposing, abandoned the proposal. Would that it had never occurred to good men to spread abroad fables of this sort; God forbid that anyone should ever again give credence to them.

IV. Kings and Roman emperors, too, enrolled in the register of the gods whomever they pleased; and all of them after Julius were judged by the senate to be either gods or public enemies — hence Vespasian's dying jest: "I think I am becoming a god." But for one to be reckoned a god, it was generally necessary that he die while still wearing the purple; hence Eutropius says of Diocletian, "It happened to him, as to no man born since, that although he died a private citizen, he was nevertheless enrolled among the deified." This, however, was not always true. Alexander ordered divine honors to be paid to his friend Hephaestion, and sacrifice offered to him (Curtius, book 10). And Antoninus Caracalla himself, a monster of a man, was enrolled among the gods by Macrinus, who had killed him, as Aelius Spartianus testifies. Concerning Hadrian — who first sacrificed his beloved Antinous, so as to use his entrails for μαντεῖαι ("divinations") and μαγγανεῖαι ("sorceries"), and then enrolled him among the number of the gods, and set up his image everywhere in the world — there is a dreadful account in Dio's History, book 69; and Clement, in his Exhortation, and Tertullian, in his Apology, justly rail against this impiety. Private persons, too, were permitted to worship privately whomever they wished. Witness Cornelia's saying to her son Gaius Gracchus: "When I am dead, you will offer rites to me, and invoke the divine shades of your parent; and at that time, be not ashamed to seek in prayer that God whom, while living and present, you left forsaken and deserted."

V. Here indeed the contempt of all religion, and of all notions of Deity, advanced so far that it eventually became mere sport to mix the most shameful crimes into their disgraceful superstitions. Let the reader see in Pliny, book 35, chapters 9 and 10, what outrages were practiced in fashioning and painting the images of the gods. Nothing was more common among painters (of whom Cicero says, "We know the faces of all the gods only as painters and sculptors have chosen to make them") than to paint goddesses in the likeness of their favorite prostitutes; so did Arellius, who was never without some woman's love burning in him. And Clodius himself, in his own speech to the pontiffs concerning his house, admits that the image which he consecrated in Cicero's house under the name of the Goddess of Liberty had been modeled on a prostitute of Tanagra. Thus nowhere more than in religion itself do they seem to have cast off all sense of religion. Mankind, then, being conquered, the ancient serpent triumphed; and he was not content merely to hold men bound to himself, unless he also made them a laughingstock as captives, and set them foully against one another in arms and war, all for the sake of the most inane superstitions. Such an outstanding example of the blindness and misery of mankind laboring under Satan's yoke is exhibited by the satirist, concerning the neighboring peoples of Egypt, as he puts it, Satire 15, lines 33–38 — the Crocodile, the firebrand of war. And he writes that both peoples continued this battle, undertaken for such a cause, until the victors devoured the vanquished (ibid., lines 77–83): "Here one, in excessive fear, loses his footing as he runs..." I am persuaded, with almost historical confidence, that the poet reported this incredible savagery of the Egyptians truthfully — both from the inborn and blind fury of very many men, arising over disputes about matters of almost no religious moment at all, and from the crimes of a similar kind committed, in name only as Christians, by not a few against the innocent professors of the Christian religion.

VI. Yet however much idolaters carried on disputes and enmities among themselves, they all seem to have conspired in this one thing: to spurn the one true God and his worship. And so, although it had been provided by law at Athens that no one should venerate ξένα δαιμόνια ("foreign deities"), and at Rome, by the Twelve Tables, "that no one should have separate gods of his own, nor privately worship new or foreign gods unless they had been publicly adopted," yet no one can be found who was ever prosecuted for violating religion by worshiping some other god besides those publicly adopted — except one who worshiped the one true God (Socrates alone excepted, whose accusation was, Ἀδικεῖ Σωκράτης οὓς μὲν ἡ πόλις νομίζει θεοὺς οὐ νομίζων, ἕτερα δὲ καινὰ δαιμόνια ἐσηγούμενος, "Socrates does wrong in not believing in the gods the city believes in, and in introducing other new deities"). But as Christianity arose, this madness of men and this envy of Satan broke out with the greatest force. Justin, the most ancient of Christian writers, most elegantly reproaches the philosophic emperors for this blindness and rage; and it is fitting to close this digression with his truly golden words: Μόνοι μισούμεθα δι' ὄνομα τοῦ Χριστοῦ· καὶ μηδὲν ἀδικοῦντες ὡς ἁμαρτωλοὶ ἀναιρούμεθα· ἄλλων ἀλλαχοῦ καὶ δένδρα σεβομένων καὶ ποταμοὺς, καὶ μᾶς καὶ αἰλούρους, καὶ κροκοδείλους, καὶ τῶν ἀλόγων ζώων τὰ πολλά· καὶ οὐ τῶν αὐτῶν ὑπὸ πάντων τιμωμένων, ἀλλὰ ἄλλων ἀλλαχόσε, ὡς εἶναι ἀσεβεῖς ἀλλήλοις πάντας, διὰ τὸ μὴ τὰ αὐτὰ σέβειν. Ὅπερ μόνον ἐγκαλεῖν ἡμῖν ἔχετε, ὅτι μὴ τοὺς αὐτοὺς ὑμῖν σέβομεν θεούς, μηδὲ τοῖς ἀποθανοῦσι χοὰς καὶ κνίσας καὶ ἐν γραφαῖς στεφάνους καὶ θυσίας φέρομεν· ὅτι γὰρ οὐ τὰ αὐτά, παρ' οἷς μὲν θεοί, παρ' οἷς δὲ θηρία, παρ' οἷς δ' ἱερεῖα νενομισμένα ἐστὶν ἀκριβῶς ἐπίστασθε — "We alone are hated for the name of Christ; and though we commit no offense against the laws, we are put to death as though we were criminals — while others elsewhere worship trees, and rivers, and mice, and cats, and crocodiles, and many of the animals that lack reason. And indeed not all venerate the same things, but different peoples in different places, so that, taken all together, they are all impious in one another's eyes, because they do not worship the same sacred things. Yet this is the one thing you have to charge us with as a crime: that we do not worship the same gods as you, nor bring libations and the savor of fat, and, in painted images, garlands and sacrifices, to the dead — though you know for certain that the very same animals are, among some, held as deities, among others as wild beasts, and among still others as sacrificial victims."

Book Four

Chapter 1

On Abrahamic Theology.

The state and condition of the pious theologians after the Babylonian apostasy — Abraham entangled in superstitions before his calling, Joshua 24:2 — Jewish fables concerning Ur of the Chaldeans, and Abraham cast into the fire — The calling of Abraham: how, and when, it took place — The enlargement of Noachic theology — The renewal of the divine covenant — The institution of circumcision — The completion of the church's new separation from the world.

I. In the previous discourse, investigating the origins of idolatry, we set forth the rise, progress, and fatal outcome of the Babylonian, or Nimrodic, apostasy; and thus, in keeping with our present design, we have finished with natural theology. It is plain from the outcome that the apostate church was all but catholic — that is, universal. Noah, indeed, was still alive when the tower of Babel was built, and he survived the dispersion of his rebellious grandchildren. For this proud defection occurred in the seven hundred and second year of Noah's life, after which he lived on some two hundred and forty-eight years, or thereabouts; and Shem, of course, far longer still. It would be impious to suppose that these ever fell away from the true worship of the true God. While Noah, then, was still living, many without doubt — especially among those with whom skill in, and use of, the primeval language remained — clung to God the Creator of all things in the Redeemer who had been promised, and persevered in his sacred worship. As is the way with witnesses to the truth in every catholic apostasy, they appear to have led a life of hardship on earth, scattered here and there, held in hatred, and exposed to the persecutions of the wicked. Things divine and human being thus reduced to this state — idolatry increasing and multiplying day by day, and the impiety and wickedness of men growing stronger and stronger — every hope of reforming the church, or of recalling the human race to a good harvest, was cast aside; and God resolved to raise up a new church, furnished with a new theology. But this could not be done except by a visible separation of some from the rest. This, then, took place in the calling of Abraham (recorded in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Genesis), by which God carried out this his purpose.

II. From the renewal of the church in the family of Noah after the flood — through the amplification of the postlapsarian Adamic theology in the pact of an expressed covenant — down to the apostasy and curse of Ham, there intervened forty years, or thereabouts. So long did the church, newly restored after the flood, remain pure. From that reformation, which was accomplished in the casting out of Ham and his family from the assemblies and communion of the godly, down to the Babylonian defection, there were sixty-two years. In so brief a span of time did that reformed church fall away, in a dreadful manner, from the worship of the true God. Between that defection, moreover, and the separation of Abraham — that is, the founding of a new church in his calling — there intervened three hundred and twenty-four years. The whole span of time, therefore, in which Noachic theology was the rule and norm of divine worship and of the obedience owed to God, came to four hundred and twenty-six years.

III. That Abraham himself, before his solemn calling, was to some degree tainted by the contagion of the Babylonian defection and crime, Scripture reports at Joshua 24:2: "Beyond the river" (Joshua is addressing the Israelites) "your fathers dwelt of old, Terah the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor, and they served other gods." That Abraham himself is meant here is denied by all the Jews — a proud and stubborn race of men, eager to ascribe everything to themselves and to their fathers according to the flesh, and nothing to divine grace and mercy. That whole people has called its paternal lineage from Abraham, its maternal from Nahor. But God has no other purpose here, in charging the authors of the whole Israelite stock with that crime, than to show that whatever they have obtained above the rest of mortals, they obtained by the mere benefit of his grace alone. For he foreknew with how great a pride that stiff-necked people, puffed up with the glorious name of their fathers and the title of "sons of Abraham," would come to despise his righteousness in the promised seed, and his mercy. Nor is it only here that the Holy Spirit strives to draw them back from a vain confidence in their own righteousness. To this very day, scattered throughout the whole world, they clamor against the grace of the gospel — boasting of nothing but the merits and obedience of their fathers and their own righteousness — and perish miserably.

IV. But in order to give some color to their vain and empty self-glorying, they have fabricated a most foul fable about "Ur of the Chaldees," out of which sacred Scripture testifies that God called Abraham. The Targum ascribed to Jonathan ben Uzziel, on Genesis 11:28, tells the story thus: "Now it happened, when Nimrod cast Abram into the furnace of fire because he would not worship his idol, that the fire had no power to burn him; and so a doubt arose, Haran saying, 'If Nimrod prevails, I will stand on his side; but if Abram prevails, I will stand on his side.' But when all the peoples who were there saw that the fire had no dominion over Abram, they said among themselves, 'Is not Haran, Abram's brother, full of divinations and auguries? He himself has bewitched the fire so that it would not burn his brother.' At once fire fell from the high heavens and consumed him, and Haran died before the eyes of his brother, when he was burned in the land of his birth, in the furnace of fire which the Chaldeans had made for their brother." So does he, in his own fashion, most inept a patcher-together of fables. "Ur," to be sure, he interprets as "fire" — that being one sense the word bears — though it is plainly the name of a place; and the phrase עַל־פְּנֵי (as in Genesis, "before Terah his father") means simply that his father was still alive and surviving, in his father's presence — whereas others, as noted above, idly imagine that Haran died before his father as a punishment, because he was a maker of images. No one fails to see that lying Jews took the occasion for this fable from the history of Nebuchadnezzar's casting three holy men into a furnace of fire for not worshiping the idol he had erected, as found in Daniel 3.

V. That Abraham, for refusing the worship of idols, was punished by the king of the Chaldeans not with fire but with exile, is reported by Maimonides from the traditions of the Sabians, in the Guide for the Perplexed, part iii, chapter 29. The masters of the Jews compose the story a little differently in Bereshith Rabbah, chapter 38: they relate that Abraham broke his father's images, and was for that reason denounced by his own father to King Nimrod, by whom, after various disputations, he was cast into the fire and rescued by an angel. I have no doubt whatsoever that the greatest injury has been done by these fable-mongers to the memory of Terah, a man who, as it appears, was pious and holy. Maimonides himself, in the first book of his treatise On the Worship of the Stars, relates at length that the king of the Chaldeans wished to kill Abraham on account of his disputations against idols and the violence done to their images. And the fable is old enough, for Jerome mentions it in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, and, long before him, Josephus, Antiquities, book i, chapter 7: Χαλδαίων τε καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Μεσοποταμιτῶν στασιασάντων πρὸς αὐτὸν, μετοικεῖν δοκιμάσας, κατὰ βούλησιν καὶ βοήθειαν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὴν Χαναναίαν ἔσχε γῆν ("When the Chaldeans and the rest of the Mesopotamians rose up in sedition against him, he resolved upon migration, and, relying on the will and help of God, took possession of the land of Canaan"). Nor indeed is it unlike the truth that impious idolaters, once he had been instructed in the true knowledge of God, should have risen up against him. But that Abraham contended with his father Terah over the making and worship of images — this is a thing scarcely any of the ancient Christians failed to believe as well. So John Malalas of Antioch, that unpublished trifler, in the Bodleian Library, book iii: Ὁ δὲ Ἀβραὰμ ἐπιγνοὺς καὶ λογισάμενος, ὅτι τὰ ἀγάλματα, ἃ ἐποίει ὁ πατὴρ αὐτοῦ Θάῤῥας, ἀνθρώπων τεθνηκότων ὑπάρχει, καὶ οὐκ ἐχρῆν τιμᾶσθαι αὐτοὺς, ὡς θεοὺς ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, γενομένους γῆν καὶ κόνιν· κατεγίνωσκεν οὖν τῷ ἰδίῳ πατρί Θάῤῥᾳ λέγων. Τί πλανᾷς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους διὰ κέρδος; οὐκ ἔστι γὰρ ἄλλος Θεὸς εἰ μὴ ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς ὁ δημιουργήσας τὰ ὁρώμενα ταῦτα πάντα· καὶ λαβὼν ἔκλασε τὰ ἀγάλματα πάντα καὶ ἀνεχώρησεν ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀπῆλθεν εἰς τὴν Μεσοποταμίαν ("Abraham, having come to know and reflected that the images which his father Terah made were of dead men, and that they ought not to be honored as gods in heaven, being now become earth and dust, took his own father Terah to task, saying: 'Why do you lead men into error for the sake of base gain? For there is no other God but him who is in the heavens, who made all these things that we see.' And no sooner said than done, he broke all the images, and, leaving his father, made his way toward Mesopotamia").

VI. That they represent Terah not merely as a maker but also as a seller of images betrays the fable for what it is: Ἡ γὰρ ἀγαλματοποιΐα ἡ ἀρχαία οὐ τοῦτο ἔπραττεν, οὐδὲ περιέβαν τὰς πόλεις ἀποδιδόμενοι τοὺς θεούς ("for the ancient art of image-making did not do this, nor did its practitioners go about the cities peddling gods") — so said Apollonius, according to Philostratus, book v, chapter 7, to a statue-maker selling images of the gods: "The ancient sculptors did not traffic in gods, nor court the cities in order to sell them; for that is fitting treatment for Hyrcanian and Scythian slaves, not for gods." But אוֹר ("Ur"), as we have said, was the name of a place, whatever the word itself may mean.

VII. Rambam (Maimonides) admits, indeed, that Abraham was ensnared in the worship of idols up to the forty-eighth year of his age, but that in that very year he cast off all fellowship with it. He was called by God, however, in the seventy-fifth year of his age (Genesis 12:4) — or perhaps a year earlier, when he left Ur and arrived at Haran. Between his renunciation of idolatrous worship, therefore, and his calling, at least twenty-six years intervened. And why so? Why, so that we might know that God did not choose or call Abraham out of his mere grace, but on account of his righteousness and obedience and love for him, and the merits of his former life! Thus do these little men constantly seize every occasion to take up the cause of their own righteousness against the grace of God.

VIII. I confess indeed that most of the ancients, deceived by the Jews, believed that Abraham arrived at the knowledge of the true God through the contemplation of the stars, before he was called. Suidas tells the fable at length under the entry "Abraham"; all these are the dreams of a proud Jewish people, which the Arabs imitate as well, as may be seen in Abraham Ecchellensis's Historia Arabum, p. 125.

IX. Simon Episcopius forges a fiction of much the same kind, with a similar design, in his Institutiones Theologicae, book ii, chapter 4: he writes that it is credible that Abraham, before his calling — though a man of upright life and a serious lover of probity — was nevertheless given over to the worship of idols. Why, I ask, should that not be credible? But what does it seem to follow from this? "Minds of this sort," he says, "are not only capable but also teachable, and at the same time some great light shines upon them, by which they are illumined and affected." There was, then, no need of irresistible Calvinistic grace to engender faith or obedience in Abraham! But what, I ask, is τὸ δουλεύειν ὑποθέσει ("being a slave to one's own hypothesis"), if this is not? Of Abraham's probity and integrity before his calling we do not read so much as a jot (γρῦ) in sacred Scripture. He is said only to have served other gods. But the design of the Holy Spirit, and of this man, appear to be opposite. The one everywhere proclaims the grace of God; the other, the probity and integrity of men destitute of divine grace. The one sets forth what serves to exalt the glory of divine mercy; the other scrapes together what serves to the praise of capable and teachable minds. But this is the way of certain men: they think they have accomplished nothing unless they have said a great deal in reproach of the grace of God.

X. For the rest, nothing prevents us from believing that Abraham, even in the midst of idol-worship, retained at least some knowledge of the true God. For not only is he said to worship other gods who, having cast off all reverence for the true Deity, takes up other gods as objects of worship for himself; but also he who, in whatever manner, wished to join other gods together with him, or who seemed to himself to be worshiping him in images and idols.

XI. Now that solemn calling of Abraham, though it was accomplished through an oracle, a kind of external word, nevertheless proceeded from the efficacious, heart-turning operation of the Holy Spirit — for that man, who lay in such darkness, exposed to temptations as great as could arise from the close bond of kinsfolk and household and from the fear of a long pilgrimage undertaken with no human resource to sustain him, presented himself so readily and willingly obedient to the word, and submitted himself at once to God's command. That calling, moreover, had regard both to holiness of heart and life — the internal renewal of the whole man — and to an external separation unto the worship of the true God. For it is not only reckoned to Abraham's praise that he worshiped God by a renewed rite and called upon him solemnly, but also that he was faithful, a friend of God, that he received the promises, that he was justified by faith, and that he proved himself the most constant lover of God. God, therefore, about to raise up a new church through a visible separation from the world and from all the admixtures and corruptions of false religion, laid its foundations in the true faith, holiness, and obedience of those called upon the promised Messiah himself.

XII. Abraham having in this way been called to the will of God, God delivered and committed to him, as the norm of worship and of living, the Noachic theology — explained and amplified by new revelations. So great and so illustrious an exposition of the divine will and of the mystery of grace was set forth in this explication of postlapsarian theology, that scarcely any single dispensation of revelation, before the one who came, to whom all things were laid up, yielded a richer harvest. For, first, a clearer and fuller explanation of the ancient promise was given to him, and repeated on various occasions: Genesis 12:3, 7; 13:15-16; 15:1, 5-6; 17:1-2, 9; 22:17-18.

XIII. Christ had now begun "to look forth from the windows, and to show himself through the lattice" (Song of Songs 2:9) — indeed, to "hasten, and liken himself to a gazelle or a young hart upon the mountains of spices" (Song of Songs 8:14), that is, to manifest himself openly and sweetly to the faith, love, and desire of the elect. For the promise of the victorious and beatifying seed is renewed at least seven times. Then, secondly, to this explication of the promise there was added a fuller declaration of the covenant of grace, consisting in promise and stipulation. For God not only makes express mention of a covenant when he deals with Abraham concerning obedience, as he had done before with Noah, but also sets forth the very nature of that covenant-making, joining the promise together with a stipulation of both universal and sincere obedience of faith: Genesis 17:1, אֲנִי־אֵל שַׁדַּי הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי וֶהְיֵה תָמִים ("I am God Almighty; walk before my face, and be perfect"). This solemn transaction he calls a "covenant" in verse 7, and there also explains what the sense of those words, "I AM GOD ALMIGHTY," was: namely, that he would be such to him in himself, undertaking his care by his own omnipotence, and that it would go well with him forever through the promised seed: "I will establish my covenant between me and you...for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you" (Genesis 17:7) — that is, "I will establish my covenant between me and you as an everlasting covenant, and I will be God to you." Having first set forth the promise of the Seed, the foundation of all grace, God graciously promises that he will, in that seed, be to him a God who spares, sanctifies, justifies, and preserves, freely and unchangeably, requiring in turn from him faith and new obedience. Further, thirdly, for Abraham's own comfort, a certain appropriation of the covenant to his family is granted, so that no one should attain blessedness except from that family, or by virtue of the blessing annexed to that family (Genesis 12:3). Thus he is constituted the father of the faithful. Fourthly, circumcision is instituted as the sign of the covenant (Genesis 17:10-11). And fifthly, a communication of the privileges of the covenant and of the church is granted together with the infant seed (which, after it had once begun to be a matter of God's particular care, the church has never absolutely lost) — Genesis 17:7. Nor, lastly, was it the smallest part of Abraham's theology that God took him into his friendship, and by revelations repeated from time to time made him so familiar with himself, that he came forth upright, righteous, godly, and instructed, beyond what can be told, in all divine wisdom and the mysteries of the faith. Of these matters, however, since they are particular, and so do not pertain immediately to our present undertaking, this is not the place to speak.

XIV. From the year of the world 2083, this illustrious exposition of theology took its beginning, and lasted, on the apostle's testimony, four hundred and thirty years (Galatians 3:17). For Abraham received the promise when he was seventy-six years old, or at the very beginning of that year, when he had already departed from Haran and arrived in the land of Canaan. From the giving of this promise it came to pass: "at the end of four hundred and thirty years, even on that very same day, all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt" (Exodus 12:41). The law on Mount Sinai, which gave the beginning to Mosaic theology, was given in the third month after that departure from Egypt (Exodus 19:1). This dispensation of theology, then, lasted exactly four hundred and thirty years and three months. On this span of time, and the proper establishing of its epochs, let the reader consult Ussher's Sacred Chronology, chapters 8 and 9.

XV. Abraham, thus called, separated, and instructed in the will of God, by the benefit and virtue of a renewed and amplified theology established a new church in his own household, and observed the solemn worship of God apart from all who were tainted with the superstitions of the apostate church. For he built an altar to the LORD between Bethel and Ai, "and called upon the name of the LORD" (Genesis 12:8). Those words, וַיִּקְרָא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָה, are the same as those employed in the account of the reformation of the church of Enosh and the restoration of divine worship (Genesis 4:26), which we treated at greater length above. And all confess that all the external worship of God, sacrifices themselves included, is contained under "the calling upon the name of God."

XVI. But not even this state of the church lasted without notable blemish, so that it stood in need of reformation long before the end appointed for that dispensation by God had come. For besides the fact that several of Abraham's descendants — namely Ishmael, and Esau with the sons of Keturah — fell away entirely from the true church, even into the very house of Jacob, where the solemn worship of God was accustomed to be performed, superstition crept in through the Syrian wives. For Rachel would not have stolen her father's teraphim (of which more later) unless she were to some degree held by a perverse superstition. Silly indeed are the things the rabbis invent here — namely, that she took away her father's household gods only so that, by consulting them, he might not be made certain of Jacob's flight; for we shall see that the teraphim were employed in auguries and divinations. How far this superstition crept in, and how widely it spread in the house of that most holy patriarch, is uncertain. But that it clung to his house is apparent from the solemn reformation which he instituted. This is found in Genesis 35:1-4: "And God said to Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there; and make there an altar to the mighty God who appeared to you when you fled from the fear of Esau your brother. Wherefore Jacob said to his household, and to all who were with him, Put away the strange gods that are among you. So they gave to Jacob all the strange gods that were in their hand, and the earrings that were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the oak that is near Shechem." That most holy man understood himself to be called, by an oracle, to reform the church — to restore the solemn worship of God, which had been all too much neglected amid the turmoils, dangers, and migrations he had endured. Obedient, therefore, to the word of God, he undertakes the reformation, and piously admonishes the whole household — wives and children alike, and the servants attached to it — concerning the work God had commanded him. It appears, moreover, that not a few had been defiled with idolatrous worship, and that idols of more than one kind had a place in his household. For of several it is said, "They brought fictitious gods and earrings" — that is, things which had been consecrated to the name of some false god. All these he buried in the ground, where the household gods of Laban doubtless perished without a trace. And this was a peculiar and hitherto unused method of instituting a reformation — namely, one directed not against persons but against the very things devoted to false worship; and this method God here approved for the use of all ages. Now this reformation of the church in the house of Jacob occurred one hundred and ninety years after its establishment in the household of Abraham — that is, in about the hundred and fifth year of Jacob's life, some four or five years after he had departed from Mesopotamia.

Chapter 2

On Mosaic theology.

The church founded and fixed in the calling of Abraham — what the visibility of the church is, and whence it arises — the state of the church after the calling of Abraham down to the giving of the law — the primeval language preserved — the sons of Abraham not immune from the taint of superstition in Egypt — the Sinaitic legislation, or the beginning of Mosaic theology — the first state of the church under positive law — theology, hitherto delivered piecemeal, reduced into one body, committed to writing, the doctrine of the church completed — the certainty, authority, and evidence of the word of God committed to writing — the twofold consideration of Mosaic theology — in what sense evangelical, in what sense legal — the Jewish fable of the oral law exploded — the threefold foundation of present-day Judaism.

I. AFTER God had, amid dangers, and often on the very verge of destruction, preserved his church through so many ages — here, there, wherever among the nations, illuminating whomever, or however many, he pleased with the light of heavenly truth — it pleased him at last, in the solemn calling of Abraham set forth above, to fix and steady that church, which had until then been as it were wandering and unstable; and, through a total separation from a world now plainly and openly placed under the power of Satan, and through the institution of new rites, to render it more visible and conspicuous. For the visibility, as they call it, of the church is not to be estimated from the number of its professors. Since, indeed, the assembly of God's people on earth, which is the church, is customarily called "visible" from that piety which is the very distinction between the righteous and the unrighteous, it can happen — indeed, it very often does happen — that, that piety being neglected, from which alone it is conspicuous, the church lies almost hidden amid the greatest crowd of professors, and cannot be clearly discerned. And a company is visible for no other reason than that it is a church. Although, therefore, in the calling of Abraham the church was reduced to almost a single family, yet, since it was then increased and enlarged by spiritual light and by new institutions of divine worship which made its separation from the rest of the world notable, it shone forth from that time more illustrious, more visible, and more glorious than ever before.

II. We have already, above, briefly related, so far as our undertaking required, that revelation which, being made to Abraham, was the foundation of the new church. We have also shown that the theology resting upon it stood, for four hundred and thirty years, as the rule or canon of obedience acceptable to God, and of the faith and worship of nearly all the godly. What befell this new race of theologians, that is, the Abrahamic church, by divine providence over the course of several centuries, is most plainly set forth in the books of Genesis and Exodus. They were, indeed, stirred up and spurred on from time to time by new revelations, to render due obedience to God, to celebrate his worship assiduously, and to trust in his promises. And though they were exposed, by the fixed counsel of God, to various afflictions and persecutions (by which they were exercised rather than broken or crushed), yet in every strait and danger they obtained unspeakable testimonies of divine favor and care. It is recorded in Scripture that Abraham, that great father of the church and of the household, communicated to his posterity the promises he had received, the knowledge of God's will with which he had been instructed, and all the rites of worship — both those handed down from the fathers and those recently prescribed to him (Genesis 18:18-19). All these things, according to each man's measure, were observed by all those who descended, in the natural order, from that son of his to whom alone the promises pertained, or who, by the will and counsel of God, joined themselves to them, until that appointed time should come in which all things were to be renewed and reduced to a new form of external worship.

III. We have shown that the language used by Abraham was that of the first men, which at length, from Eber, was called Hebrew. This his descendants, though ranging through many parts of the East where other dialects — Syriac especially — were in use, kept pure and unimpaired. This appears from the distinction Scripture notes between the speech of Laban the Syrian and that of Jacob, at Genesis 31:47: "Laban called it" (the heap of stones) "Jegar-sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed." The common translator adds, "each according to the propriety of his own language." Yet Laban, since he was among Eber's descendants, seems probably not to have entirely forgotten that tongue, judging from the Hebrew names his daughters gave to Jacob's sons; but he had come to use Syriac as now more familiar to him. In Egypt too, where they served a hard bondage for some two hundred years, the native purity of the language remained. The same, however, cannot be said of the worship of the true God. For the Holy Spirit testifies that the whole church fell away, to some degree, from the principles and rule of this Abrahamic theology in Egypt. The prophet Ezekiel teaches that both women, Oholah and Oholibah — that is, Israel and Judah, the whole race of Abraham's descendants — committed adulteries in Egypt (Ezekiel 23:2-3), and that they brought their adulteries out from there (v. 8); whence God complains, in the twentieth chapter of the same prophet, that this people did not forsake the idols of Egypt (v. 8). Likewise Joshua expressly affirms that the fathers of this pilgrim people worshiped other gods not only beyond the river but also in Egypt (Joshua 24:14). And some suppose it was for this reason that, when Satan boasted of having ranged over the whole earth and having it subject to him, God had only Job to set against him (Job 1:8; 2:3). How far this defection of Abraham's descendants proceeded, or with what idols or what foreign worship they defiled themselves, is altogether uncertain. Whether they took up the superstition of Apis, we shall see later. After that time, they are reported to have been ever more addicted to idolatry — not only when they "made a calf" in the wilderness, a stunning example of the vanity and blindness of the human mind, but all the way down to the Babylonian captivity, by which God determined utterly to purge that plague from the church. But these matters belong to the account of the defection of the Mosaic church.

IV. When, therefore, the time was now at hand in which God willed to apply, as it were, a finishing hand to a theology that was to be taught and administered through mere men, he called forth this chosen people — with Moses acting as mediator and go-between — into the utterly desolate wastes of Arabia, separated from all the rest of mortals; and there, not without an immense enlargement of theological light, he taught them the wisest and holiest laws, countless sacred rites, and his whole will. No state of the church founded on positive law, or on pure institution, had preceded these times. Up until now, since the world was founded, each family, either separately or joined with others, as right reason judged fitting to be done from the circumstances of the case, had devoted itself to the instituted worship of God. Nor did the Israelites themselves act otherwise while they remained in Egypt. All, indeed, worshiped the same God according to the dictates of the same theology; but that they should do so as a company united by some ecclesiastical bond — this the law of nature, which alone they made use of in all matters not specially revealed, did not prescribe. But since it was necessary that, for the spiritual glory once to be brought to light through the promised seed, a conspicuous type or pattern should exist, God compacted that whole people into a single visible assembly, which should be the more solemn seat of his worship. And this was accomplished in that most celebrated giving of the law at Sinai. To pursue the heads of particular revelations, or to relate the institutions of worship, would be foreign to our purpose. For one investigating the progress of theology in general, it will suffice to note a few things by which it was now for the first time enlarged.

V. First, then, that heavenly doctrine, or knowledge of God, which had been revealed πολυμερῶς ("in many parts," i.e., piecemeal) and on various occasions from the founding of the world, was now as it were compacted into a single, general, and settled rule of worship and obedience, and delivered μονοειδῶς ("in a single form") to the whole church. Then, since this doctrine had until now been preserved only by oral tradition — by which it was in part utterly lost, and in part rendered useless through admixture with various superstitions and false opinions — it was now, by God's special command and by his ineffable care and mercy toward the church, committed to the trustworthy monuments of writing. In this way theology was snatched from the keeping of mortal men, and no longer exposed to their rashness, blindness, or negligence. Whatever, therefore, may afterward have befallen the theologians themselves, theology from that day forward remained pure, without the least blemish or corruption. Furthermore, to the collected body of earlier revelations and institutions, now digested into laws, new revelations besides were added, which rendered the rule of worshiping God and of living to him so perfect that the church needed no new institution or new doctrine, until he should come in whom "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" were to dwell.

VI. Now these revelations of the divine mind, committed to writing, attest their author with no less evidence, and persuade men that they are from God, than each revelation made immediately to some individual rendered that person certain that he had received it from God. Since it pleased God to breathe immediately upon the spirit of certain mortals, or to make them partakers of divine revelations — as we have shown him to have dealt with Adam, Noah, and Abraham — it is agreed that all of these were made most certain of the will of God, and that God was speaking to them. But there was a peculiar divine certainty and persuasion possessed by those upon whom that afflatus came, or to whom the revelations were communicated by God's command. For whoever wishes to have any certainty about that divine and supernatural revelation which was not granted to him immediately by God, must needs rest upon a twofold foundation: namely, the ministry of that person through whom God communicated it immediately, and the affinity of the very nature of the revealed matter to the divine, which plainly shows that something divine inheres in it. But the divine persuasion of a truth revealed from heaven insinuates itself into the human mind in a far different way, where one hears God himself speaking immediately. Most of those who feared God, before his word was committed to writing, had no other ἀσφάλεια ("certainty, security") of doctrines divinely revealed than that the things themselves were instilled into their minds by the ministry of a few. But now that the mind of God has been set down in writing, every single mortal to whom the Scripture comes has God addressing him no less immediately than if he heard God speaking with a living voice — just as Adam, when he said he had heard the voice of the Lord. For just as no voice can strike the ears of men except by means of the air in which it is formed, and yet that voice, if it really is God's voice, cannot for that reason be denied to be immediately from God; so, although the voice of God is delivered in writing, and God makes use of that medium to address men, there is no reason on that account why he should be said to address them any less immediately. But this is said to happen "immediately" with respect to the sort of human ministry of which we spoke before. That divine quality (τὸ θεῖον) remains in the written word of God which, accompanying the immediate revelations, gave to those to whom they were made a most firm and utterly infallible persuasion of heavenly truth. Abraham himself can serve as an example of the trust which God's oracles, once immediately granted, produced in those who received them. Abraham had no principle of right reason — save this one alone, that God is to be obeyed absolutely in all things — that would not have opposed the command he received, in that most celebrated divine utterance, concerning the sacrifice of his son. Yet the oracle had made it plain to him, with such certainty, such assurance, and such infallibility, that God himself had spoken to him, that, all doubt and disputation set aside, he girded himself at once to carry out the divine command. Nor does the matter stand otherwise in the written word. God so clearly reveals himself in it, and so establishes his authority as its author, that the human mind is bound to render him religious subjection in all things, resting on no other testimony — a point we have demonstrated more fully in a separate treatise.

VII. It is clear that this theology, revealed and confirmed in that celebrated giving of the law, and committed to writing, can be considered in one way or another. For if we attend to the doctrine itself, its scope and its primary object of faith, it tastes of nothing at all but a manifest elucidation of the first evangelical promise. The greatest part of its institutions, almost all the rites of its sacrifices, relate to, point to, and proclaim the promised Mediator, and his whole mediatorial work, together with the eternal redemption once to be procured by his blood. Its manner of teaching is called "legal"; for since all the institutions of worship which it established and exhibited were carnal — instituted by the sole and most free good pleasure of God only for a time appointed for correction (διόρθωσις), and imposed upon the people of Israel — they could not, by their own force, in any way effect those divine and sacred outcomes (ἀποτελέσματα) which they pre-signified and displayed in type. Those, therefore, who were instructed in this theology, although they were bound by the will of the lawgiver to bear the yoke of external rites, nevertheless understood and apprehended by faith the promise of eternal life to be exhibited through the Messiah in the flesh, and of all spiritual blessings lying hidden beneath the shadows of the legal ceremonies. For Christ himself affirms that Moses, and the prophets who interpreted him, bore witness to him and to his mediatorial work. The apostles too, in proclaiming the death and resurrection of Christ himself, and eternal life through them, declared that they taught nothing other than what was written in Moses and the prophets. Of the corruption of this theology, and of the catholic apostasy of its theologians, we must treat more fully hereafter; for the present it will suffice to note that today's apostates are held fast by a threefold, most pernicious error. First, beyond and besides that theology committed to writing, of which we have briefly spoken, they pretend that God delivered a certain other oral, cryptic, mystical theology, containing the exposition of the written one, along with a great many other things, I know not what, added on top of it. And this fable — which sacred Scripture everywhere cries out against — is the very foundation of present-day Judaism. Now how the tradition of this oral law is supposed to have been transmitted is related in the Seder Olam, whose authors show, at the beginning of the work, that they were living around the year of Christ 1128 — for they teach that from the destruction of the second temple to that present time, in which they were engaged upon the work, one thousand and fifty-three years had elapsed. "Joshua the son of Nun," it says, "peace be upon him, received from him" (that is, from Moses) "both the written law and the oral law. It is agreed that Moses our teacher sat judging all Israel from morning to evening, and that the written law did not contain a provision for every one of the new cases that arose. Afterward, however, he set over them captains of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens, and said to them, 'Hear your brethren, and judge them justly.' He also said of himself, 'And I commanded you at that time.' This command was nothing other than that law which he had in his mouth. Concerning the office of slaughtering also, and its ceremonies, it is written, 'What I have commanded you, you shall offer and eat' — teaching, namely, that certain precepts had been laid down concerning slaughtering which were not written in the law. Further, Joshua delivered this law to the elders when he departed to the life of the world to come; the elders, who prolonged their days after Joshua, delivered it to the prophets, and one prophet to another through the generations, down to Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi; the prophets delivered it to the men of the Great Synagogue, who are Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, son of Jeconiah king of Judah; and those who came with Zerubbabel — Joshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Ezra, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispar, Bigvai, Rehum, and Baanah. These are the heads of the Great Synagogue." Now this oral law was afterward committed to writing, we are told at length, by Rabbi Judah, who lived two hundred years after the destruction of the second temple — so R. M. B. M. (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, that is, Maimonides) relates in his preface to Seder Zeraim, which, together with other short works of the same Maimonides, the learned Pococke edited in Arabic and Latin. That law thus grew, first in the Mishnah, then in each of the two Talmuds, with the responses and explanations of the sages from that time onward duly added to it. They chant the very same tune in the first chapter of Pirke Avot, and indeed everywhere else. Galatinus is wholly occupied with expounding these matters in the first book of his De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis, a work found to have plowed with Martin Raymond's heifer — that is, to have been taken over from Ramón Martí. But a consideration of what the Talmudic Jews have, up to now, fabricated concerning this law through the preservation of traditions will come before us in another place. Secondly, the Jews maintain that that legal manner of teaching, and all the rites of carnal worship, ought to be eternal and altogether unchangeable — an error which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whom we shall elsewhere show to have been Paul, opposes. Thirdly, they dream that, by the observance of these rites and ordinances, together with such obedience as they are able by their own strength to render to the moral law, they will be justified and accepted before God. Of these matters, however, when we come to the narrative of the Jewish apostasy, we must, as we have said, treat at greater length.

Chapter 3

Digression I: On the Origin of Writing.

The methods of investigating the origin of writing — the authors who hold that the use of writing was antediluvian — the arguments for that opinion — whether it is probable that Adam invented writing — the Jews and Muhammadans idly claim that letters were created by God — the authority of Suidas and Pliny — the prophecy of Enoch — the pillars of Seth — the opinion of Kircher — a reply to the arguments for antediluvian writing — Augustine calls that opinion a mere suspicion — whether the prophecy of Enoch was written under the Old Testament — arguments against the antediluvian use of writing — the word of God was not committed to writing before the flood — no report of writing among the nations after the flood — testimonies concerning the origin of writing among the nations — the Phoenicians commonly held to be the first inventors of writing — no certain monument or memory of writing before Moses — the constant tradition that Cadmus was the first among the nations to invent writing — whence the Phoenicians (of whom Cadmus was one) learned the use of writing — Kircher's arguments for writing before Sinai examined — Hermes Trismegistus — concerning the book called Asclepius — the Book of the Wars of the Lord, Numbers 21:14 — concerning the astronomical observations of the Chaldeans.

I. SINCE theology — that is, the doctrine of the truth which is according to godliness — has now for the first time been committed to writing, it does not seem foreign to our present undertaking to inquire briefly into the use of writing, or the origin of the art of writing. I take up a subject, I confess, of no great moment, exposed to the conjectures of all men, and long since worried over in the writings of a great many; but I shall be brief, and, I hope, not tedious to the reader — especially since there is no lack of reason to inquire yet further into the sources of matters of this kind. For since we have shown above that God gave many promises and commands to men before that most celebrated giving of the law which we have set forth, and that some of these pertained to the whole human race, while all of them were given to the whole church, through the mediation of this or that agent — if we should suppose that the use of writing was known before this time, it would be worth inquiring why God willed that none of them be committed to writing, when this could have been done to the very great benefit of all, as is plain from the outcome. Indeed, one might not unreasonably conjecture from this that writing had no origin before the law was written, and that those letters which God traced with his own finger on the stone tablets were, properly speaking, the very first of all; and since I myself hold to that opinion, it has seemed good to subject, in a few words, to examination the arguments brought forward to the contrary by learned men.

II. There are, accordingly, those who maintain that the use of writing was antediluvian. To lend some semblance of truth to this opinion, they employ proofs — or rather conjectures, which they reckon to be at least like probabilities. For, first, they judge it fitting to suppose that Adam, the parent of the world, most wise through long experience and use of things, and diligently watchful for the good of his posterity, also invented writing, so great a benefit to the human race. So holds Theodor Bibliander, On the Origin of Writing, and Angelus Rocca, in his description of the Vatican Library: "On a small brick pillar," he says, "Adam is rather handsomely depicted by the painter's art. Above his head are characters, or more ancient letters, now called Hebrew; and at the feet of the same Adam is a Latin inscription, which reads in these words: 'Adam, divinely taught, the first inventor of the sciences and of letters.'" And he judges that reason itself persuades this to be true — though he did not wish to burden himself with the tedium of setting that reason forth. Hermann Hugo leans on his authority, in his On the Origin of Writing, chapter 7. To these may be added Altissiodorensis, Annius of Viterbo, and Camerarius. The Jews affirm, too, that Adam wrote certain books, on the creation of the world and on repentance. "What miracles of books," says Giraldus, in his first Dialogue On the Poets, "if not rather monstrosities, the Hebrews are accustomed to relate, mocking certain unlearned Christians of ours!" But why should they not boldly say that Adam made use of books, when they affirm that the very letters were created by God on the evening of the Sabbath, as Münster testifies in his Annotations on Genesis 1:1? The Muhammadans likewise prattle that two verses of the Qur'an were created two thousand years before the world was founded, and written out by hand in the paradise of God. Suidas, under the entry "Adam": τούτου τέχναι καὶ γράμματα ("his are the arts and letters"). But what sort of letters he means he does not show, though earlier, under the entry "Abraham," he had said, οὗτος εὗρεν ἱερὰ γράμματα ("this man discovered sacred letters") — by which words he seems to have meant the Hebrew letters. Next, they make use of the authority, or rather the testimony, of Pliny, Natural History, book vii, chapter 56: "I judge," he says, "that letters were always Assyrian." And a little after: "from which it appears that the use of letters is eternal" — that is, coeval with the world. Further, mention is made of the prophecy of Enoch in the epistle of Jude. It is difficult to conjecture how this could have been retained in the memory of men unless it had been committed to writing. They say, besides, that Seth, Adam's son, erected two pillars, one of stone and the other of brick, on which Josephus affirms he inscribed the courses of the sun and stars, and other observations of the nature of things (Antiquities, book i, chapter 2). Josephus's opinion is subscribed to by Polydore Vergil, book i, chapter 6; Ludovicus Vives, on book viii; Augustine, City of God, chapter 39; and others. Finally, unless I am mistaken, we have noted before that Maimonides affirmed that "the antediluvian idolaters wrote many books in defense of their most pernicious error."

III. There is no one, so far as I know, who has ever undertaken the defense of this opinion more zealously than Athanasius Kircher, in his Obeliscus Pamphilius, book i, chapter 1, pp. 2-3. He rests upon rabbinic testimonies, all of them recent, and most of them exceedingly inept; indeed, so that no argument might be wanting, he seems to give credit even to the most monstrous fiction of the creation of letters in paradise — at the very least he wishes it placed beyond controversy that God wrote a book and gave it to Adam. He adduces the testimony of Josephus as well, but in words that are found nowhere in him — and without doubt never existed at all (p. 7). No one doubts, on his authority, that Ham invented impious arts, and, because Noah refused to allow them to be brought into the ark, inscribed them on stones and iron plates. But such is the case with that learned man: he scarcely ever seems to have considered what he ought to write, but only what he could write — ready meanwhile to believe whatever "lying Greece dares in her histories" (Juvenal, Satires 10.174).

IV. These, then, are the arguments which learned men use to render that opinion about antediluvian writing probable. Whether they have, by their means, obtained what they wished, let us see briefly. That Adam invented letters is only a suspicion and a conjecture, to which no reason compels our assent. Hence Augustine, Questions on Exodus, book ii, question 69: "It seems to some that letters began with the first men, and were passed down to Noah, and from him to the ancestors of Abraham, and from them to the people of Israel; but by what means this could be proved, I do not know." In this same ignorance, though most learned men, we all still labor. After sin was forgiven, the Chaldee Targum on the Song of Solomon 1:1 relates that Adam "spoke a song to God." The author adds nothing about writing, though otherwise he is full of trifles. Angelus Rocca leans upon images — I know not what sort — and recent paintings in the Vatican Library; but how inept an author he is, and how utterly lacking in judgment, we shall see later. That Adam did not invent every art and science is certain; indeed, perhaps he did not even devise many, since he doubtless led a most toilsome life, and great was his misery for as long as he lived. Pliny's authority can carry no weight in this matter, since he knew nothing of the origins of things beyond the fables and conjectures of the Greeks, and was thus utterly a child in every matter of true antiquity. Those who deny that the world is eternal cannot, and ought not, make use of his testimony — since he invented the eternity of letters for no other reason than because he supposed the world itself never to have had a beginning.

V. Nor does the mention of Enoch's prophecy seem to lend credibility or authority to this conjecture. That the memory of such sayings should be preserved through many ages — indeed, why not through all ages? — ought not to seem impossible, especially to those to whose taste and palate ecclesiastical traditions are agreeable. Caesar reports that among the Druids "it was not lawful to commit sacred things to writing" (Gallic War, book vi, chapter 14). It is well known that all the Pythagoreans, and the theologians of Egypt, observed the very same discipline, as we showed earlier from Herodotus, book ii. Indeed, the Lacedaemonians committed none of their laws to writing, as Justinian notes. Plutarch, in the Life of Lycurgus, relates: Νόμους δὲ γεγραμμένους οὐκ ἔθηκεν ("he did not set down written laws"). Yet there was no lack of hope that sayings, concisely and laconically put, might be fixed and retained in the memory. But there is no need, in this matter, to place our confidence in traditions. For there is no reason why we should believe that this prophecy of Enoch existed, whether unwritten or written, through all those ages from when it was first uttered and made known down to the time of Jude, and that Jude learned it either from tradition or from written books. He who first committed it to writing, since he was borne along ἀπὸ Πνεύματος ἁγίου φερόμενος ("carried along by the Holy Spirit"), is not credibly thought to have drawn it from any source other than the inspiration of that very Spirit. And there was a most weighty reason why it should be rescued, at that time, from a very long oblivion. The time was close at hand in which that prophecy was to be most fully fulfilled, in the utter ruin (πανωλεθρία) and dreadful destruction of the Jewish church — of which the flood was the type and pattern that went before, just as Peter, weaving the same web together with Jude, teaches (2 Peter 3). The Holy Spirit himself, the very author of that most ancient prediction of the judgments of God then about to be executed, repeats it and calls it to memory in order to confirm the faith of the saints. He, however, has no need of either traditions or books in order to repeat his own words.

VI. Further, it is true that Josephus affirms that the descendants of Seth (not Seth himself) erected two pillars, and some are pleased to place their confidence in his account. But although I am not much moved by his bare authority in a matter of which he plainly had no clear knowledge, it will suffice for our purpose to deny that he makes any mention of writing — although Hornius confidently pronounces, in his Introduction to Ancient Geography, that Josephus "employed incredible audacity, or futile credulity," in this whole affair. That this could have been done in other ways, without the use of writing properly so called, is plain from the Egyptian hieroglyphics. But all these things are uncertain, and have in them, to establish this conjecture, neither the weight nor even the shadow of a reasoned proof. Nor should the testimony of Maimonides prevail against those very strong arguments by which we have proved that there were no antediluvian idolaters at all.

VII. The suspicion, then, of certain persons concerning Adamic or antediluvian writing is by no means probable. Nor are there lacking reasons by which it can be shown — beyond the weakness of these proofs already noted — that it is destitute of every semblance of truth, and even of the color of probability; let it suffice to bring forward one or two. That reason which we mentioned at the beginning of this discussion is strong enough by itself to settle this dispute. From the very beginning of things, God had given to men, for the use of those who feared him, many promises and commands which had no foundation anywhere except in his own most free revelation. Apart from the knowledge of those promises and commands, all that natural knowledge of God which men could obtain from the law of nature implanted in them, or from the contemplation of created things, was of no avail. That God, who is supremely good, willed that the human race should make use of all the means granted by him, necessary for obtaining eternal life, needs no proof. Since, then, it stands beyond dispute (ἀναντιρρήτως) that those means could best be preserved in writing, and could in that way come to the knowledge of men, and since this method of preserving the divine promises and precepts was not displeasing to God — indeed, was most pleasing to him — what fitting reason can be given why he should have been unwilling for this to be done before the flood, or should not have commanded it to be done, if the use of writing were then known? But since no traces exist of any sacred writing drawn up by God's command before the flood, do not suppose that the use of writing was known at that time, for the matter is certain. Hence Theophylact, on Matthew: Οἱ μὲν πρὸ τοῦ νόμου ἐκεῖνοι θεῖοι ἄνδρες, οὐ διὰ γραμμάτων καὶ βιβλίων ἐδιδάσκοντο ("those divine men who lived before the law were not taught by means of letters and books").

VIII. Furthermore, if writing had been in common use before the flood, and thus known to all those who survived that catastrophic deluge, how could we suppose that oblivion should have overtaken all the nations so suddenly, with respect to a thing so excellent and so useful in human life? For what is everywhere celebrated concerning the first invention of writing, here and there, among the nations scattered abroad from the disaster at Babel, does not permit us to believe that any memory of writing, or of its use, was preserved among those nations, or that even the faintest rumor of it survived. Now since those origins of writing which can be reliably investigated not only exclude the antediluvian world, but also that whole span of time which intervened between the flood and the giving of the law, it is permissible to look into them briefly. Whatever can be scraped together from the ancients — Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, and others — concerning the origin of writing, Lilio Giraldi has related in his first Dialogue On the Poets, mixing much that is inept and false with the true. Among other things, he foolishly invents that certain Hebrews — I know not which — discovered the Hebrew points and called them "Mesoroth"; those who are not still wet behind the ears know that Hebrew pointing is not called "Masora." Hermann Hugo transcribed his account into his own book, On the Origin and Antiquity of Writing. The learned Samuel Bochart has diligently and eruditely set forth, from ancient records, the origin of Phoenician writing and its first arrival in Greece, in the second part of his Sacred Geography, book i, chapter 20 — to whose supreme erudition and diligence scarcely anything can be added. The admirable Joseph Scaliger accomplished the same, in his Animadversions on Eusebius's Chronicle, at the year 1617. Angelus Rocca, in his description of the Vatican Library, lists the inventors of many alphabets in various languages. But while striving to eclipse the diligence and erudition of them all, in his great work to which he gave the title Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Athanasius Kircher — as to whether any literary work of greater fantasy and ostentation has ever come to light since men were born, I for my part greatly doubt — let the learned judge what he has accomplished. We shall dispatch the whole matter briefly, so that we may arrive where we are heading.

IX. Over the antiquity of writing, and the glory of its first invention, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks themselves all contend — to say nothing of the fables of the Chinese. We showed above that Pliny judged the Assyrian letters to have always existed, and thus to be eternal. Diodorus Siculus reports, in book v, that the Phoenicians received their letters from the Syrians, or Assyrians. Manetho relates that Hermes taught the Egyptians the use of writing; this is reported by Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, book iii, and by Plutarch, Table Talk 9, Question 3: Ἑρμῆς λέγεται θεῶν ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ γράμματα πρῶτος εὑρεῖν ("Hermes is said to have been the first of the gods in Egypt to discover writing"). Some write that Cecrops of Athens invented the Greek letters; so Tacitus, Annals 11.14: "Some record that Cecrops the Athenian, or Linus the Theban, and, in the time of the Trojan War, Palamedes the Argive, devised sixteen forms of letters; that afterward others, and chiefly Simonides, discovered the rest." Cecrops, however, is said to have been born in Egypt, and to have brought writing from there into Greece. Among the Phoenicians, there is no memory of writing before Cadmus and Phoenix his brother. And these are nearly all the things recorded about the origin of writing that bear any semblance of truth. Let us see first whether their antiquity can from this be shown to reach back beyond the time of Moses; we shall speak of the rest afterward. Eusebius, in his Chronicle, reckons that Cecrops — who is called both διφυής ("of double nature") and αὐτόχθων ("earth-born") — was contemporary with Moses himself, and older than Cadmus. But all the ancient Christian writers, and Porphyry as well, reckon Moses to be two hundred years younger than this; for which reason he is roundly thrashed by George Syncellus.

X. But there is no report worthy of credit that he invented writing; what remains to be said will perhaps refute the fable. Most scholars judge that everything told of Hermes, or the Egyptian Mercury, is fabulous. Cicero affirms, in the third book On the Nature of the Gods, that he was the fifth Mercury, and that he was called Thoth by the Egyptians, to whom he gave laws and letters. Augustine, City of God, book xviii, chapter 39, proves that he lived long after the time of Moses. Whenever he lived, however, he appears to have taught the Egyptians no letters other than the hieroglyphic; hence Plutarch says of his letters, Table Talk 9, Question 3: Διὸ καὶ τὸ τῶν γραμμάτων Αἰγύπτιοι πρῶτον Ἴβιν γράφουσιν ("wherefore the Egyptians also draw the Ibis as the first of their letters") — that is, they paint that serpent-devouring bird as the first character. And Kircher, in the third volume of his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Doubt 2, p. 47, argues that the ibis was the first letter among the Egyptians. This Mercury is Taautus, whose books Clement of Alexandria carefully lists in the sixth book of the Stromata. Philo reports that Sanchuniathon also diligently searched them out: Πολὺ φροντιστικῶς ἐξεμάστευσε τὰ Τααύτου, εἰδὼς, ὅτι τῶν ὑφ᾽ ἥλιον γεγονότων, πρῶτός ἐστι Τααυτὸς ὁ τῶν γραμμάτων τὴν εὕρησιν ἐπινοήσας ("with great diligence he sought out the books of Taautus, knowing that, of all who had ever lived beneath the sun, Taautus was the first to devise the discovery of letters"). This Taautus, he says, was the son of Misor, the brother of Sydyk, who begot the Dioscuri, who are known to have lived a little before the Trojan war. That Cadmus brought writing into Greece is a most ancient and constant opinion. Herodotus's testimony, in his Terpsichore, chapter 58, is especially notable: Οἱ δὲ Φοίνικες οὗτοι οἱ σὺν Κάδμῳ ἀπικόμενοι, τῶν ἔσαν οἱ Γεφυραῖοι, ἄλλα τε πολλὰ, οἰκήσαντες ταύτην τὴν χώρην, ἐσήγαγον διδασκάλια ἐς τοὺς Ἕλληνας, καὶ δὴ καὶ γράμματα· οὐκ ἐόντα πρὶν Ἕλλησιν, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκέειν ("Those Phoenicians who came with Cadmus, of whom the Gephyraeans were part, having settled in this land, introduced among the Greeks, along with many other branches of learning, the alphabet also, which, in my opinion, the Greeks did not possess before"). And a little after, continuing to speak of the same letters, he says it was fitting that, since the Phoenicians had introduced them into Greece, they should be called "Phoenician" — Φοινικήϊα. And so they were called: Φοινικήϊα σήματα Κάδμου ("the Phoenician signs of Cadmus") — these are the words of Timon, in Sextus Empiricus. And Plutarch, Table Talk, book ix, question 3: Φοινίκεια διὰ Κάδμον ὠνομασθέντα ("called 'Phoenician' on account of Cadmus") — namely, those sixteen letters which the Greeks first used. And in his Comparison of Water and Fire: ἐκ Φοινίκης γράμματα ("letters from Phoenicia"). Pliny too, Natural History, book vii, chapter 56, affirms that "Cadmus brought letters into Greece from Phoenicia, sixteen in number." And from Critias, in Athenaeus: Φοίνικες δὲ εὗρον γράμματ᾽ ἀλεξίλογα (Deipnosophists, book i) — "the Phoenicians invented letters, an aid to speech." As for why letters are called ἀλεξίλογα, Eustathius, on the Odyssey, book xiv, gives various reasons: either ἤ τὰ ἀλέγοντα, ἤγουν βοηθοῦντα εἰς λόγον ("things that attend to, that is, assist, speech"), or δι᾽ ὧν ἀποτελεῖται τὸ πλείω λέγειν ("by means of which one is able to say more") — that is, "by whose help a shortening of speech is effected." Casaubon, on Athenaeus, book i, chapter 22, thinks that letters may not unfittingly be called ἀλεξιλόγους, "on account of the power of speech in healing the disturbances of the mind" — according to that saying, "words are physicians for a sick soul." Tacitus too, Annals 11.14: "The report is that Cadmus, borne by a Phoenician fleet, was the author of that art" (namely, of writing) "among the still-uncultivated peoples of Greece." Among the epigrams written concerning Zeno, which Diogenes mentions in his Life of Zeno, section 30, is that of Zenodotus the Stoic. By these words he refers to that saying of Critias, in Athenaeus, book i: Φοίνικες δ᾽ εὗρον γράμματα ἀλεξίλογα. Elsewhere, moreover, the same Lucan teaches that the hieroglyphic manner of writing was in use among the Egyptians before the invention of the alphabet. Curtius too, book iv, chapter 4: "This nation" (namely, the Phoenicians) "either first taught letters, or first learned them." And Irenaeus, book i, chapter 12: "The Greeks confess that they received sixteen letters from Cadmus, and afterward, as time went on, discovered now the aspirated, now the double letters; and they relate that, last of all, Palamedes added the long ones." Concerning the origins of any matter, there is scarcely a more constant report in all antiquity. Kircher too assents to this opinion — but he wishes, in vain, that Cadmus had been an Egyptian, a claim he argues at great length, with scarcely any reasons at all, in Oedipus Aegyptiacus, volume iii, dissertation 3, preliminary discourse, pp. 56-57. I grant that Eusebius held this view as well, Chronicle, book ii, no. 562: "Phoenix," he says, "and Cadmus, setting out from Thebes of the Egyptians into Syria, reigned at Tyre and Sidon." The contrary is proved by the customs, the religion, and the Phoenician names, which are utterly unlike anything Egyptian.

XI. As to the number of letters which Cadmus brought into Greece, the agreement is no less: there were sixteen. So Tacitus, Pliny, Plutarch, and Eusebius, Chronicle, book ii, nos. 16-17. Pliny affirms that Palamedes added four more of them at the time of the Trojan War — namely, Θ, Ξ, Φ, Χ — and that Simonides Melicus afterward added as many more, namely Ζ, Η, Ψ, Ω. It appears, then, that the Cadmean letters were Α, Β, Γ, Δ, Ε, Ι, Κ, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Π, Ρ, Σ, Τ, and one more. Plutarch's words carry the same sense: Τὰ δὲ δὴ πρῶτα καὶ φοινίκεια διὰ Κάδμον ὠνομασθέντα, τετράκις ἡ τετρὰς γενομένη παρέσχε· καὶ τῶν αὖθις ἐφευρεθέντων δὲ, Παλαμήδης τε πρότερος τέτταρα, καὶ Σιμωνίδης αὖθις ἄλλα τοσαῦτα προσέθηκε ("the first letters, called 'Phoenician' on account of Cadmus, were supplied by the tetrad taken four times over; and of those discovered afterward, Palamedes first added four, and Simonides again added as many more") — Table Talk, book ix, problem 3. And Irenaeus, Against the Heresy of Mark: Ἕλληνες ὁμολογοῦσιν ἀπὸ Κάδμου πρῶτον ἓξ καὶ δέκα παρειληφέναι ("the Greeks confess that they first received sixteen letters from Cadmus"). But if it be true that Cadmus brought only sixteen letters into Greece, it does not appear that these were the same as those then in use among the Hebrews. For before the time of Cadmus the law had been written by Moses, in which twenty-two letters occur throughout — indeed, in the Decalogue alone all of them are found, with the single exception of Teth. If, then, Cadmus had used those very letters, why should we not suppose that he made the remaining six known to the Greeks as well? It is probable, therefore, that the Phoenicians, after they had observed the use of writing among the Hebrews, devised some letters — sixteen, that is — on their model. These are the ones Cadmus brought into Greece. Whether they were the same as those called "Samaritan" is uncertain. We shall see that the Samaritan alphabet did not receive its full number of twenty-two letters until quite late. It is agreed, too, that they changed the shapes, or characters, of the letters. Of writing, then, before the age of Cadmus, there is plainly no memory at all among the nations. Diodorus Siculus is the authority that the Phoenicians, of whom Cadmus was one, learned the use of writing from the Syrians (book v, chapter 74): Σύροι μὲν εὑρεταὶ τῶν γραμμάτων εἰσὶ, παρὰ δὲ τούτων Φοίνικες μαθόντες, etc. ("the Syrians are the inventors of letters, and the Phoenicians, having learned from them..."). No one is unaware that the Hebrews are called Syrians. That the Phoenicians received from the Syrians the use of writing — not its shapes, nor its number — is plain from what we have brought forward concerning Cadmus. Some report of the manner of writing customary among the Syrians did indeed spread into Greece, though, as it appears, not the practice itself; they called it by a certain name, and it runs from right to left. Giraldi notes, from Sextus Pompeius, that this kind of writing was so called. Some have tried to trace the etymology of the word — in vain, unless I am mistaken. Some memory of it seems to have been retained in that style which they called βουστροφηδόν ("as the ox turns [in plowing]," i.e., boustrophedon). On this, Pausanias treats in his Eliaca; Isidore, Origins, book vi, chapter 13; Suidas, under ὁ κάτωθεν νόμος; Meursius, Attic Lectures, book i; Vossius, Grammar, book i; Bochart, Sacred Geography, part 2, book i, chapter 20; and others. But what the shapes were of those letters which Cadmus first brought into Greece, or of those which the Ionians first used, is not altogether agreed. Herodotus relates, Terpsichore, chapter 59 and following, that he himself saw, among the Thebans, in the temple of the Ismenian Apollo, Cadmean letters inscribed on certain tripods, for the most part resembling the Ionic. The first of the inscriptions was:

Another:

And a third:

Ἀμφιτρύων μὲ ἀνέθηκε νέων ἀπὸ Τηλεβοάων ("Amphitryon dedicated me, spoil taken from the Teleboans").

But the celebrated Vossius, in his Grammar, book 1, chapter 10, strives in vain to prove — against Josephus, who affirms that the Greeks were at that time ignorant of the use of letters — that Laodamas dedicated this tripod before the Trojan War, since his reign fell almost exactly within that very period; for he was the son of Eteocles, while the son of Polynices took part in that war. These inscriptions, in the ancient Ionic letters which Herodotus affirms to have been similar to the Cadmean, were restored by Joseph Scaliger in his Animadversions on Eusebius's Chronicle, at the year 1617 of Eusebius's reckoning, following the letter-forms he copied out from the columns in the Farnese gardens at Rome. Of these, the specimen of the first line is as follows: ΑΜΠΗΙΤΡVON. M. ANETHEKEN. EON. ΑΠΟ. TELEBOAON.

XII. That these were indeed the most ancient forms of letters among the Greeks I should scarcely have believed, had not Pliny taught (book 7, chapter 58) that the ancient Ionic letters differed little from the early Latin ones, and Tacitus, in the Annals, book 11: "The forms of the Latin letters are the same as those of the most ancient of the Greeks."

XIII. For they do not depart so far from those letters that have remained in continuous use that their form and character would have escaped the most learned men of antiquity — yet this is precisely what we read concerning the Ionic letters. For concerning the people of Eretria, who in the reign of King Darius were led captive into a certain region of the Medes not far from Babylon, Philostratus relates this in his Life of Apollonius: Γράφοντες τὸν Ἑλλήνων τρόπον, καὶ τὰ γράμματα Ἑλλήνων μὲν, ἀλλ᾽ οὔπω τοιαῦτα ἰδεῖν φασι ("they write in the Greek fashion, and the letters are indeed Greek, but they say they have never seen such letters before") — that is, "They write letters in the Greek manner," meaning toward the right rather than toward the left, as the orientals do; "and the letters are indeed Greek, yet of a form they declare they have never seen." The same author relates that the Greeks who inhabited Gades inscribed certain things on the Pillars of Hercules in letters οὔτε Αἰγυπτίοις, οὔτε Ἰνδικοῖς γράμμασιν, οὔτε οἷοις ξυμβαλεῖν ("neither Egyptian nor Indian letters, nor any that could be deciphered"), book 5, chapter 5. And yet the Greeks migrated there long after the Ionians had learned the Cadmean letters. I judge these to have been Phoenician letters, from which the letters set down above are exceedingly remote.

XIV. Since, then, it is plain that the use of letters became known to the post-diluvian world only gradually, by various stages, and out of various occasions and endeavors, and only quite late — however much the fable of certain antediluvian letters may please some — it is, by Hercules, not credible to me.

XV. Let us proceed to those centuries which immediately followed the flood, that we may, if possible, trace out the vestiges of the origin of letters before the Mosaic law was divinely given and written. Athanasius Kircher takes it upon himself to prove that the Egyptians had letters before the time of Moses, but he uses this one argument alone: that they were taught the use of letters by Hermes Trismegistus, whom he holds to have been older than Moses, a contemporary of Abraham. Further, he contends that this Hermes wrote many books, and that some of them still survive even now. And so, having thus settled a doubtful case, he then proceeds at great length, and in earnest, to celebrate his triumph. But that learned man (of whom I am genuinely at a loss whether to marvel more at his leisure or his ingenuity) appears, in many passages of his ponderous work, to have heaped together nothing but raw conjectures, mostly inept, interlarded with the most monstrous fables. For the testimonies he uses are for the most part of such a kind that no learned man could bring himself to rehearse them, except for the sake of displaying πολυγνωσίας ("wide-ranging erudition"). Indeed, they are the most putrid fictions of unlearned men, of which no ancient author who is not himself a trifler makes mention; and in those that seem of somewhat better quality, there is not so much as a γρύ ("grunt," i.e. the least particle) of evidence as to the age or authorship of the Hermetic writings. What of the fact that Athanasius himself elsewhere concedes that this Hermes used hieroglyphic characters alone? For when he happened to mention the many thousands of books ascribed to this Hermes, he immediately adds: "Yet I would not have anyone think at this point that Trismegistus wrote thirty-six thousand complete volumes, but that by 'books' of this sort are properly meant certain hieroglyphic systems, by which he indicated the various arts and sciences." But he also ascribes to this same Hermes the book still extant called the Asclepius, and claims it for him, denying — as some suppose — that it was composed by ancient heretics, and he devotes a special digression to this argument. Truly, when I read it, I felt pity for the man. For no mortal could ever have spent his labor and study more uselessly. Whoever can persuade himself that these patchwork compilations, so evidently stitched together out of the sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Platonist philosophers, were written by that Hermes Trismegistus, older than Moses, is a man, it seems to me, not only ready to give a most easy assent to the most putrid and ridiculous drivel, but also fixed and settled in this resolve within himself — namely, never to open his eyes to the sun, lest the light shine upon him against his will. But Kircher dotes upon the most monstrous fictions of that rhapsodist — even upon that horrendous blasphemy in which he calls God, on account of the generation of the Son, ἀρσενόθηλυν ("male-female," androgynous). And to speak freely, what he babbles in his exposition of the obelisks and hieroglyphics concerning a threefold deity, and other matters, is plainly horrendous and full of scandal. The same author nevertheless admits that "he can by no means deny that many books were once circulated that were spurious." For it is very well known that some of the ancients labored to contrive this very fraud — a point we demonstrated above from Plato. But concerning that book falsely ascribed to Hermes, let the reader consult Casaubon, Exercise 1, on the Apparatus to the Annals, part 1, at number 18, and learn how inept were the many fictions of that most shameless impostor. Cicero, Plutarch, and others record that many men celebrated for their wisdom were, in antiquity, renowned under the name of Mercury. We have shown above that one of these, whom they called Thoyth, or Thouth, or Touth, taught the Egyptians letters; but there exists no trustworthy testimony that he lived before the time of Moses, or that he invented letters properly so called. And without any doubt, had they known the use of letters from earliest antiquity, they would not have been so foolish as to wish to go on using, perpetually, so confused, obscure, and useless a manner of indicating the mind's meaning through hieroglyphics. Some also relate that Zoroaster was older than Moses, and that he wrote certain books; but it is well that Porphyry, in his Life of Plotinus, affirms that he has shown by many arguments that the book inscribed with the name of Zoroaster is spurious and of recent date.

XVI. Setting aside, then, these trifles, let us see what is seriously said on this matter. There are two arguments which the advocates of the antiquity of letters bring forward with some appearance of probability. The first is that Moses himself mentions the "Book of the Wars of the LORD," evidently written before that time, Numbers 21:14. The words are: עַל־כֵּן יֵאָמַר בְּסֵפֶר מִלְחֲמֹת יְהוָה ("therefore it is said in the book of the Wars of the LORD"); "Therefore it is said in the Book of the Wars of the LORD" — by which words he shows that the book had been written before. But סֵפֶר ("sepher") signifies not only "a book," but also any kind of "account" or "narration." סָפַר ("saphar") properly means "to recount" or "to number"; it means "to write" only incidentally. Thus in Genesis 5:1, זֶה סֵפֶר ("this is the sepher") means "this is the account" — namely, "of the generations of Adam"; it is not asserted that anything was written in a book, but rather that something was stated in a kind of narration. So too the ancient name of the city of Debir is said to have been קִרְיַת־סֵפֶר, "Kirjath-sepher," Judges 1:11. The Vulgate adds, "that is, the city of letters," following the Greek version of the LXX, which has πόλις γραμμάτων ("city of letters"). And the same city was called קִרְיַת־סַנָּה, "Kirjath-sannah," Joshua 15:49 — that is, "the city of learning." By סֵפֶר, then, is understood teaching or history; for history teaches — especially the history that concerns the deeds of the LORD. Furthermore, יֵאָמַר denotes not something already said, but something yet to be said; the Hebrews suppose that the Book of Judges is meant, but I think that this very Book of Numbers is intended. "It shall be said," says Moses — that is, it shall become famous, drawn from the Book of the Wars of the LORD, and be on the lips of men.

XVII. The second argument in this matter — one which the celebrated Vossius also uses in his Art of Grammar, book 1, chapter 9 — is that Simplicius, in his commentary 46 on Aristotle's On the Heavens, book 1, asserts that "the astronomical observations which Callisthenes, by Aristotle's order, had sent from Babylon, covered one thousand nine hundred and three years, as Porphyry reports," and, as some add, "were preserved down to the times of Alexander of Macedon" — which indeed would not have been especially difficult, if Callisthenes really did send them from Babylon. But Simplicius lived about a thousand years, or thereabouts, after that dispatch of Callisthenes.

XVIII. How easy it is to err in the reckoning of years, especially when no reliable records of what occurred survive, we all know. Nor does Simplicius set forth his own opinion, but reports what Porphyry wrote somewhere: "astronomical observations were sent," he says, ἃς τινας διηγεῖται ὁ Πορφύριος χιλίων ἐτῶν εἶναι καὶ ἐννεακοσίων τριῶν μέχρι τῶν χρόνων Ἀλεξάνδρου τοῦ Μακεδόνος σωζομένας ("which Porphyry relates to have been preserved for one thousand nine hundred and three years, down to the times of Alexander of Macedon") — "which Porphyry narrates to have covered one thousand nine hundred and three years, and to have been preserved down to the times of Alexander of Macedon." In which work Porphyry related this is uncertain, since those words are nowhere to be found among his surviving writings. Berosus affirms that these observations covered only 480 years — that is, down to the thirteenth year of Antiochus Soter, to whom he dedicated his history. Epigonus taught that they numbered 720 years, on the testimony of Pliny, book 7, chapter 56. Marcus Tullius, moreover, in the second book of On Divination, chapter 46, mentions observations of 470,000 years among the Babylonians and the inhabitants of the Caucasus; it is certain that nothing certain can be gathered from these reports. Furthermore, the record of astronomical observations could be preserved by other arts, without letters; and once the use of letters was discovered, those things which had previously been preserved from perishing by human memory, by traditions, and by hieroglyphics, were then committed to letters. Epigenes, or Epigonus, according to Pliny, teaches that the observations of the Babylonians were inscribed on baked bricks. How this was done an old anonymous author relates, concerning divine wisdom according to the Egyptians: "The wise men," he says, "of the Babylonians and Egyptians, penetrating by the sharpness of their minds into the hidden things of the highest world, recorded the conceptions of their minds — as we ourselves are eyewitnesses — upon stones by means of signs. And they did the same in all the arts and sciences. Then they placed the stones on which these things had been inscribed in their temples, and displayed them as if they were pages to be read through; and such stones served them in the place of books." The celebrated Vossius further adds, and asks: unless letters had existed before the giving of the law, for what purpose would the law have been written on bronze tablets by the very hands of God? — "Bronze," in place of "stone," is a slip of memory. But there is also an easy answer to this: God did it so as to provide both for the perpetual preservation of his law, and for the instruction of Moses — and so of the whole people — in the use of letters. Although, then, in a matter of no great weight I would not wish to keep sawing away in contention with anyone who thinks otherwise, I do not hesitate to affirm that no one has yet demonstrated, either by reasons or by trustworthy testimonies, that the use of letters properly so called was older than the Mosaic legislation — so that I fully rest in the opinion of Eupolemus, the most ancient historian among the Greeks, whose words Clement of Alexandria reports in the first book of his Stromata: Τὸν Μωϋσῆ φησὶ πρῶτον σοφὸν γενέσθαι καὶ γραμματικὴν πρῶτον τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις παραδοῦναι· καὶ παρὰ Ἰουδαίων Φοίνικας παραλαβεῖν, Ἕλληνας δὲ παρὰ Φοινίκων ("he says that Moses was the first wise man, and that he first handed down the art of writing to the Jews; and that the Phoenicians received it from the Jews, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians") — that is, "They say that Moses was the first wise man, and that he was the first to teach the Jews letters; that the Phoenicians received them from the Jews, and the Greeks from the Phoenicians."

Digression II

On the ancient letters or characters of the Hebrews, in which the law was written by God himself, and according to the pattern of whose script all the books of the Old Testament were written.

I. There still exists, and once existed from the earliest Christian antiquity, a Mosaic Pentateuch written in those letters which are commonly called Samaritan, though the language is Hebrew. Origen and Jerome make mention of it. Whether either of them ever saw the book itself, or any copy of it, is uncertain. In that συλλογή ("collection" — the Hexapla) of the Hebrew text and the Greek translations, which Origen produced and published with great labor and at great expense, there was no literary monument more celebrated in the whole ancient church. If he had ever seen that Samaritan Pentateuch, or, having seen it, had judged it worthy of any place or value, he would doubtless have assigned it some notable place, at least some place, in that πολυθρύλλητον ("much-talked-of") work — which, however, he did not do.

II. Jerome affirms that the Samaritan text was written with exactly as many letters as the Hebrew; but since this is most plainly false, that most learned man appears to have pronounced upon it only from rumors and the reports of others. Both he and Origen also write that among the Samaritans the letter Tau resembles a cross. Jerome, on Ezekiel chapter 9: "To come to our own matter: in the ancient letters of the Hebrews, which the Samaritans still use to this day, the last letter, Thau, bears the likeness of a cross." Tertullian and Augustine held the same opinion. But there is no mention whatsoever of the letter Tau in Ezekiel, and some, most ineptly and with no small asinine stupidity, trifle from this passage about the sign of the cross being fixed upon men's foreheads. The words are וְהִתְוִיתָ תָּו, which our countrymen rightly render, "And set a mark" — "Thou shalt mark with a mark." For even schoolboys know that intransitive verbs among the Hebrews take a cognate noun. It is false, moreover, that the last letter in the Samaritan alphabet is σταυροειδής ("cross-shaped"); for that form of the letter, which appears in the alphabet that Schickard produced from the Vatican Library in his Bechinath Happerush, is without doubt fictitious. I admit indeed that on certain coins a figure not unlike a cross appears in place of ת; but of coins there is nothing at all in Jerome, nor was that shoddy merchandise yet of any value in his day. It is not probable, then, that those most learned men ever saw that Samaritan Pentateuch — at least the one that still survives. Yet from their testimony it is clear enough that the Samaritans who then existed had a Mosaic Pentateuch, written indeed in the Hebrew language, but in a character different from that in use among the Jews. The Samaritans were that people whom Shalmaneser, king of Assyria, in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah — about one hundred and thirty years before the Babylonian captivity — transplanted into Samaria and other cities formerly inhabited by the ten tribes whom he had carried away captive. Sacred Scripture shows that they came from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, 2 Kings 17:24; from Cuthah they were afterward called Cuthites. They were, then, Chaldeans and Syrians, as is clear from the names of the places, cities, and regions from which they took their origin. That upon their first arrival in the land of Canaan they used not only their vernacular tongue, that is, Syro-Chaldaic, but also Chaldaic letters, can, I think, be doubted by no one. It has been shown above, from Pliny, that the use of letters had been known to the Chaldeans from such antiquity that some have held Assyrian letters to be eternal. The art of writing, then — and that in Chaldaic — was known and familiar to these peoples transplanted into Samaria. The Babylonian and Syrian colonists, then, using their own language and ancestral customs, occupied the Israelite dwellings. Concerning the idols which they worshiped first in the place of God, and then alongside God — namely Succoth-benoth, Nergal, Ashima, Adrammelech, and Anammelech — let the reader consult the most learned Selden's Syntagma on the Syrian Gods.

III. This most abject people, then — a mixed rabble of various nations, and next to nothing, inhabiting waste places, without law or king, subject to the Jews — remained ignoble and obscure right down to the Babylonian captivity. But being afflicted by lions divinely sent against them because they had polluted the holy land with idols contrary to the Noachic precepts, that is, the law of nature, and since the neighboring Jews, among whom alone the worship of the true God flourished, would have nothing in common with them, they arranged to have a priest of the Jeroboam sort sent to them by King Shalmaneser, to teach them the manner of worshiping God as it had been observed by the idolatrous Israelites. The rabbis write that his name was Dustai; for thus they say: סנחריב שלח לכותים רבי דוסתאי בן ימאי ללמדם תורה ("Sennacherib sent to the Cuthites Rabbi Dustai son of Jamai to teach them the law") — that is, "Sennacherib sent to the Cuthites Rabbi Dustai, son of Jamai, to teach them the law." Most ineptly, in their usual manner: they invent some rabbi or other — a rabbinic title born many centuries too soon — and have him sent by Sennacherib, to whom this business had nothing to do. The words that Epiphanius reports on this matter are exceedingly monstrous, and altogether like the ravings of a dreamer, written with such carelessness — not to say anything harsher — that he does not appear to have deigned even to consult the sacred history. For in the first place he relates that "the Assyrian nations were sent into Judea by Nebuchadnezzar, at the request of the elders who had been carried into captivity in the days of Jeconiah" — almost as many monstrosities as words. Then he says that "Ezra was sent from Babylon to instruct the Samaritans in the law of the LORD": Μετὰ τοῦ νόμου Ἐσδρὰν τινὰ ἱερέα ἀποστέλλουσι παιδευτὴν τοῦ νόμου ἀπὸ Βαβυλῶνος, πρὸς τὸ παιδεῦσαι τοὺς ἐν τῇ Σαμαρείᾳ καθεσθέντας Ἀσσυρίους ("together with the law they send a certain priest Ezra as instructor of the law from Babylon, to instruct the Assyrians settled in Samaria") — nor in the whole course of the narrative does he wake up even once. Next he would have "Samaritans" interpreted as meaning "guardians": Ἑρμηνεύονται Σαμαρεῖται φύλακες, διὰ τὸ ἐν τάξει φυλάκων τετάχθαι ἐν τῇ γῇ, ἢ ἀπὸ τοῦ φύλακας αὐτοὺς εἶναι τῆς κατὰ τὸν νόμον Μωϋσέως διατάξεως ("'Samaritans' is interpreted as 'guardians,' because they were stationed in that land in the rank of guardians, or because they were guardians of the ordinance according to the law of Moses") — that is, "Samaritans are interpreted as guardians, because they were once stationed as guardians in that land; or because they were appointed by Moses to guard the law." Although these things are most absurd, Dionysius Petavius, in his Animadversions on Epiphanius, affirms that almost all the Greeks and Latins embrace that idle etymology of the word; and indeed Eusebius, in his Chronicle, expressly preceded him in this etymology — unless the very words, "which in the Latin tongue is rendered guardians," were added by Jerome, as Scaliger and Petavius suspect. But that priest, whoever in the end he was, being in no way concerned for the worship of the true God — which was required to be solemnly carried out only at Jerusalem — taught the new peoples that impious manner of worshiping God which had prevailed among the Israelites before the captivity. The Samaritans, then, were admitted into the Israelite religion in the same manner in which the Americans were admitted into Christianity through the Jesuits and other Romish emissaries; for in order to shorten the business of conversion, they granted them the liberty of worshiping and adoring the idols they had previously had — especially their household penates or lares, which they called Zemas — after marking them with the titles and names of the saints. But why should I speak of the audacious Jesuits, corrupters of the whole religion of Jesus Christ, who are intent solely upon enlarging the papal kingdom, when that whole crop of ceremonies which sprouts up everywhere among Christians has grown up from nothing but Gentilism and heathen superstition.

IV. Whether that priest shared the written law of God with these Samaritans is uncertain; no testimonies of the matter survive, no records. But as the affairs of the Jews were worn down and tending toward ruin, it is credible that these Cuthites gradually raised their heads, and that afterward, when the Jews were led away captive, they occupied their empty dwellings. Whether they made any progress at all in the Jewish religion and the knowledge of God, or whether they utterly cast it off, is uncertain. It is true, indeed, that when they wished to join themselves to the returning Jewish people, drawn on by carnal hope of sharing in the privileges which the Persian kings had granted them, they affirmed that they had sacrificed to God from the days of Esarhaddon, who had transplanted them into the region of Samaria — or that they had "sacrificed to no other," Ezra 4:2. For the written text (ketiv) has לא, "not"; the reading (qere) has לו, "to him." But the people of God gave no credit to these lying hypocrites, who were seizing the opportunities of the time to advance their own carnal advantage. Rejected, then, by those first reformers of the Jewish church and by the votes of the whole returning people, and seizing the occasion of a dissension that had arisen among the priests, by the help and persuasion of a worthless man who had fled on account of his crimes, they built for themselves a temple on Mount Gerizim, after the pattern of the one they had seen the Jews constructing at Jerusalem. Jerome, and Epiphanius as well, affirm that they fabricated that very mountain and falsely called Gerizim a mountain that was not in fact Gerizim. Both contend that Gerizim is situated near Jericho, quite far from Neapolis; Mercator holds the same opinion, but Masius disputes against them in his commentary on Joshua 8. But in what religious disposition they were held from that time on, the histories of those times show. For even granting that the common report of the Jews was a lie when they affirm that these people placed on the summit of the temple they were building an image of a dove, which they worshiped, there is no reason to doubt that what Josephus reports from trustworthy records is entirely true. So, when Antiochus was harassing the church with various afflictions, that most trustworthy author proves, in his Antiquities, book 12, chapter 7, that the Samaritans, suspecting that some evil might arise for them from that quarter too, openly renounced, by a letter given to the king, all worship of the true God.

V. Whether they had by that time received the use of the Pentateuch, I for my part greatly doubt. For since they knew that this impious tyrant hated nothing so much as the sacred writings, which he strove with all his might to wrest from men's hands and consume with flame, and since they were of such a disposition as to offer of their own accord to dedicate their temple to the Greek Jupiter, why should they not have handed over the law itself to be burned, by which they could most clearly have demonstrated that they were entirely free from any participation in the crime of the Jews? But the corruptions that still exist in their Pentateuch seem to argue the contrary; and it is probable that these were made while the temple which they had built on Mount Gerizim still stood — that is, before the reign of Hyrcanus, the Jewish high priest, who overthrew that temple and razed it to the ground. And they clearly demonstrate with what good faith they conducted themselves in that religion which they had taken up unwillingly. Since men were born, nothing has ever been attempted or perpetrated, in any religion true or false that men have set themselves to worship, by the most wicked of mortals with such impious wickedness and audacity as these most filthy scoundrels employed in corrupting the sacred books. Let us pass over those lesser crimes — of thrusting the name of Shechem into the text, and substituting Gerizim in place of Ebal, in order to lend support to their error. Consider only this: that they added an eleventh commandment to the ten commandments of God — namely, their own crime. The Decalogue is set forth in two places: Exodus 20, when the law was first given, and Deuteronomy 5, when it is solemnly repeated; in both places they stitched their own precept onto the commandments of God, and no copy of their Pentateuch survives in which this most impious fraud is not found. The words, as they are given in the Le Jay and London Polyglot Bibles, run as follows: "And when the LORD your God shall have brought you into the land of the Canaanites, which you are going in to possess, you shall set up for yourself two great stones, and shall plaster them with lime, and shall write upon those stones all the words of this law. For after you have crossed the Jordan, you shall set up these stones, which I command you this day, on Mount Gerizim, and you shall build there an altar to the LORD your God — an altar of stone; you shall not lift up iron upon them. Of unhewn stones you shall build that altar to the LORD your God, and you shall sacrifice peace offerings, and eat there, and rejoice before the LORD your God, on that mountain beyond the Jordan, westward, in the land of the Canaanite who dwells in the plain, opposite Gilgal, beside the oak of Moreh, toward Shechem." These bold impostors pretend that God himself pronounced these words, by which they strive to confirm their whole crime, on Mount Horeb, together with the law itself. Ussher, in his Sacred Chronology, chapter 7, judges that Dositheus, the well-known corrupter of the Jewish religion, was the first to hand down to them a Pentateuch interpolated by himself, and there gives a specimen of that bold man's imposture in corrupting the text. From this, I say, it is plain enough with what spirit they handled sacred things, and what is to be thought of their Pentateuch wherever it is found to depart from the Hebrew text.

VI. But around the time of the church's return from Babylon, and the restoration of the temple and of divine worship, some most learned men affirm that something marvelous and altogether unprecedented occurred, the like or equal of which no record of earlier times, no monument of past events, recalls. For they suppose that both peoples — the Jewish, that is, and the Cuthite — as if by some conspiracy, cast off the ancient letters that had long been known and familiar to their forefathers and to themselves, and each took up the other's: the Jews, that is, the Chaldaic letters, and the Cuthites, or Chaldeans, the Jewish. But let us see in a few words what this matter really is. They teach that those letters commonly called Samaritan were the old and original letters of the Hebrews; that the law was written by the finger of God in them, and that, in their view, the whole Old Testament was written in them. They affirm that these alone were in use among the whole nation right down to the Babylonian captivity, and that none besides these were used. We have shown above that the Samaritans were Assyrians, and were skilled in the Assyrian script; no one can doubt that they had almost daily use of it under the kings of Assyria and Babylon, under whose empire and dominion they lived. But it is reported that they abandoned these letters, and took up the Hebrew ones in their place. Their language, indeed, was Syro-Chaldaic, mixed according to the manner of the time; there is no doubt that they retained it. Only, it is said, they abandoned their own, native, beautiful, easy letters, thoroughly familiar to them, and took up in their place those misshapen, gap-toothed, perplexing letters of the Hebrews which they now use, exhibiting words that they themselves could scarcely, or hardly at all, understand. The Jews, however, as it is said, did the same thing. For the same authors relate that the two tribes, after they had endured some years in captivity — some more, some fewer — had forgotten their own language. For that reason, the returning people, although it took no care to have the Scripture translated into the language it is said to have unlearned, is nevertheless said to have resolved to cast off the letters in which it had originally been written — letters that had been the nation's own, οἰκεῖαι ("proper, native"), and its only letters from its very cradle — and either to devise new ones, or to take up the Assyrian ones. To what end or advantage this idea could have come into their minds does not at all appear to me, nor what benefit the church could have expected from it. Since the language expressed by the letters remained exactly the same, it seems impossible that any good could have arisen from this change of letters. For knowledge of the characters in which a language is written contributes little toward acquiring skill in that language.

VII. Since, then, I hold a view very different from that of the authors of this opinion, I judged it would not be foreign to the matter in hand if I briefly discussed the reasons and authorities on which it rests, and also set forth those considerations which lead me to hold the contrary; and I determined to do this nonetheless, although on this account, among others, I have recently been assailed with the abuse of a most impudent tongue.

VIII. We have set forth what the opinion of learned men on this matter actually is. They lay down as foundations certain assertions which please me no more than the opinion itself. These, then, are to be considered first. First, then, they affirm that "the Jews, during the captivity, forgot their own language and letters," and from this they would have us believe that some necessity arose for changing the ancient characters. But this seems to me not credible at all — and much less a foundation firm enough to build so doubtful and uncertain an opinion upon. From the destruction of the temple and the city to the beginning of the reign of Cyrus, when the greater part of the people returned, about fifty years elapsed. That very many survived that span of time is both probable in itself and attested by the sacred page, for it teaches that the same men saw both the burning of the first temple and the laying of the foundations of the second. That so great a people, or the greater part of them — indeed, these very same men — should within the span of a single lifetime have forgotten their own native tongue, which they moreover reckoned holy above all others, is not at all credible.

IX. Furthermore, during that captivity, most of the captives dwelt together in the same cities. This came about by God's gracious ordering, so that they might be the more ready for their return, and in the meantime a comfort to one another. That a great multitude of the common people, and very many of the elders of the people, dwelt in the place where the prophet Ezekiel exercised his ministry, appears from the whole course of his prophecy. Nor did they ever mix themselves with those nations among whom they lived scattered; in sacred matters they had nothing, in civil matters very little, in common with them. All causes of the corruption or change of their language were far removed. "This people dwelt alone in the very bowels of other nations, and was not reckoned among them." They contracted no marriages with the Chaldeans, no family alliances; moreover, they had without doubt carried away with them very many copies of the sacred books — the prophet Daniel made use of these, chapter 9:2. No one denies that all these were written in the ancient and customary character of the Hebrews. That they saw, possessed, or read any other books, written in another language or in other forms of letters, does not appear, and cannot be proved. For them to have learned the Chaldean arts was forbidden. It is also credible that they had correspondence by letters with Jews in other parts of the world, as the epistle of the prophet Jeremiah to them indicates; and had they not used their vernacular tongue and their ancient letters in these, they could not have made themselves understood to one another. Furthermore, among the captives there were many priests and Levites. These devoted their efforts to instructing the people in the knowledge of God from the sacred Scripture — which could not be done except by the reading and exposition of the law. As teachers, they devoted themselves to performing all the sacred rites which it was lawful for them to observe outside the borders of the holy land, and this was the most effective means of retaining the vernacular tongue. Also, by God's command and promises, they always cherished a firm hope of return, and continually devoured, with eager expectation, the end of the captivity. For that reason, unless we judge that they diligently retained their native language, letters, and customs, we would scarcely reckon them to have been human at all. To what good end, then, would they have learned the language or letters of those whom they knew to be devoted to foreign destruction, and from whose company they daily expected their deliverance?

X. Furthermore: God graciously granted them prophets throughout that whole span of time during which they were held captive; Daniel survived to see the return. These carried out their ministry both in the Hebrew language and using Hebrew letters. As far as language is concerned, certain parts of Daniel's prophecy have a peculiar character; but no one doubts that these too were written in Hebrew letters. And while the autographs of these prophets not only existed but were, so to speak, still wet from the writers' hands, to suppose that Ezra, rejecting these, transcribed these prophecies in another character seems to me to be almost sheer madness.

XI. It is further alleged that the Jews lived scattered throughout the whole of Assyria, and that they accordingly learned the language of the Assyrians, or Chaldeans, so thoroughly that they forgot their own; and they say this is why, when the law was publicly recited to the common people after their return, the Levites were obliged to interpret the words read into Chaldaic, so that the people might grasp their meaning — as is clear from Nehemiah 8:8. Some also write that from this arose the custom of reading and writing the law verse by verse, alternating Hebrew and Chaldaic, so that, once a verse of the text had been recited or written, its Targum was immediately appended; and some copies of the law written in this manner still exist. The truth of the matter: we have shown above — and it is also entirely established from the history of the returning Jews — that those to whom God granted the will and the means to return to their homeland lived not at all scattered, but together in very numerous colonies. This will be manifest to anyone who weighs the history of the return, found in Ezra chapters 2 and 8. The Holy Spirit narrates the exposition of the law by the Levites in these words, Nehemiah 8:7-8: "The Levites taught the people the law, the people remaining in their place; for they read that book, the law of God, distinctly, and by expounding the sense, gave understanding by means of the reading itself." Whoever wishes to understand, by this exposition of the sense of the words of the law, a translation into the Chaldaic tongue — what the rabbis call the Targum — is, without any doubt, no one, unless he would rather play the fool with the rabbis than embrace the plain truth. The holy man relates that the Levites diligently attended to their duty of teaching the people. God had set them over the task of instructing the people in the law by its constant exposition, the narration of its sense, and its preaching. Sacred history testifies that what they had been accustomed to do before the captivity, in discharging the duty entrusted to them, they also did at that time, under that solemn reformation of the church: that is, they read the law publicly, narrated its sense, and instructed the people in its understanding — which is a most manifest description of the solemn preaching of the word. Finally, Scripture plainly teaches that the returning people spoke in pure Jewish speech; and for that reason Nehemiah was vehemently angered against those who, through impious intermarriage with the neighboring peoples, had also contracted a corruption of their speech, in the last chapter, verses 23-25: "In those days also," he says, "I saw Jews who had married women of Ashdod; and their children spoke half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak the language of the Jews, but spoke according to the language of each people. Therefore I contended with them, and cursed them, and struck them," etc. There would indeed have been no cause at all for the holy man to be so greatly incensed that they could not speak pure Jewish, but used a mixed and indeed barbarous speech, if the whole people had labored under the same defect of linguistic ignorance. A copy of that Hebrew-Chaldaic Pentateuch is kept in the Bodleian Library among the books of the celebrated Selden — the very same, unless I am mistaken, that is dragged in to confirm this opinion about the corruption of the language of the returning Jews. But it would be most inept to refer that arrangement of the Targum to the alleged custom of first reading the text and then the Chaldaic paraphrase. For that manuscript — of which, or of any older example of its kind, I have not yet heard that any trace exists anywhere — was written at least a thousand years after the Syro-Chaldaic language had ceased to be in any use whatsoever among the Jewish people.

XII. Furthermore, it is very well known that colonies can preserve their language uncorrupted for a very long time, provided only that a large multitude of people of the same tongue spend their lives together in the same place, and do not mix themselves with other peoples by marriage or commerce. Let the Anglo-Saxons in Ireland serve as an example. Almost four hundred years have elapsed down to our own age since a band of Englishmen, not large, was carried over into Ireland and settled at Wexford, and there retained its vernacular tongue so exactly that Camden does not hesitate to affirm that an Englishman who wishes rightly to learn and understand his native language ought to betake himself to Wexford. Vain, then, is what is alleged first in this matter — namely, that the Jews had forgotten their own language — a forgetfulness for which, with the language itself retained, they would have sought a remedy foolishly and in vain by changing their letters.

XIII. Next, the defenders of this μετάθεσις ("transposition, change") of the Jewish letters suppose that those letters called "square" were the ancient Assyrian or Chaldean letters; but by what argument, I ask, are they led, on what testimonies do they rely in affirming this? What reason persuades us to believe it? No writings of the Chaldeans or Assyrians exist, nor have any ever existed within human memory; there is no ancient author who affirms that he ever read, or even saw, any such; whence, then, could we learn what forms of letters they used? The Targums, indeed, are written in that language, but in letters that have been in common use among the Jews from the days of Ezra. Nor do the ancient champions of this opinion assert otherwise: "Ezra changed the Hebrew letters," writes Eusebius — he does not teach that Assyrian ones were used. "He found other letters," says Jerome — he is silent about Chaldaic ones. "He devised new ones" — so Bede. The Jews who incline to the opinion of a change of letters trifle in saying that the pattern of these letters was taken from the angelic writing on the wall which Daniel chapter 5 records. John Potken of Cologne, the first of the Europeans to publish anything in Ethiopic, judged the language and letters of that writing to have been Chaldaic, as appears from the letter prefixed to his edition of the Psalms.

XIV. It is, in truth, plainly futile what they say — that it was not without God's providence that the sacred Scriptures came to be written in Chaldaic letters, since the empire of the Chaldeans had spread itself far and wide through the whole East, and the truth might thereby be more widely disclosed. Futile, I say, this is, and that on more than one count. For what benefit or advantage, I ask, could accrue to those ignorant of the Hebrew language from the fact that the sacred books were written in Chaldaic letters? Can any shortcut in learning a language really come from its being written in one known character rather than another that could be just as perfectly grasped and retained within the space of a single little hour? Since the language which alone embraced heavenly truth remained the same, that change of letters brought, without any doubt, absolutely no benefit toward advancing the knowledge of that truth. Besides, the empire of the Chaldeans had been utterly overthrown, and the Chaldeans slaughtered to a man, by the time this prodigious μεταμόρφωσις ("transformation") is imagined to have taken place. It is not clear that the Medes or Persians, in whose hands at that time the sovereignty of the East lay, used either the same characters or the same language as the Chaldeans. What, then, could bare Chaldaic letters have contributed toward advancing the truth on account of the empire of the Chaldeans, when that empire had by then plainly ceased to exist?

XV. Since, however, we are moving among the most uncertain conjectures, I would dare to wager any stake, if an arbiter could be given, that the ancient Samaritan letters were Chaldaic. Indeed, it is not even improbable that these letters were in some use among the Israelites before the captivity of the ten tribes. For the Jews themselves testify that some of them understood the Syro-Chaldaic, or Assyrian, language. "Speak," say the servants of Hezekiah, "to your servants in the Syrian language, for we understand it," 2 Kings 18:26; and the Assyrians also understood the Jewish tongue, as is clear from the same passage. Now, since the language of each people was known to the other, or at least to some among either people, why should we not also judge that the letters of the Assyrians — the very letters which the Samaritans afterward used exclusively, since these were native to them — were also in some use even among the Jews?

XVI. Some affirm that the Jews made this change of letters out of hatred for the Samaritans, so as to have nothing in common with them in the worship of God; and why, then, should they not also, for that same reason, have rejected the Mosaic Pentateuch which the Samaritans had embraced? It is true indeed that the Jews pursued the Cuthites with undying hatred, and were in turn regarded by them as mortal enemies; the reasons for this perpetual quarrel are to be related when we come to treat of the reformation of the Jewish church. I would not even deny that this is the nature of that depraved disposition — that those thoroughly imbued with it care nothing what disadvantage falls upon themselves, provided they can lay low and crush those with whom they wage their enmities. But that the Jews were driven by their hatred to such a pitch of madness that, with no disadvantage or prejudice to their enemies at all, they should abandon their ancient letters — given by God himself, and consecrated by all the inspired writers — and take up in their place some other letters, either newly fashioned and devised, or borrowed from the most superstitious of all nations, is altogether incredible. It is well known that the Samaritans engaged the Jews in a formal dispute over sacred and ecclesiastical privileges: is it reasonable, then, that we should suppose the Jews indulged their hatred so far as to grant the Samaritans so great a ground for boasting as would lie in this — that the Samaritans alone retained the letters written by the hand of God himself and of Moses, while the Jews made use of some newfangled, profane letters? Surely that most obstinate nation is not accustomed to deal in that fashion, even now, with those against whom it is enraged.

XVII. And these are the general foundations which learned men lay for their opinion concerning the Ezraic change of letters — all of which we have shown to be uncertain, if not plainly false. For neither reason, nor occasion, nor any probable cause can be assigned for so notorious a μετάθεσις ("transposition").

XVIII. But learned men will attempt to prove that it did happen, even though there were no reasons why it should. The arguments they use are testimonies, and other records; I will briefly weigh the chief of these, so that we may see whether they are equal to establishing credibility for this paradoxical opinion.

XIX. Of the testimonies they use, some are drawn from the Jews, others from the writings of certain Christian authors. The chief of the Jewish testimonies is from the Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin, chapter 2, section 3: אמר מר זוטרא ואיתימא מר עוקבא בתחלה ניתנה תורה לישראל בכתב עברי ולשון הקדש והידין וניתנה להם בימי עזרא בכתב אשורית ולשון ארמי ביררו להם ישראל כתב אשורית ולשון הקדש והניחו להדיוטות כתב עברית ולשון ארמית מאן הדיוטות אמר רב חסדה כותאי ("Mar Zutra — and some say Mar Ukba — said: at first the law was given to Israel in Hebrew script and the holy tongue; then it was given to them, in the days of Ezra, in Assyrian script and the Syrian tongue. Israel chose for themselves the Assyrian script and the holy tongue in particular, and left the Hebrew script and the Syrian tongue to the idiotai [the unlettered]. Who are these idiotai? Says Rab Chasda: they are the Cuthites") — that is, the Samaritans. He who is openly false and mendacious in matters better known ought to be reckoned of only feeble credibility in doubtful and uncertain matters; and very many of the things recorded here by Zutra and Ukba are plainly and utterly false. For what of this — was sacred Scripture given, in the days of Ezra, in the Syro-Chaldaic tongue? Most false; since only small portions of one or another book are written in that dialect, which they have retained in that language. Those prophets who were contemporaries of Ezra — Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi — did not utter so much as a single word in Chaldaic in their writings. No Targum, moreover, was written until long afterward. Most false, next, is the claim that sacred Scripture was left to the Samaritans in Hebrew letters but in the Assyrian language: the Pentateuch said to have been handed down to them is Hebrew, not Chaldaic, as everyone knows.

XX. Since, then, all the rest of what these Amoraic rabbis assert is utterly false, why should not what they babble about the change of letters also be reckoned false? The Talmudic Jews reply that these words of the rabbis in the Talmud, and consequently all the passages in which mention is made of the Assyrian letters, must be interpreted far otherwise than they are commonly taken. For they affirm that this "Assyrian" script was that very script in which the tablets of the law were written, and consequently the whole Old Testament. So Ben Israel, on chapter 1 of the Talmudic tractate Megillah: "This script," he says, "in which we today write the books of the law and every sacred matter, and which is called the script of Ashuri, is the very same that was on the tablets of testimony and in the book of the law that was placed at the side of the ark of the LORD." Then they give a reason why it is called "Ashuri": Rabbi, in the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin chapter 2: למה נקרא שמה אשורית שמאושרת בכתב ("why is it called Ashurith? because it is meusheret — made blessed — in the writing"). Others give other explanations of this word, but I have no wish to pronounce upon their squabbles, since they are the most mendacious tricksters, especially, to a man, the older ones. Let the reader consult Joseph de Voisin, Preface to the Pugio Fidei, pp. 86-87; Hottinger, On Hebrew Coins, pp. 122-123; Buxtorf, Dissertation on the Antiquity of the Hebrew Letters.

XXI. There exist in the Talmudic work itself very many testimonies, ascribed to older masters than those adduced for the contrary opinion, which openly, directly, and consistently affirm that the square letters which Jews and Christians use today were the ancient letters of the Hebrews, in which the law and the whole of sacred Scripture were written. There is no need for me to transcribe these, or any of them, here, since, in my judgment at least, what they say contributes little or nothing at all toward settling this dispute. The celebrated Buxtorf has, however, collected these in so great a number (for they are but a number, and nothing more) that he does not shrink from concluding his treatise with these words: "We think we have shown, clearer than the noonday light, that the greater and better part of the Hebrews, both ancient and modern, contrary to what others have hitherto wished to persuade us, stand and contend for the antiquity of the Hebrew letters."

XXII. But of greater weight seem to be the things found among some of the ancient Christian writers, and these too must therefore be briefly reviewed. Eusebius, Jerome, and Bede are thought to give judgment in this matter. From Eusebius these words are cited, at the second year of the 180th Olympiad: "Ezra was a most learned scribe of the divine law and the illustrious teacher of all the Jews; and it is affirmed that he composed the divine Scriptures from memory, and that, so that they might not be mixed up with the Samaritans, he changed the Jewish letters." But this Eusebian statement errs in many ways, and is by no means equal to establishing the aforesaid opinion. For, in the first place, it rests on some rumor or other: "it is affirmed," he says — but by whom, or when it was affirmed, he does not tell us, nor whether he himself gives this rumor any credence at all. Furthermore, he cites as authority a rumor plainly guilty of the most open falsehood: for this same rumor affirmed that Ezra restored the lost Scriptures from memory — a blasphemous fiction than which nothing more inept or more abhorrent to the truth could ever be invented. But when any witness is caught lying down in one falsehood, it is fair and right that his credibility be entirely withdrawn. Further, these unnamed authorities did not even affirm that Ezra introduced the use of Chaldaic letters, but only that he changed the ancient letters — which might perhaps be referred to the invention of the vowel points. It is established that the Jews, or the Samaritans themselves, were the authors of this rumor; and how much credit is due to them in matters of history is very well known.

XXIII. What is cited from Jerome, in his preface to the books of Kings, runs as follows: "That there are twenty-two letters among the Hebrews," he says, "the language of the Syrians and Chaldeans also attests, which is in large measure akin to Hebrew; for they too have twenty-two elements, of the same sound, but with different characters. The Samaritans, too, write out the Pentateuch of Moses in the same number of letters, differing only in the shapes and the apices. And it is certain that Ezra, the scribe and teacher of the law, after the taking of Jerusalem and the restoration of the temple under Zerubbabel, found other letters, which we now use — since up to that time the characters of the Samaritans and of the Hebrews had been the same." Thus he. Do you really say, Jerome, that it is certain that Ezra abrogated the letters given by God and substituted others in their place? That it is certain he laid hands on the writings of all the prophets, even some quite recently published? But whence, I ask, is this certain? Or by what indications are we to know it to be probable? Then, what, I ask, were those "other letters" which you say he certainly found? Chaldaic? But you deny this, since you say the Chaldeans have the same number of letters and that these are akin to them. Or would you have him devise new ones? On what authority, or by what warrant, this might be suspected is not yet established. Do you also say that the Samaritans had a Pentateuch written in exactly as many letters as the Hebrew? But this is plainly false, if they had at that time the same Pentateuch some copies of which have come down to us; but whatever else may be certain in this whole little narrative, it is most certain that lying Jews imposed upon the credulous Jerome more than once. Next I should like to know what these "apices" are, by which, over and above the mere shapes, he says the letters of the Samaritans differ from the Hebrew. How letters that differ in their whole shape can also be said to differ in their apices, I do not understand. I do not deny that Ezra found the apices of the letters, but I judge it most true that by these apices the vowel points are meant. Jerome, then, seems here to have in mind a threefold alphabet, each consisting of twenty-two letters: the Syro-Chaldaic; the Jewish, with the apices or points added by Ezra; and another, Jewish alphabet retained by the Samaritans, which he says was certainly in common use among the Jews before Ezra. And thus what Eusebius merely "affirms" grew, within a short span of time, into that Hieronymian "it is certain," which in Bede turned into something "most certain," since he expressly affirms that Ezra devised new letters — and so, by this process, that rumor, uncertain at first, grew, as is wont to happen, to such a point that scarcely anyone among certain learned men is reckoned worthy of the name of man who is not ready to give it credit; just as Tacitus perhaps would have thought those men asses who denied that the Jews worshiped the image of an ass, after the report of that worship had become so widespread that every single one of the most approved historians had committed it to memory. But why those who deny that Ezra restored the Scriptures anew after they had been utterly lost should not equally be reckoned half-men, no reason can be invented. For far more of the ancients bear witness to the restoration of the lost Scriptures than to the change of letters. Irenaeus, in Eusebius, book 5, chapter 8: "When the Scriptures had utterly perished while the people of Israel were held captive under Nebuchadnezzar, God stirred up Ezra the priest, of the tribe of Levi, by the divine breath of his Spirit, so that he might write anew the books of all the prophets who had gone before, and restore to the people anew the law promulgated by Moses." So Eusebius: "It is affirmed that he composed the divine Scriptures from memory." Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women, chapter 3: "When Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonian conquest, it is established that the whole body of Jewish literature was restored through Ezra." And Basil, Epistle to Chilo: "This is the field in which, having withdrawn, Ezra poured forth all the divine books by the command of God." Theodoret has similar things in his preface to the Psalms. Even before these, Clement of Alexandria, Stromata book 1: "Ezra the Levite, who had been made a priest, prophesied, renewing again all the ancient Scriptures." And almost every one of the ancients holds the same opinion — though this most putrid delirium is contradicted by the express testimony of Scripture, Ezra chapter 8, and is plainly a blasphemous fiction.

XXIV. There is, then, no reason why these testimonies should be reckoned to carry any weight or importance toward settling this dispute. The oldest of these witnesses, Eusebius, lived 800 years after the death of Ezra, to whom this deed is attributed. Notable calamities made some of those centuries famous, and these brought about the greatest ignorance of past events. But the Jews, after they began to publish some accounts of their own affairs, following a long period of misery, filled the whole world with the most shameless fables. These trifles were drawn out of their cesspools. Moreover, these witnesses do not at all agree among themselves. They all affirm what is most false; they produce or press no chronological history, no catholic tradition, no consistent report, but bring forward the rumor of certain shadowy figures, to which it is not the part of a sound-minded man to attribute any authority. The rabbis, then, are the weight behind this cause — and not the most ancient or the wisest of that flock; many more learned ones protest against it, and those who hold the opinion that Ezra introduced the use of new letters imagine, in rabbinic fashion — that is, boldly and most mendaciously — that these letters were divinely devised, and so consecrated to sacred use. Whoever wants more by way of answer may consult Pico della Mirandola, Epistle to an Unknown Friend; Buxtorf, Thesis on the Antiquity of the Hebrew Letters; Joseph de Voisin, Preface to the Pugio Fidei; Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, vol. 2, chapter 2.

XXV. But we have by no means settled this matter; those who have taken up the defense of the Ezraic change of letters place the firmest support of their cause in the ancient coins of the Hebrews. They affirm that a great many of these have been dug up in the districts around Jerusalem, and where that city once stood. And nearly all of these bear Samaritan letters inscribed on them. There are very few indeed on which the square letters appear; but these, they say, are recent, struck after the people's return from captivity, while the others are ancient. Here the champions of the Ezraic μετάθεσις ("transposition, change") triumph in earnest, and rage against all who find the opposing opinion more agreeable, as though they were stupid, obstinate, of a stubborn temper, and incapable of yielding to the truth. But to be frightened by threats, or driven off an opinion which one has not embraced except after a serious examination of everything bearing on its explanation, by mere abuse, is not the mark of a man who loves the truth. I hope, then, that I may call this testimony once more into question without offending anyone — especially since it has long been shown, from the inquiry of others, that it is justly to be suspected of the crime of forgery.

Certain learned men take for granted here several things:

1. That the coins produced by some are true and genuine coins of the ancient kings of the Jews, struck or cast while the first temple still stood; and that no fraud lurks or lies hidden here.

2. That coins bearing Samaritan letters engraved on them were struck under the first temple, and those bearing the square letters, all under the second; for it is certain — from these very coins, they say — that Samaritan letters alone were in use before the people's return from captivity.

3. That there was only one single kind of letters among the Israelites before the Babylonian captivity, destined for every use, sacred as well as profane, so that whatever character they used in striking coins, that same one — and no other — they used in all their writing.

But all of this is doubtful and uncertain — some of it plainly false, wanting all testimony and probability, as will appear from an examination of it.

XXVI. It is well known that there exist, among certain private collections, coins struck from silver and bronze bearing Samaritan characters, or at least characters not unlike what are commonly so called. Learned men judge these to be from the ancient coins of the kings of Judah, and have had some of them engraved from written descriptions. Kircher, drawing on Villalpando and others, exhibits nine of them; Hottinger, several. Some are also kept in the Bodleian Library, which had belonged to the famous Selden. Selden himself, though he published a most learned book on the "law of nations among the Hebrews," presented only two or three images borrowed from the books of others, not yet having become the owner of any coins himself; afterward, as a curious investigator of antiquities, literature, and monuments, he obtained some of his own. I had thought to present the reader here with impressions (ἔκτυπα, "reproductions") of these, but there are things that prevent it. We willingly admit, then, that coins of this kind do exist, variegated with the letters or characters which are called Samaritan. It remains, in the next place, for us to consider how much authority they ought to have. That many have practiced impostures in striking and selling coins — impostures which turn up everywhere — no one who is not out of his mind will doubt. Perhaps nowhere else in the whole field of antiquarian study — in which, nevertheless, it delights very many to make sport of guileless (ἀκάκους, "innocent") men — is deception more common. Some, for the sake of gain, others tickled by a wicked itch to deceive credulous men, have applied themselves to practicing this fraud. Countless forgeries (παραχαράγματα, "counterfeits") of impostors of this kind still exist. On a coin of Ptolemy Euergetes this title is read: ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟΥ ΦΥΣΚΩΝΟΣ ΕΥΕΡΓΕΤΟΥ ("Of Ptolemy Physcon Euergetes"). Likewise on other coins one king is called Αὐλητής ("the Flute-player"), another Λάθυρος ("Chickpea"); but "Physcon" ("Pot-belly"), "the Flute-player," and "Chickpea" were ridiculous taunts, imposed upon them against their will. It is not the part of a sane man to believe that the proudest of kings consecrated their own reproaches to eternity on their coins. It would be no wonder if somewhere there existed a coin of Tiberius with the inscription CALDIUS BIBERIUS MERO (a mocking pun on the name of Tiberius Claudius Nero, alluding to his fondness for wine — something like "Hot-Drink, Tippler, Sheer-Wine").

XXVII. Rightly, therefore, does Cardinal Baronius, at the year of Christ 324, no. 113, say: "There have appeared in our own age — shall I call them impostors? — who take a bronze coin covered with a thick coat of rust, and skillfully fashion, for the sake of base gain, whatever shapes and letters they please, not without great harm to the study of antiquity." It is, moreover, an old enough and well-known trick of deception to pretend that things have been found underground. Romulus used this device when he wished to bring the Sabine virgins into his power. "A report was spread by him first," says Plutarch in his Life, "that he himself had discovered an altar of some god hidden under the earth; they called the god Consus" — Διεδόθη λόγος ὑπ' αὐτοῦ πρῶτον ὡς θεοῦ τινος ἀνευρήκοι βωμὸν ὑπὸ γῆς κεκρυμμένον· ὠνόμαζον δὲ τὸν θεὸν Κῶνσον. From this arose the proverb among the Romans, "to worship a stone from a tomb as a god," which Cicero uses in his speech For Plancius, and elsewhere. So too Martinus Polonus, in his Chronicle at the year of Christ 104, says that at Rome the body of a certain giant was dug up, whose height exceeded the height of the walls; and he affirms that this was the body of Pallas, whom Turnus slew — for this appeared, he says, from an epitaph inscribed there,

which — I know not whether it was composed by Evander's own mother — Phavorinus, as reported in Gellius, mentions.

XXVIII. Among the countless examples of this fraud — of which there survive everywhere not merely traces but express testimonies — I judge that the most elaborate fable of all, that of Prosper of Fiesole, published under the title Antiquities of Etruria by Curzio Inghirami, deserves a place. From this one case alone let the reader learn how much labor, effort, and expense men are ready to spend who have set their minds on weaving deceptions and driving others into fraud. As for the little balls (globuli) which he mentions, and the stories and figures of things contained in them, which he published as the discovery of a noble gentleman, I would not myself deny that they exist. For it is not fair to suspect that any man could be so utterly wicked and worthless as first to concoct and spin out a long tale for the sake of deceiving others, and then swear that he had not invented it. But that the whole work was the fiction and sport of a man who lacked neither leisure, nor talent, nor learning — the man who buried those little balls in the earth — I am unwilling to suspect, since the matter is plain enough on its own. There are countless things that betray the imposture; for in so long a tale, so self-consistent, it was well-nigh impossible for him to keep the sequence of events so exactly in mind as everywhere to observe what came first (τὸ πρῶτον). He even ventured, as it were, to prophesy that he would be dealing with the Phaeacians (that is, with credulous fools), when he pretends that a man who was carried off by the Catilinarian war, so many years before the birth of Christ, made express mention of that crucifixion. For indeed, on the first of the balls — which, like the rest, he calls a scarith — these words were inscribed: "Thou hast found the treasure; mark the place and depart; in the year 1624 from the announcement of the King of the Jews" — the one crucified in 1691. Nonsense! For that any king of the Jews would be crucified was granted for foreknowledge neither to any angel, nor to any demon, nor to any man. Let the reader learn from this how much emptiness there is in such matters, and to what lengths the ingenious but utterly worthless vanity of certain men has proceeded in forging false images of antiquities — how many seals and subscriptions, marks and impressions (ἔκτυπα), are said to have been dug up there from the rubble of walls, the roots of trees, and the depths of caves? All the Hebrew coins known to exist anywhere do not equal in number the signs which a single page of that book exhibits — and yet all of these seem to have been contrived by one man.

XXIX. Of this same stamp was that deed of Alexander which Plutarch records in his Life: when he had reached the Ganges and could not win the soldiers' consent to cross the river, wishing to do many things for the sake of glory and fame among posterity, he had larger weapons made, and mangers for horses, and bridles heavier than were ever actually in use, and hid them — so that posterity, finding them, might suppose that the soldiers of Alexander, to whom those weapons belonged, and the horses, to whom those mangers and bridles belonged, had far exceeded the ordinary measure of men and horses.

XXX. But after it began to be suspected among the Orientals in what esteem the monuments of ancient things were held among Europeans, they left no stone unturned to delude them with such tricks and to practice deceit upon them. For while the East was held by Christians, it does not appear that any Hebrew coins were dug up there. Were the matter not so well known, scarcely anyone would believe that there are still found men professing the Christian name who undertake long and most dangerous pilgrimages to see and venerate objects which the Muhammadans — who forged them the day before yesterday — sell at a great price for the mere sight and touch of them. A most distinguished man, an eyewitness (αὐτόπτης) beyond all exception, told me not long ago that he had seen in the eastern regions the mitre and pastoral staff of St. Andrew, or of St. James (for I do not well remember which it was), which were viewed with great devotion by very many Christians, who found it necessary to pay thanks and a fee to a certain common Muhammadan in whose possession they were, for so great a privilege. Now when this man, by some chance, had been brought to the place where this treasure was kept, and was examining the mitre somewhat more closely, he at once made out words woven into it in Arabic, by which the Muslims (as they like to be called) express their solemn profession of the one true God and of his prophet Muhammad; and at once he departed, not without detestation of the impious fraud and pity for the credulous. Abraham Ecchellensis relates a great many things of this kind in his History of the Arabs, chapters 7 and 8, as does Kircher in Obeliscus Pamphilius, book 1, chapter 2, pp. 10–11 — though Kircher himself is eager to carry off the palm for the silliest credulity from them all. So too, from the time it became a common opinion that some of the Americans were descended from the Israelites, gravestones and sepulchral markers at once began to be found, inscribed with Hebrew letters, and even Samaritan ones (since by then the opinion of their antiquity had already spread abroad), in many places in those parts of the world. And the eastern Jews — who are the sole traders in this counterfeit merchandise — are so ingeniously wicked in this, as in all their other evil arts by which any hope of gain seems to gleam, that a learned man who traveled through those regions testified that he received from a Jew an ancient coin, as it seemed to be, and that the very next day the same man brought him, along with the one he had received, another so exactly like it that he could not tell which was his own. If what Kircher relates in Oedipus Aegyptiacus, class 2, vol. 1, chapter 2, section 2, is indeed true, it will settle this dispute without doubt; but if these things can be caught lying under the charge of forgery, they will serve to bring this fraud, wrapped in darkness, out into the light. He reports it on the word of Thomas Obicini of Novara, a friar of the Franciscan order, whom he praises to excess; this Thomas, among other rare monuments of antiquity brought from the East, carried with him into Europe a certain inscription in Hebrew letters, copied from a rock set at the foot of Mount Horeb itself. Applauding Kircher's interpretation of the inscription, a certain Checaudus (p. 119) — himself long and often resident in those parts — asserts that this very stone was the altar which Moses built on Mount Horeb. And Kircher does not doubt that the inscription itself was carved on the rock at the time when the Israelites, on their return from Egypt, were staying in the deserts of Arabia. Here is his ἐκτύπωμα ("impression, engraving") of it.

XXXI. And these were, it seems, the ancient Hebrew letters which Moses and the people of the wilderness used. But if this is true, no one, I think, will deny that any further labor of inquiry into settling this dispute is wasted. For without doubt these letters, if they are to be called letters at all, are neither Hebrew nor Samaritan. From them, however, Kircher extracts these words: ייי עלמתא יבטן ("God will make a virgin conceive") — a phrase ill-suited to that age, as Hottinger shows in his preface to Cippi Hebraici. For from such shapeless little scratches one has equal license to fabricate whatever one pleases with equal probability. But I have no doubt whatever that this whole inscription, along with the other pieces of the same kind which Kircher mentions there, was a fabrication of this same Thomas Obicini — or, at the very least, that cunning Muhammadans, seeing a man scraping together from every quarter whatever he could carry back with him to Europe, imposed upon the credulous friar. Nor is it improbable that some solemn Muhammadan symbol is set out enigmatically in those figures. From all this it appears how much confidence ought to be placed even in the coins that are brought from those regions.

XXXII. Those who first mentioned the Ezraic change and asserted the antiquity of the Samaritan letters are utterly silent about these coins; none of them were found until the report had generally taken hold that these Samaritan letters were most ancient. So a lie came to the aid of the fraud. In order that the coins might be believed ancient, the letters that were held to be most ancient were first stamped on them; then it is proved that those letters are most ancient, because they are engraved on the most ancient coins. So too, after it had come to be believed, from a slip of the Vulgate translator, that the face of Moses, as he came down from Mount Sinai, was horned, coins were at once struck bearing the image of a horned Moses.

XXXIII. There are also some coins inscribed with Samaritan letters in which the Tau exhibits the shape of a cross. But there are many considerations that persuade us this shape of the letter, resembling a cross, was never in use among the Samaritans. The mistake of Origen and Jerome, no doubt, gave occasion for this fabrication.

XXXIV. There also exist coins variegated with the Cabbalistic names of God, expressed in Samaritan characters. Everyone knows that these were forged only a long time after the destruction of the second temple. There are also coins on which the name of Jesus, who is also called the Savior, is inscribed in Samaritan letters. No one doubts that fraud underlies all of these. And who, I ask, will persuade anyone that whatever remains of these coins did not come forth from that same workshop of impostures?

XXXV. But it may also be granted that this character which is called Samaritan was known to the Jews, and in some use among them, before the destruction of the first temple. It is the constant opinion of the Jews themselves that they once used two kinds of letters. Buxtorf shows this at length with a great many testimonies adduced. Among the ancient Christians, Irenaeus held the same view, book 7, chapter 41 — for he mentions priestly letters, differing from those in common use. Hence the author of the Targum on the book of Esther affirms that the Jews, on the days of Purim, read the scroll of the law כמכתב רושם עבראי ("according to the writing of the character of the Hebrews"), Esther 9:27 — plainly indicating, in his judgment, that the law was also written out in another character besides that ancient sacred Hebrew one — namely, the one they call Libonaean.

XXXVI. Nor can it be denied that other nations too followed this same custom. That the Egyptians used a threefold kind of writing is attested by Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5: Αὐτίκα δὲ οἱ παρ' Αἰγυπτίοις παιδευόμενοι, πρῶτον μὲν πάντων τὴν Αἰγυπτίων γραμμάτων μέθοδον ἐκμανθάνουσι τὴν ἐπιστολογραφικὴν καλουμένην. Δευτέραν δὲ ἱερατικὴν, ᾗ χρῶνται οἱ ἱερογραμματεῖς, ὑστάτην δὲ καὶ τελευταίαν ἱερογλυφικήν, ἧς ἡ μὲν ἐστι διὰ τῶν πρώτων στοιχείων κυριολογική, ἡ δὲ συμβολική ("Straightway those who are educated among the Egyptians first of all thoroughly learn that method of Egyptian letters which is called the epistolographic; second, the hieratic, which the sacred scribes use; and last and final, the hieroglyphic — of which one kind is literal, by means of the primary elements, and the other symbolic"). Heliodorus, book 4, tells the same of the Ethiopians: Ἐπελεγόμην τὴν ταινίαν γράμμασιν Αἰθιοπικοῖς, οὐ δημοτικοῖς, ἀλλὰ βασιλικοῖς, ἐστιγμένην· ἃ δὴ τοῖς Αἰγυπτίων ἱερατικοῖς καλουμένοις ὠμοιοῦνται ("I read through the band, marked with Ethiopian letters — not the popular kind, but the royal ones, which resemble what are called the hieratic letters of the Egyptians"). So too Diogenes Laertius, in his Life of Democritus, section 49, after cataloguing, from Thrasyllus, the books which Democritus had written, adds: Τάττουσι δέ τινες κατ' ἰδίαν ἐκ τῶν ὑπομνημάτων καὶ ταῦτα· τὸ Περὶ τῶν ἐν Βαβυλῶνι ἱερῶν γραμμάτων, Περὶ τῶν ἐν Μερόῃ ἱερῶν γραμμάτων ("Some class these separately, apart from the memoranda: Concerning the Sacred Letters in Babylon; Concerning the Sacred Letters in Meroe") — so there was likewise a double kind of letters in use among the Babylonians and the people of Meroe. Also concerning the Greeks, Theodoret, on Genesis, question 61: Ἐν τοῖς Ἑλληνικοῖς ναοῖς ἴδιοί τινες ἦσαν χαρακτῆρες γραμμάτων, οὓς ἱερατικοὺς προσηγόρευον ("In the Greek temples there were certain peculiar characters of letters, which they called sacred"). There was, then, no nation acquainted with letters at all that was content with one single kind of character for every use. Some affirm that the Jews kept all their sacred things open and public, and therefore had no need of any character other than the one in common use. For, they say, this was the sole reason why other nations invented certain cryptic letters — namely, so that their sacred writings might not leak out among the common people. But no one can prove that this was the sole reason for that custom; other causes could well have been at work. Furthermore, although the Jews were bound to instruct all their own people in the knowledge of all sacred things, yet it was a point of religion with them that the things sacred among them should not flow out to the profane nations. Hence arose that vast ignorance of Jewish affairs pertaining to religion found among all the nations. Indeed, those who suppose that Ezra devised a new kind of writing affirm that he did so precisely so that the Jews might have nothing in common with the neighboring Samaritans in sacred matters. It does not, then, seem at all unlike the truth that the Jews used one kind of characters — that which they employed in dealings with the nations — apart from that which was consecrated to the transcribing of the sacred books.

XXXVII. It is also possible that they used this profane kind of letters in carvings, engravings, chased work, goldsmith's work, and the like. The Samaritan letters seem well suited to such uses, since, in comparison with all others, they are misshapen and unnatural. When I said this elsewhere, I know not what uproar was raised by a certain learned man about "natural" and "unnatural" letters, and trifles of that sort — poured out, I am ashamed to say, from black bile. I meant that they were unsuited and unfit for ordinary writing, and therefore an arbitrary invention (εὕρημα) for the particular use we have mentioned. So Schickard, in Bechinath Happeruschim, p. 82: "It is," he says, "jagged, misshapen, rough, laborious, and difficult to trace out, and therefore artificial." Fuller says much the same in Miscellanea Sacra, book 4, chapter 4.

XXXVIII. Most scholars judge that this Samaritan character is that very one which the Jews call ליבונאה ("Libonaean"). Learned men disagree about the meaning and derivation of this word, and likewise about why the Samaritan character should be so called. Morinus derives it from לבן, whence ליבן; he says this means a graving-tool or chisel or burin, and takes "Libonaean" to mean something incised or carved — and so it seems to have been devised for that use. Among the Rabbis, too, there is mention of "large letters," which, as they say, the ancients used in amulets. Rabbi Solomon affirms that these were the Libonaean letters: "The letters," he says, "are large, of the kind used in writing amulets, and on the lintels of doorposts." His words are quoted by Rabbi Azariah, in Meor Enayim, p. 171. Fuller sets out the whole matter clearly in the place cited above, whose words I have thought worth reproducing here: "That the letters written by the Samaritans," he says, "are entirely the same as those found on the shekels, does not mean that these alone, and no others, were in use among the ancients. As if, indeed, one nation ought always to have had one single kind of letter in use — a notion which experience itself easily refutes among, I believe, all the more cultivated nations. Certainly among our own people we see that the characters proper to archives differ considerably from the common ones. Indeed, those who are skilled know that a manifold variety of letters is familiar to the Arabs, differing not a little among themselves. But these matters are perhaps more obscure, and not very well known to scholars. Yet who does not know the most illustrious and most ancient commonwealth of the Egyptians? What, then — shall we suppose they were content with only one kind of characters, when their hieroglyphic characters had, I think most certainly, a very great and well-nigh astonishing dissimilarity from the common and ordinary ones? And who will contend strenuously that the wisest of nations, the Hebrews, should be condemned to a single form of letters, as if bound to it in perpetual servitude? We do not doubt, then, that for those two chief and distinct classes of affairs and business — namely, sacred and civil — the ancient Hebrews were accustomed to at least a twofold form of letters. And this, in my own judgment, the matter itself can immediately teach; for the one kind is amply demonstrated by the written monuments of the Jews surviving to this day, while the other is rescued from oblivion by the books and coins of the Samaritans." So far Fuller.

XXXIX. There also exist coins marked with the square letters. But these, they say, "are not ancient." Why so? Because, of course, "they are not inscribed with the ancient letters." But whence does it appear that those other letters are the ancient ones? From this, they say — that we see them engraved on ancient Hebrew coins. Utterly absurd! The coins prove that the Samaritan letters are ancient, and in turn those letters attest that the coins are ancient. But these coins of the later kind, they say, were struck under the second temple. How, I ask, or from what does this appear? Why, because they are marked with Assyrian letters, which were not in use before that time. And here too it is plain that the very point in question (τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ) is being begged. Nor are there lacking reasons to expose the emptiness of these conjectures. For if that kind of coin inscribed with square letters was struck under the second temple, how, I ask, are we to account for the fact that so few of that kind are found forged, while the other kind — which was struck or coined only while the first temple stood — is found frequently enough, so much so that a learned man does not hesitate to affirm that they are dug up daily? The people who lived at the time of the destruction of the second temple were far wealthier, and possessed more coined money, than the people who perished with the first — a people ground down and almost consumed by many calamities over several preceding centuries. A historian also relates that, when the Roman devastation was imminent, men of every sort hid away underground the whole mass of money they possessed. It is credible, moreover, that in the rebuilding of the temple and the city, the ruins and rubble of all the walls and buildings were thoroughly searched over by the new inhabitants. Then again, for four hundred years before the decisive destruction (πανωλεθρία), the city was inhabited by a most avaricious people, who would not hesitate to dig into the very bowels of the earth for the sake of finding money. It might, therefore, rightly seem strange to anyone that so great a number should be found of those coins struck or cast before the Babylonian captivity, when those other ones, said to have been struck while the second temple stood, are so infrequent.

XL. Furthermore, Schickard testifies that he has seen an ancient coin, dug up at Jerusalem, struck while the Hebrew kingdom was still intact, marked with common square letters, bearing on one side the likeness of Solomon and on the other an image (τύπον) of the temple. Villalpando denies that this coin is genuine; Kircher, along with Schickard, affirms it. Others find it necessary to follow Villalpando — for if that coin were granted to be genuine, the whole opinion they fight so fiercely to defend would immediately collapse. Yet they would not seem to exercise this judgment (κρίσιν) without reason. For they say it was unlawful for the Jews, without special command, to fashion or paint the likeness or image of any animal whatsoever; and therefore a coin displaying a human face ought not to be acknowledged as genuine, since it was unlawful for them to strike images of that sort. But why, I ask, do they say "of any animal"? The precept extends to every likeness of anything "in heaven or on earth or in the waters," whether animals or not. And yet all the Hebrew coins found anywhere exhibit images of things of this kind. The urn and the rod of Aaron were things existing on the earth, no less than Solomon himself. And when they lapsed into idolatry, they changed "the glory of the incorruptible God" not only "into an image made like corruptible man," but into the likeness of inanimate things as well. If, then, there were any force in this reasoning, it would equally rule out all coinage, as much as it does that one struck with the likeness of Solomon's face. Nor indeed is it altogether improbable that the ancient Hebrews made no shekels variegated or marked with figures or inscriptions of letters at all. For this only is what we contend — that all coins, notwithstanding this consideration, should be held in the same regard and at the same value. But that it was absolutely unlawful for the Jews to fashion any image whatsoever, provided it had no reference to religious worship, has not yet been proven. For although they shrank in the extreme from images forbidden by the law, they nevertheless made use of Roman coins struck with the raised image of Caesar; and even now, throughout the whole world, they all but worship the images of kings stamped on coins. When Pilate brought the busts (τὰς προτομὰς) of Caesar into the temple, the people, as Josephus testifies, began to riot. Yet we know that this same people embraced busts and images (εἰκόνας) of that kind on their coins. The Arabs still call these busts מתאל, or "methalias" — whence comes the name "medalia," now commonly received, and perhaps our own word "medal." And the author of the Targum on Esther affirms that "Mordecai was clothed in a purple garment, painted with birds and fowl of the air of every kind."

XLI. And so too, in earlier times, they did not reject the little images of the Philistines that were offered to them on the return of the ark. Unless, then, those who have taken up the defense of the change of the Hebrew letters have such absolute dominion over ancient coins that they may pronounce a verdict of forgery against whatever ones they please, at their own discretion, and admit others as evidence at their pleasure, this whole numismatic argument is plainly settled. But whoever can bring himself, on the strength of such feeble little conjectures, to believe that the prodigious change spoken of above actually took place — let him do so without me as a rival; for I would impose on no one the necessity of believing what he is unwilling to believe, or of disbelieving what he is willing to believe, provided that I too may be allowed to use my own judgment in these matters.

XLII. It remains for us to review briefly the arguments that support the antiquity of the Hebrew letters. Passing over the many points which learned men are accustomed to dwell on, and which may be sought in their writings, let it suffice to note the heads of those which carry the most weight with me.

XLIII. First, then, bare possession itself — which cannot be dislodged by the testimonies and conjectures adduced above — is an argument for the antiquity of these letters. If we are ready to yield ground before the feeble assaults of any and every adversary of this sort, we shall nowhere remain safe, steady, or firm. The square letters, and these alone, were in use in the church for the writing of the sacred Scriptures, by the consent of all, for close on a thousand years, before any mortal, Jew or Christian, ever summoned them into court to plead their case. Will it be thought fair that the bare assertions of a few ancients, and the crude conjectures of moderns, should override the prescriptive right of so many years — indeed, of so many centuries? Who, I ask, ever said, wrote, or handed down to memory that, at the very least six hundred years after Ezra's death, he threw away the letters given by God and used by all the prophets, repudiated the ancient copies written in those sacred letters, consigned them to the Samaritans, devised new ones, or brought into sacred use the letters of an idolatrous, accursed nation, which only recently had ravaged and cut down the oppressed church? If anyone chooses to suspect that Ezra treated the word of God in such a fashion, I cannot stop him, since suspicion lies within everyone's own power; but to me, when men put forward such suspicions, they seem to be telling Milesian tales.

XLIV. Secondly, we have shown above that there was, in truth, no just, lawful, or necessary cause — nor even the slightest occasion — for this prodigious change. For the Jews had not forgotten their own proper language during the captivity; and even if they had forgotten it, that change would in no way have remedied the difficulty under which they labored. It was, rather, only after the death of Ezra and of all the prophets that this people began to fall away from the purity of their primitive language — and that not from the forgetfulness said to have overtaken them during the captivity, but from the barbarism and the Syriac influence which their dealings with the neighboring nations rubbed off on them. For when, a little before the time of the Maccabees, they were oppressed by the dominion and power of the Syrian empire, and, scattered here and there, retained nothing sacred or intact in their commonwealth or their religion, they also allowed a corruption of their language to creep in; but this has nothing whatever to do with the time of Ezra, who is said to have taken the ancient letters out of his people's possession.

XLV. Nor, thirdly, if we would speak truly rather than merely wondrously, should such a change be reckoned even possible. Many thousands of Jews — very many of them priests and nobles — remained in the eastern regions and never returned to Jerusalem. To deny that they retained copies of the sacred Scripture among themselves is the mark of men ignorant alike of the customs of the nation and of all ancient history. That all those copies were written in that character which had been in ancient use, even those who invent the story of the change made by Ezra must grant. Now, that the returning people should have consigned the ancient letters to the Samaritans, and adopted new ones — either devised afresh or borrowed from the Assyrians — in their place and use, while the greater part of the whole people, still clinging to their eastern homes, continued to use and retain those ancient letters — this, I think, no one but a man possessed by prejudice will readily believe. That countless thousands of Jews remained in the East, that is, in Babylon and the adjoining Assyrian regions, is attested by that most trustworthy witness Josephus: within a few years they had grown to so great a multitude that they stirred up enormous wars, which, after many battles in which they were victorious, were at last scarcely quelled and suppressed by the full strength of the Parthian empire. By this argument the author of the Sepher Ikkarim, book 8, chapter 22, most forcefully proves that the sacred books were never corrupted: "When," he says, "Ezra went up from Babylon, only a few went up with him; but the great men of Israel, the wise and the noble, all remained in Babylon. Since this is so — since all the great men and those learned in the law remained there — Ezra could not have altered anything in the law; otherwise his law would not have agreed with the law of all the others who remained in Babylon, and who dwelt in the cities of Samaria and in the land of Assyria and in other places, and who were unwilling to go up with Ezra." Now this argument — which is indeed most forceful — bears equally against a change of letters as against a corruption of the books. What, too, would have become of those countless copies, written in the ancient letters, which were scattered through nearly the whole world? No one has yet shown. Indeed, even after Ezra had, as they say, devised and inserted the vowel points into the text, there nevertheless remained countless copies throughout the East that were not marked with them — and this for other reasons as well as this one: that so great a task, belonging not to a brief span of time but rather to a single age or century, could not have made that divine invention (εὕρημα) common to all the Jews of every nation everywhere at once. Very many, therefore, continuing to use ancient copies without points, transmitted to their descendants other copies transcribed from them in the same way they had received their own from their forebears. And so, throughout every century, a great many codices written without points always survived. But if this opinion of the learned men be granted — that all the ancient letters were rejected, and new ones substituted, the whole process perhaps completed within a few days — it must then be supposed that at once, throughout the whole world, every Jew anywhere agreed to this so completely that not a trace, report, monument, or rumor survived of those copies which alone they had possessed before, and which in some parts of Scripture they had received but lately from the very amanuenses of the Holy Spirit themselves. From the time when this change of letters is pretended to have taken place, down to the completion of the Babylonian Talmud around the year of Christ 500 or 600, there were very many Jewish colonies, synagogues, and schools, continuing in unbroken succession — to whom the Samaritans, for whose sake this innovation is claimed to have been made, were scarcely even known; still less did they have anything in common with them, or fear contagion from any contact with them. It would be a kind of prodigy if, out of so many thousands, not one man took care to have the ancient copies of the Scriptures transcribed — copies whose characters had first been consecrated to sacred use by God himself at the founding of their church, and then, by an unbroken succession of prophets, down to the very times in which some of these very men had lived. Whenever, in the end, the points were devised, it is plain that in every century very many copies were preserved and transcribed without them. But according to our adversaries' opinion, once the new letters were adopted for use, the old ones were at once utterly exterminated from the bounds of the church — "let Apella believe it!" (a proverbial expression for what no one in his senses could credit.)

XLVI. Fourthly, there exist innumerable testimonies of the ancient Jews which pronounce against this fiction of the change of the Ezraic letters. Of these, as many as may fairly be counted sufficient testimony in this case have long since been produced by the celebrated Buxtorf, to whom we refer the reader.

XLVII. Lastly, most of what is said about these Samaritans, and on which the opinion of the change of letters is built, is altogether most uncertain. When they first received the law of Moses is uncertain; that they corrupted it is most certain. Whether they ever seriously embraced the worship of God is uncertain; that they openly renounced it is most certain. Whether any of that mixed rabble of nations that they once were still survive is uncertain — or whether they have survived from those many centuries at all; for those who now embrace their follies are, for the most part if not all, Jews by birth and blood, called Samaritans on account of a perverse superstition, as is plain from the Itinerary of Benjamin. We owe our first contact with those who are commonly so called to the most noble Scaliger. He was the first to write to them, and it was he who urged Peiresc to send into the East to obtain a copy of their Pentateuch, as Gassendi relates in the Life of Peiresc, p. 157.

XLVIII. The same author shows, on p. 327, what came of that mission. He relates that Scaliger died before any copy of the Pentateuch had ever reached his hands. He had, indeed, earlier received the alphabet, and certain fragments concerning the reckoning of the year and its seasons. From that time on, all who did not believe that these letters — whose forms he himself, almost alone in all Europe, possessed — were the most ancient Hebrew letters, were pronounced half-men. For that great man had so conducted himself that he would allow no one to differ from him even in the smallest trifles without abuse. Benjamin of Tudela affirms in his Itinerary that the Samaritans who lived at the time when he traveled through the East lacked three letters, namely החע; which everyone knows could in no way have been the case had they used the ancient Hebrew letters, since express mention is made at least of the letter ה. Many indeed affirm that Benjamin lied. I admit that he was a Jew, and therefore rightly suspect in recounting the affairs and conditions of his own nation. But to say that he was a liar, and that he lied in this very narrative, is not enough, unless there is weighty evidence ready at hand to justify so grave a charge. They say, then, that all the copies of the Pentateuch brought into Europe prove that he lied boldly and ignorantly. But all those copies are of an age much more recent than Benjamin's. What and how many they are, Morinus teaches in his Opuscula Samaritana, and Hottinger in his Smegma Orientale, book 3, part 2, chapter 4, and others. Not one of them is three hundred years old. Since, then, we have shown the wicked audacity of these men in corrupting the sacred text, who will persuade us that they have not, according to their own pleasure, made whatever innovations they wished in their own letters? Yet I do not say this as though I had resolved to give credit to Benjamin; though I know that he ought to carry no less authority among scholars than any of those who, among the Jews, have borne witness to the change of the Ezraic letters that we have discussed.

XLIX. I fear, however, that I have lingered longer than is fitting over these minutiae — which, indeed, I certainly would not have done, had I not seen that this opinion about the change of the ancient Hebrew letters holds the foremost place among those pernicious views which certain learned men cherish, and deliberately champion, to the prejudice of the truth of the Hebrew text.

Chapter 4

The fame of the Sinaitic legislation — before it, laws nowhere publicly established, still less written down — the Gentiles acknowledge Moses as the most ancient of lawgivers — the origins of laws ascribed to God — Zaleucus the first among the nations to commit laws to writing — his age — the foundations of Mosaic theology — first: divine revelation the sole rule of religious worship — the worship of God never left to human discretion — explanation and confirmation of this first foundation — no doctrine to be reckoned infallibly true except so far as it is immediately revealed by God — all God's institutions to be observed with the utmost submission of mind — nothing not instituted by God acceptable in his worship — this foundation established by the punishment of transgressors — second: justification by mere grace — its parts — acknowledgment of natural misery — all privileges granted freely to unworthy sinners — the destitution of spiritual strength — reconciliation through the sacrificial expiation of sins — the uselessness (ἀνωφελεία) of the sacrifices of brute animals toward that end — the true high priest to bear all sins in his own person — third: the ceremonial worship not to be absolutely eternal — a limit set to it — Christ set before all — the glory, holiness, and faith of the Jewish church — the prophetic ministry.

I. All memory of ancient things, and the monuments of the origins of laws, teach that the fame of that most celebrated Mosaic lawgiving (νομοθεσία), which we have briefly related, passed swiftly into nearly the whole world. That the use of letters was known to nations before that time is not denied by some; the reasons that keep me from agreeing with them are set out elsewhere. But there is no one, so far as I know, who has taught that laws were written down among mankind earlier than these laws of God. Indeed, the arguments brought forward to prove that any writing preceded what God himself engraved on the tablets of stone are mere conjecture. Nor — to continue on the path we have set — is it confirmed by any suitable testimony that, before the Mosaic age, peoples established any settled laws for their own government, even unwritten ones (ἀγράφους), beyond the dictates of right reason. In those early stages of affairs, the will of the nations and peoples — that is, of those in whose hands government lay — was the law of public society. It was expected of them, in turn, that they should hold sacred that common equity and good which is fitting to human nature, along with ancient customs and the principles of reason and utility, on which a people relies to grow together into one body. But the Holy Spirit had foretold that the fame of this most holy lawgiving would spread most widely, Deuteronomy 4:5–6: "Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, as the LORD my God commanded me. Ye shall observe therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people." That is, once this lawgiving had been heard, and the equity of these laws perceived, they would convict themselves of folly and rashness for having lived, up to then, wandering and unsettled, almost after the manner of wild beasts, loosed from all law. Those, therefore, who kept careful watch over the good of their peoples strove earnestly to express and imitate, among their own, this benefit which God had bestowed on that nation; for the wisest of the Greeks acknowledge that Moses was the very first lawgiver of all. So Diodorus Siculus, Library, book 1, chapter 94: Μετὰ γὰρ τὴν παλαιὰν τοῦ κατ' Αἴγυπτον βίου κατάστασιν, τὴν μυθολογουμένην γεγονέναι ἐπί τε θεῶν καὶ τῶν ἡρώων, πεῖσαι φασὶ ἐγγράπτοις νόμοις πρῶτον χρήσασθαι τὰ πλήθη καὶ βιοῦν τὸν Μωσῆν, ἄνδρα καὶ τῇ ψυχῇ μέγαν καὶ τῷ βίῳ ἱκανώτατον μνημονευόμενον ("After the ancient constitution of life in Egypt, which is fabled to have existed under gods and heroes, they say that Moses was the first to persuade the multitude to use written laws and to live by them — a man remembered as great alike in greatness of soul and in the excellence of his life").

II. The wise have always clearly perceived that all right and power of one or many over others takes its origin from God himself. For since all power, in the highest degree (καθ' ὑπεροχήν), resides in God, they most rightly judged that no one could rightfully become a partaker of it except through him; and accordingly they held it fitting that the laws of a people's society should be imposed by his divine will. This truth they had either seen or heard set down in this Mosaic legislation. Hence the most celebrated lawgivers among the nations — Zaleucus, Lycurgus, Minos, Numa — consistently pretended that they had received the laws by which they intended to bind their peoples from some gods or other: Numa from Egeria, in the grove at Aricia; Minos from Jupiter, in the Cretan cave; Lycurgus from Apollo, at Delphi; and Zaleucus, first of all, from Minerva. Nor did those fictions derive their origin from anywhere else than from the fame of this most celebrated Israelite legislation.

III. The first among the nations to write laws down was Zaleucus of Locri, who lived a little before, or about the time of, the Babylonian captivity. Strabo says of the Locrians: Πρῶτοι δὲ νόμοις ἐγγράπτοις χρήσασθαι πεπιστευμένοι εἰσί ("They are believed to have been the first to use written laws"). And Marcianus of Heraclea affirms the same. For indeed, among the laws of Lycurgus was this: that they should not be written down.

IV. To return to our subject. The theology of Moses, whose revelation we have set forth, rested upon certain general heads, or most holy principles, as upon unshaken foundations, on which the heavenly doctrine and all the institutions of divine worship were built. These must now be briefly run through.

V. "That divine revelation is the one foundation, the sole standard, the single rule of all religious worship that is to be pleasing or acceptable to God, holds the first place in this theology."

VI. This truth — as necessary to know as any other in religion — is now at last consecrated to eternal memory, handed down in the faithful monuments of the divine writings. God, indeed, never at any time, from the very laying of the world's foundations, allowed the will of men to set the measure or manner of his worship. Yet this excellent foundation of true theology remained, right up to this Mosaic legislation, wrapped in much obscurity. Many things besides were, by God's forbearance, passed over without public rebuke, though by no means pleasing to him. But now at last the religious observance of this clearly revealed principle became a celebrated part of divine worship. In it are contained these three things, of which frequent mention is made in the books of the Old Testament.

VII. For, first, this theological principle teaches that no doctrines concerning God or his worship are to be reckoned of infallible or undoubted truth in religion, except those alone which he himself had revealed: Deuteronomy 4:2, "Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you"; and 12:32. That truth alone is saving and life-giving which is written. It is that which must be taught, that which must be expounded — not increased by anyone.

VIII. Further, this same truth teaches that all and each of the things instituted by God in his worship — however discordant with reason, however difficult or useless they might appear — must, on account of the supreme authority of him who instituted and ordained them, be observed and honored with the utmost religion and submission of mind. For very many of the Jewish institutions were arbitrary, flowing from the mere good pleasure of the lawgiver, and imposed by the right of his sovereign authority (αὐτοκρατορίας); and Peter testifies that the whole body of them was "a yoke grievous to be borne" (ζυγὸν δυσβάστακτον), Acts 15:10 — to which is opposed the "reasonable service" (λατρεία λογική) of Christians. On the sole ground of God's preceptive will, all these things were to be religiously observed. That nothing whatever is to be added to the worship of God is what remains of this first foundation. And all this was established by the second commandment of the Decalogue.

IX. Now since proud little men (homunciones) are prone — as the experience of every age testifies — to bring into religious worship the figments of their own hearts, adorned with specious pretenses, above all of a "wisdom" consisting in "will-worship and false humility" (ἐθελοθρησκείᾳ καὶ ταπεινοφροσύνῃ), God, in order that this part of the new theology should remain forever inviolable and sacred, confirmed and established it by the dreadful punishment of those who were first to fall away from its authority. For after he himself had sent down fire from heaven upon the altar, as a type and emblem of the Holy Spirit, and the sons of the high priest, giving no heed to his mind, had used strange fire in the sacred rites, at once, because they had not rightly sanctified the name of God, they themselves were consumed by fire. And this is the first foundation of divine truth in this Mosaic amplification of theology, which is thus solemnly consecrated to eternity.

X. "That righteousness, acceptance before God, deliverance from sins, and finally eternal salvation, are to be expected from mere grace alone, through the promised seed" — this theology indicated in the next place. There was promised, that is, a mediator of peace between God and man, who, through his own eternal sacrifice, would obtain redemption, and would reconcile sinners to God. It taught that all grace with God was to be ascribed to him alone. This saving foundation of supernatural theology — that is, of the reconciling of sinners to God — which had been made known somewhat more obscurely at the first giving of the promise, and then at the renewal of the covenant with Noah, and more clearly still to Abraham, is now openly and plainly explained. In it are contained these excellent doctrines of the new theology.

XI. 1. "That these theologians, now mastered by the light of this heavenly truth, were in themselves most wretched sinners, lost, accursed, children of wrath no less than others, and no better than those whom God was pleased to pass by in this disclosure of his grace." Whatever measure of spiritual misery this involved, God solemnly compelled these new theologians to acknowledge and confess it, so that its sense might penetrate the more sharply and firmly into their hearts and consciences: Deuteronomy 26:5, "Thou shalt profess and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my father."

XII. 2. "That whatever spiritual privileges either they themselves or their forefathers obtained, and whatever singular benefits they were made partakers of, all came to them of mere grace, with no regard whatsoever to their own works or deserts." A place of particular distinction in this regard is held by the passage in Deuteronomy 9:4–6; to which may be added 7:6–9 and 10:15.

XIII. 3. "That although God had bestowed on them the ineffable benefit of his word, they were nevertheless so wholly destitute of spiritual strength that, unless he himself deigned to come to their aid with his effectual, heart-turning grace as well, they would derive no profit whatsoever from it toward pleasing God and obtaining eternal salvation" — Deuteronomy 29:4; 30:6.

XIV. 4. "That reconciliation, the expiation and remission of sins, must be procured through a bloody sacrifice." Every institution taught this — above all, that solemn sacrifice to be offered yearly on the Day of Atonement, Leviticus 16; hence that word of the apostle, Hebrews 9:22, Σχεδὸν ἐν αἵματι πάντα καθαρίζεται κατὰ τὸν νόμον, καὶ χωρὶς αἱματεκχυσίας οὐ γίνεται ἄφεσις ("Almost all things are by the law purged with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission").

XV. 5. "That no sacrifices of brute animals were of themselves fit or sufficient to take away sin, so as fully to free from its guilt the one who would approach God by them and look for his favor." All these were therefore instituted for the purpose of prefiguring some other, more excellent sacrifice. Hence it came about that, when the true theologians had lost the understanding of the use of these sacrifices, and their faith in the Messiah to come had thereby decayed, they nowhere remained secure, or free from the stings of conscience and the sense of the law's curse, but lapsed into dreadful idolatry, Micah 6:6–8.

XVI. 6. "That the high priest, in his own person, would bear all the sins of the whole people," Exodus 28:38. And these things were contained in that second foundation.

XVII. In the place of a third foundation, this theology taught: "That all these institutions of religious worship — however excellent and full of glory, and however signal and beyond the common lot the honor of those who were made partakers of their benefit — were destined to last only for an appointed time, and had a fixed period prescribed, beyond which it would be lawful for no one to cling to them." For there was one to come at last, to whom all things were reserved, furnished with the authority of a lawgiver, who would announce the will of God most perfectly, and whose word all were bound to obey, on pain of being cut off from the people of God, Deuteronomy 18:16–19.

XVIII. By the light and help of these principles, that great foundation, the cornerstone, Jesus Christ, the promised seed of Adam and of Abraham, took his place in that Israelite church. And from this flowed the glory and dignity of that church, God moreover enriching and enlarging it with new benefits, so that it might become a more illustrious type of the more excellent glory and the more spiritual administration of the kingdom of Christ, 2 Corinthians 3. It cannot indeed be denied that many of the theologians, out of excessive love and admiration for that carnal glory which attended the ceremonial worship, were hindered from looking forward to the end of its abolition. But it is equally certain that all the faithful, from that time onward, burned with desire to enjoy the very realities which were prefigured through that whole most holy apparatus. Yet the singular thing which, above all, made that church, imbued and instructed with the doctrine we have briefly set forth, glorious and dear to God, was that holiness — that is, that saving communion with God himself — which very many of its members cultivated. The faith and obedience of many indeed are consecrated by the Holy Spirit to eternal remembrance, that they might serve us for instruction and comfort. But there were very many others, whose names, unknown to us, are written in the book of life, who, relying on the light and guidance of this theology, walked continually before God in all holy obedience, filled with inward peace and with the consolations of the Holy Spirit.

XIX. Now after God, in the very founding of this church, had by the revelations made to the lawgiver entrusted these theological principles which we have reviewed to his faith, in order that they might be better preserved from oblivion, and more effectually impressed upon a rebellious people, he raised up, in almost every age, beyond the ordinary ministry of priests and Levites, prophets outside the ordinary order, who, partly by the living voice and partly by writings divinely inspired (θεοπνεύστοις), might set forth these principles clearly, and exhort the people to shape their religious worship and their lives according to their rule. For it is plain from their writings that the prophets bent all their effort toward preserving intact the honor of God's word, and so the authority of God himself; toward proclaiming righteousness and the remission of sins through the Christ who was to come; and toward sustaining the church with the hope and expectation of that spiritual glory to be brought in through the Messiah.

Book Five

Concerning the Corruption and Solemn Restoration of Mosaic Theology; and Concerning Its Abolition.

Chapter 1

The duration of the church before and after reformation — the condition of the reformed churches — the twofold defection of the Jewish church — the first, partial — its nature — the denial of the first foundation of Mosaic theology — the superstitious worship arising from it — this twofold, with respect to the object of worship, and to the means.

I. Although this Mosaic worship was not to be eternal, yet it was more lasting and stable than the condition of those who drew near (τῶν προσερχομένων) to God under it. For just as we have found that all the others, in the course of time, fell away from their primeval divine institution and from the theological principles with which they had been furnished, ever since the very foundations of the world were laid, so too we shall see that this new nation of theologians became entangled in the same fellowship of that guilt. Now the defection of the Jewish church, which held to this theology, was twofold: partial, to be repaired by a restoration of God's grace; and final, which was to be followed by the last punishment, in the utter destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the nation. And since that church was once divided into two parts, the one embracing the ten tribes fell more quickly into both defections, and so into perpetual ruin, than the other, which had been allotted the seat of the solemn worship of God, prescribed by God himself.

II. The apostasy of the Jewish church took its beginning from some measure of falling away from that divine truth contained in those three theological foundations set out above. And, as usually happens, a corruption of morals followed. For wherever men bind themselves by the crime of contempt for divine truth, they at once show themselves akin to every other kind of crime as well. It is inevitable that the morals of men should go to ruin, once every standard and foundation of true obedience lies despised.

III. By the name "partial apostasy" I reckon all the errors, superstitions, idolatries, and other crimes of which the Jewish people were guilty at various times, from their first institution down to the Babylonian captivity. From the Sinaitic institution to that captivity, that church had completed one thousand and seven years; but restored by the returning people, it was blotted out by utter destruction within six hundred years. So it generally happens that, since no ecclesiastical reformation has ever perfectly expressed its original pattern (πρωτότυπον), no church has ever been found, in its reformed state, to equal the duration of its original constitution. I fear the reformed churches of Europe may prove no exception to this. We all confess, and lament, that they have never attained the perfection of the apostolic churches; hindered as they are by so many earthly entanglements, they have scarcely to this day been able to extricate themselves happily from their snares. There is, accordingly, much that strikes fear into me, lest they should not continue adorned, for as long a span of time, with that holiness and purity which they graciously obtained, as those first churches endured for — churches which, nevertheless, we know fell away. The causes and reasons of this fear I shall perhaps explain elsewhere. This much, which I have said, is certain: entangled as they are in the affairs and political conditions of nations and peoples, they have never been able to keep themselves sufficiently free from the corruptions and defilements of the age. Hence, even now, in some places lately illumined by divine truth, matters have come to such confusion that scarcely any face of an evangelical church remains; while for those to whom, by God's gracious disposing, it has fallen to spend their days under the discipline of the cross, it has long been the very cause of ruin that great men — degenerate sons and grandsons of noble and heroic parents — most greedily gaping after the honors and riches of the world, have by their most shameful defection from the profession of divine truth dragged many others down with them to perish eternally. I fear I may be saying something too true:

IV. But to return from this digression. This partial defection touched those three foundations of Mosaic theology mentioned above. The first taught the complete fullness and sufficiency of the sacred Scriptures. This they at times either consigned to oblivion or reckoned as nothing. From this crime flowed all that infamous, superstitious, and arbitrary worship, so often and so gravely rebuked under that very name by the Holy Spirit. For from this they judged it right and lawful for themselves to devise whatever they, in their utter vanity, supposed would serve to promote the worship of God — as though, forsooth, the glory of God were to be fashioned according to their own whim and fancy. With the same madness the Christian world still rages even now. To root out this most pernicious error, God employed the extraordinary ministry of the prophets. And in order that the authority of that foundation of his worship — which they wickedly kept tearing down — might stand unshaken, although there was no lack of graver charges, as it might seem to us, that he could have brought against this idolatrous people, he chiefly presses upon them this aggravation of their impiety: that they observed, in religious worship, "things which he had not commanded, neither had it come into his heart," Jeremiah 7:31; 19:4–5.

V. Now the apostates fell away from this theological principle in two ways: first, with respect to the object of worship, and second, with respect to its means. For, to speak of the first point first, they took to themselves other gods besides the true God — worshipping them alongside him, without him, or after him. But all worship of idols, or of strange gods, carries with it either a tacit or an express denial of the true God. For however much idolaters may pretend to use his name, he refuses to be numbered among the gods. Since, then, the chief part of the initial defection of these theologians consisted in the crime of this foreign worship, it does not seem foreign to our purpose if I briefly review the idols themselves, which this people — subject to superstitions almost past belief — worshipped in place of the living God; after I have first said certain things that must necessarily be premised.

Chapter 2

The idols of all nations worshipped by the Israelites — A summary of ancient Israelite geography — Which nations were known to them — Chaldea — Mesopotamia — Egypt — Arabia — Phoenicia — Syria — Canaan — The idols of those nations — The manner and means of superstitious worship.

I. God very often complains through the prophets that his people wickedly worshipped the gods of every nation everywhere, setting him aside. But this must be understood of the nations that were known to them; and the Holy Spirit himself explains his own meaning thus, 2 Kings 17:15: "They followed," he says, "the nations that were round about them." Which these nations were, and how far the most ancient sacred geography extended, it is fitting to state briefly in advance. Abraham was a native of Ur of the Chaldeans. Chaldea has to its north Mesopotamia, which borders the Euphrates; to its east, Susiana as far as the Tigris; to its south, the Persian Gulf; and to its west, the Arabian desert. There was no region better known to them, especially since it was the seat of the Assyrian empire.

II. From Chaldea, having crossed the river at God's command, the same Abraham withdrew into Aram-naharaim, or Mesopotamia — a region very well known from its situation between famous rivers, and familiar to the Israelites for many reasons. From there Jacob had once taken his wives; and accordingly that nation was a second branch of the people's stock, to whose very borders the boundaries of David's empire once extended. They called Egypt Mitsraim, after Ham's son, who occupied that land immediately after the dispersion at Babel. Their long servitude there, while the nation was being formed, did not allow them to remain ignorant of it, nor did the later proximity of empires or commerce allow it afterward.

III. Arabia in general they called Ereb; the desert region, Kedar; the fertile region, Sheba; the rocky region, Aram-Soba. In it, the Ammonites, Moabites, Midianites, and Edomites were well known to them from their common ancestry, and the rest of its inhabitants from proximity and from the wars waged against them. The Mediterranean Sea was to them "the great sea"; the western sea, and whatever lands lay beyond it, they called Tarshish — though the LXX render that word variously, and specifically at Isaiah 23:1 as Καρχηδών ("Carthage").

IV. In the land of Canaan they had thorough familiarity with all the nations — both those which had been subdued or destroyed by them in war, and those which survived that disaster and continued in their own right. It is clear from the sacred histories that they came to know the whole of Phoenicia, together with that part of Syria which borders on Arabia and is called Coele(-Syria), which they scarcely distinguished from Arabia Petraea. The Persians, or Elamites, they came to know only late, and then very obscurely. Since, moreover, commerce with the nations was forbidden them, and they made use of seafaring only sparingly, and for one or two ages at most, it is no wonder that the rest of the world's regions were unknown to them, just as they themselves were unknown to most others. Perhaps they designated the East Indies by the name Ophir; all Europe, Chittim; Greece, Phobel; Ionia, Javan; Media, Madai; Lydia, Lud; Africa, Phut; Ethiopia, Cush; Spain, Chephorad; Gaul, Sarphath. But of all these regions only a thin and obscure report reached them, so that they remained wholly ignorant of the manner of life and the gods of their peoples. Being ignorant, therefore, of Hellenism, or European superstition, they chose for themselves to adore and worship the gods, or idols, of the eastern nations, so far as they knew them. For the Chaldeans were the source for them of the worship of the sun; the teraphim came to them from Mesopotamia; to Egypt they owed the golden calves. Into the crime of Baal-peor they were led by the counsels of the Moabites and Midianites. Molech was the idol of the Ammonites. The Tyrians taught them the manifold worship of Baal; together with the Philistines they honored Beelzebub with religious devotion; ensnared by the tricks of the Syrians, they learned the rites of Astarte, or the queen of heaven; King Ahaz sacrificed to the unnamed gods of Damascus; and together with the Persians and others they began to mourn for Tammuz. And these things bring to light the true sense of very many passages in the prophets — especially Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, and Ezekiel — in which God complains that his people defiled themselves with spiritual adultery along with all the nations.

V. Furthermore: all the superstitious rites which those nations employed in the worship of idols — however ridiculous, shameful, filthy, and abominable beyond what can be said or imagined — the Israelites, in servile devotion to those very idols, adopted for themselves. They sacrificed horses to the sun along with the Chaldeans and Persians; they worshipped the calf in the wilderness with dancing and feasting, exactly as the Egyptians worshipped Apis. They imitated the Ammonites and Tyrians in the immolation of their sons and daughters. They reproduced the Syrian libations made to Astarte, with the wine and cakes which they offered to the queen of heaven. In a word: there was nothing so foolish or ridiculous, nothing so unspeakable or wicked, nothing so obscene or filthy, ever devised anywhere by the most senseless and accursed idolaters — or rather suggested to them by the prince of darkness — which they did not prefer to the most holy and chaste worship of the living God.

Chapter 3

How false gods are called appellatively in Scripture: לֹא אֱלֹהִים ("gods that are not gods"), אֱלִילִים ("things of nought") — Among the LXX rendered variously as χειροποίητα ("hand-made things"), βδελύγματα ("abominations"), εἴδωλα κωφά ("dumb idols"), θεοί ("gods"), ἀγάλματα ("images"), δαιμόνια ("demons"), οἰωνίσματα ("auguries"), μάταια ("vain things") — whence אֱלִיל derives — With respect to efficacy: מֵתִים ("dead things"), שְׁקָרִים ("lies"), אָוֶן ("vanity, iniquity") — Of their effects upon the consciences of the superstitious: הֲבָלִים ("vanities"), תֹּהוּ ("emptiness"), צִירִים ("pangs"), עֲצַבִּים ("sorrows") — Of matter and external form: סֶמֶל, צְלָמִים ("images, likenesses") — אֱלֹהֵי זָהָב ("gods of gold"), אֱלֹהֵי כֶסֶף ("gods of silver"), אֱלֹהֵי אֶבֶן ("gods of stone"), עֵץ ("wood") — of visible form, אֱלֹהֵי מַסֵּכָה ("molten gods"), פְּסִילִים ("carved images") — With respect to the true God and his covenanted people, אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים ("other gods") — Of names taken from particular reasons: from their worshippers, אֱלֹהֵי הָעַמִּים ("gods of the peoples"), אֱלֹהִים בְּעֵבֶר הַנָּהָר ("gods beyond the river"), אֱלֹהֵי נֵכָר, אֲחֵרִים — from a peculiar imaginary use: אֱלֹהִים חֲדָשִׁים ("new gods"), תְּרָפִים ("teraphim"), חַמָּנִים ("sun-images") — Of the guilt of idolatry, שִׁקּוּצִים ("abominations") — By way of contempt, גִּלּוּלִים ("dung-idols") — all these considerations are thereby indicated.

I. The Old Testament sometimes expresses idols, or false gods, in common or generic terms; and there are places where it distinguishes them individually by their proper names. When spoken of in common, however, they are called by various names for various reasons. It seems worthwhile to set out a sample of that variety.

II. First, according to the truth of the matter they are called לֹא אֱלֹהִים ("gods who are not gods"): 2 Chronicles 13:9, "he that cometh to consecrate himself... becometh no god" — that is, a false god, which is anything but God. And אֱלֹהִים וְהֵמָּה לֹא אֱלֹהִים: Jeremiah 2:11, "Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods?" — that is, gods that are not gods. The same words are repeated at Jeremiah 16:20, "Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?" These are those λεγόμενοι θεοί ("so-called gods") of whom the apostle speaks, 1 Corinthians 8:5 — that is, those who are wickedly called gods by many, but are not; are not, as he says elsewhere, Galatians 4:8, φύσει θεοί ("gods by nature"), but only κατὰ δόξαν ("by repute") and putatively.

III. Next, they are called by various names with respect to their efficacy and outcome — as אֱלִילִים: Leviticus 26:1, "Ye shall not make yourselves אֱלִילִים." This word occurs applied to idols some twenty times or thereabouts. The LXX render it variously. In the passage cited, by χειροποίητα ("hand-made things"): "gods, the work of men's hands," Isaiah 2:8; elsewhere by βδελύγματα, "abominations," or things to be abhorred — so likewise Ezekiel 30:13; Leviticus 19:4, εἴδωλα; and Habakkuk 2:18, εἴδωλα κωφά — "idols," and "dumb idols." Also Psalm 97:7, γλυπτά, "graven things"; Isaiah 19:3, they have θεοί and ἀγάλματα — "gods and images"; Psalm 96:5, δαιμόνια, "demons"; Jeremiah 14:14, οἰωνίσματα, "auguries"; Zechariah 11:17, μάταια, "vain things" — in which last passage alone they render the true sense of the word itself. Now אֱלִיל may be said to be as it were אֶל אֵל, "not God" — whatever it is, it is not God. But it is more correctly derived from אלל, "vain," "a thing of nothing," which is indeed what an idol is. Hence the apostle, 1 Corinthians 8:4, Οἴδαμεν ὅτι οὐδὲν εἴδωλον ἐν κόσμῳ ("We know that an idol is nothing in the world") — that is, in power or efficacy it can do nothing at all. Hence false gods are called אֱלִילִים — that is, vain, things of nothing. And the apostle calls all the gods of the nations μάταια — that is, אֱלִילִים, Acts 14:15. Our translators render this word almost everywhere as "idols."

IV. For the same reason they are called אָוֶן: Isaiah 66:3, "as he that blesseth אָוֶן." Our translators, "as he that blesseth an idol." The LXX, Ὡς βλάσφημος ("as a blasphemer") — for he curses God who blesses an idol. The same word occurs at Hosea 6:8 and Amos 1:5; Jerome translates it "idol." The word itself properly signifies a lie, and labor joined with weariness; also iniquity and vanity — all of which meet together, as it were, in the worship of idols. For idols are themselves lies — that is, they speak falsely, in that they mock their worshippers, or rather the worshippers mock themselves, with a vain hope; and those who wear themselves out in any superstitious worship will carry away nothing at all but vanity and misery besides.

V. For the same reasons — namely, with respect to efficacy and outcome — they are called שְׁקָרִים, "liars" or "lies": Isaiah 44:20, "Is there not שֶׁקֶר" (LXX ψεῦδος, "a lie") "in my right hand?" That is, an idol, which will prove to me like a lie, performing nothing of what it seems to promise. Hosea 7:1, "they have wrought שֶׁקֶר" — a lie; Jerome, "an idol."

VI. And hence also they are called מֵתִים, "the dead": Psalm 106:28, "They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacrifices of מֵתִים" ("the dead"). "Sacrifices of the dead" is an objective genitive: sacrifices offered to the dead — that is, to gods who can furnish help to no one, but are simply, as it were, a dead thing, vain and useless, from which to expect any help or comfort is nothing short of the utmost madness. And so, in opposition to all the gods of the nations, Paul says pointedly that he had hoped ἐπὶ Θεῷ ζῶντι ("in the living God"), 1 Timothy 4:10.

VII. Thirdly, they are also called by various names with respect to the effects which worship not instituted by the true God has upon the consciences and minds of the superstitious, and the final outcome of all idolatry.

VIII. In that respect they are called עֲצַבִּים, "sorrows" and "troubles" — for those devoted to arbitrary worship are occupied with the utmost anxiety; besides the greatest sorrows and anxieties, those superstitious souls (δεισιδαίμονες) obtain nothing: 2 Samuel 5:21, "And the Philistines left there their עֲצַבֵּיהֶם" ("their sorrows"). LXX: τοὺς θεούς, "their gods." Our translators: "their images." 1 Samuel 31:9, "they published it in the house of their עֲצַבִּים" — "of their idols." LXX: τοῖς εἰδώλοις αὐτῶν. And in several other places they render it by εἴδωλα, sometimes by γλυπτά, as at Isaiah 46:1, Psalm 106:36. For עצב also signifies "to form" or "to shape," as in Job 10:8, "Thy hands עִצְּבוּנִי have shaped, or formed, me." And so, from shaping and forming, images seem to be called עֲצַבִּים, and accordingly rendered by γλυπτά — for the rabbis likewise call the carved images of the saints among Christians by this name. But the word's derivation is from עצב — indeed, it is the very word that is used elsewhere to mean "sorrow" and "sadness": for images bring nothing to their worshippers but labor and sorrow, or the utmost anxiety of conscience, together with the sense of divine wrath.

IX. For the same reason they are called צִירִים, that is, "pangs": Isaiah 45:16, "The makers of צִירִים have gone away with shame." Junius: "craftsmen of images." Our translators: "the makers of idols." The Vulgate: "the fabricators of errors." The LXX: Ἐγκαινίζεσθε πρός με, νῆσοι ("Be renewed unto me, O islands") — wide of the mark altogether. The Arabic follows them. They omit what is in the text, and add what is nowhere indicated. The word properly signifies "the pangs of a woman in travail." The prophet testifies that superstition afflicts and torments men's consciences with pangs like these, Micah 6:7.

X. In this same respect they are also called תֹּהוּ, that is, "a thing unformed and confused," also desolation, waste, and solitude — for all religious worship instituted outside the divine ordinance lays waste and confounds men's consciences, which it ought rather to cultivate and strengthen. 1 Samuel 12:21, "And turn ye not aside after הַתֹּהוּ, which cannot profit nor deliver, for they are תֹּהוּ." LXX: οὐθέν εἰσι, "they are nothing." Some also think they are called עָמָל ("trouble, mischief"), Numbers 23:21.

XI. By reason of this same effect, and with respect to the outcome, they are also named הֲבָלִים, "vanities": Jeremiah 14:22, 8:19, 10:8, "Are there any among the הֲבָלִים of the nations that can cause rain?" LXX: Μὴ ἔστιν ἐν εἰδώλοις τῶν ἐθνῶν ὑετίζων; See Deuteronomy 32:21.

XII. With respect to the matter of the objects of immediate worship, they are also called by various names. Hence, by way of contempt, they are named עֵץ, or "wood": Hosea 4:12, "My people ask counsel at בְּעֵצוֹ, their stock of wood"; and Jeremiah 10:8. Whatever idolaters falsely imagine for themselves, their gods are wood, and nothing more. So too אֱלֹהֵי אֶבֶן, "gods of stone," or stone gods: Deuteronomy 4:28, "Ye shall serve gods, עֵץ וָאֶבֶן, of wood and stone." Also אֱלֹהֵי כֶסֶף, "gods of silver," or silver gods; and אֱלֹהֵי זָהָב, "gods of gold," or golden gods — that is, made and cast of silver or gold, Exodus 20:23. And the Aaronic calf itself is called אֱלֹהֵי זָהָב, "gods of gold," Exodus 32:31.

XIII. They are also called by various names from their external form. Most frequently צְלָמִים, "images, likenesses": Numbers 33:52, "Ye shall destroy their צַלְמֵי מַסֵּכֹתָם" ("molten images"); LXX, εἴδωλα χωνευτά ("cast idols"); and likewise 2 Chronicles 23:17. Our translators everywhere, "images." To form also belongs סֶמֶל, which frequently occurs together with פֶּסֶל, a word properly signifying a carved thing: Deuteronomy 4:16, "Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a פֶּסֶל, a graven image, the תְּמוּנַת כָּל־סֶמֶל, likeness of any figure," or idol. LXX: γλυπτὸν ὁμοίωμα, πᾶσαν εἰκόνα ("a graven likeness, any image").

XIV. With respect to matter and form they are called פְּסִילִים, "carved things"; for פֶּסֶל is an image or likeness hewn out of stone, wood, or any other material, Exodus 20:4; Leviticus 26:1; Judges 18:17; Isaiah 42:17. The LXX render this word variously: γλυπτά, Leviticus 26:1, Deuteronomy 4:16 — that is, "carved things." In the same sense also γλύμματα, "carvings," Isaiah 45:20; εἴδωλα, Exodus 20:4, 2 Chronicles 33:22; also ἀγάλματα, or "statues," Isaiah 21:9; and εἰκόνες, "images," Isaiah 40:19–20; and "altar enclosures," 2 Chronicles 34:3. Our translators consistently render it "graven images." By this name the rabbis generally call the images which certain Christians make in order to worship them. Hence פסל in Chaldee means to profane, or to render profane — for nothing is more profane than the making of images.

XV. Hence also they are named אֱלֹהֵי מַסֵּכָה, "gods of casting," or molten gods, "molten gods": Exodus 34:17, "Thou shalt make thee no molten gods." And there is a description that comprehends all of this, Deuteronomy 4:28, אֱלֹהִים מַעֲשֵׂה יְדֵי אָדָם — "gods, the work of men's hands."

XVI. With respect to the true God and his covenanted people, they are called אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים, "other gods," Exodus 20:3 — which, because they are not that true God, are in reality not gods at all; such as that covenanted people ought not to have admitted. And in the same sense, אֱלֹהֵי נֵכָר, "strange gods," or foreign, and אֲחֵרִים, Deuteronomy 32:16, and in many other places.

XVII. Taking their designation from their worshippers, they are called אֱלֹהֵי הָעַמִּים, Deuteronomy 13:8[?] — "gods of the peoples" — of those rejected from the true God and his covenant and worship. For which reason also, Joshua 24:14, they are called אֱלֹהֵי בְּעֵבֶר הַנָּהָר, "gods beyond the river" — namely those the Chaldeans worshipped.

XVIII. From particular reasons, or a particular imaginary use, certain idols have received their names.

XIX. Of this kind is חַמָּנִים: "the groves and חַמָּנִים shall not stand," Isaiah 27:9. LXX: εἴδωλα. Our translators: "images." And Leviticus 26:30, "I will destroy your high places, and cut down אֶת־חַמָּנֵיכֶם." LXX: τὰ ξύλινα χειροποίητα ὑμῶν ("your wooden hand-made things"). And Isaiah 17:8, "he shall not look to הָחַמָּנִים" — LXX, τὰ βδελύγματα, "abominations." They seem to be so named from חַמָּה, or the sun, which is called by this name from חֹם, "heat." Hence our translators, wherever this word occurs, add in the margin "sun images," although another derivation of the word could also be given, and sometimes it simply signifies "images."

XX. Of the same kind is תְּרָפִים. The etymology of the word is unknown. Those who derive it from רָפָה ("to be weak") are mistaken. It appears to be a foreign or borrowed word. We shall say more about it under the proper names of idols. The LXX often retain the word itself, as at Judges 17:5, 18:14, 17; 1 Samuel 15:23. Sometimes they translate it by εἴδωλα, as at Genesis 31:19, 34, 35; and κενοτάφια, or "empty images," as at 1 Samuel 19:13. Also γλυπτά, or "carved things," Ezekiel 21:21; and ἀποφθεγγόμενοι, or "speaking ones," Zechariah 10:2, for reasons soon to be explained. Our translators either retain "teraphim," as at Hosea 3:4, or render it by "images," with the word "teraphim" noted in the margin everywhere.

XXI. Also אֱלֹהִים חֲדָשִׁים, "new gods": Judges 5:8, "they chose new gods" — mere mushrooms of the earth, which the day before yesterday had no existence at all. See Judges 10:14.

XXII. Next, from the nature and desert of idolatry, idols are frequently called שִׁקּוּצִים, "abominations": 2 Kings 23:24, "Josiah put away all the idols, וְאֵת כָּל־הַשִּׁקֻּצִים, and all the abominations." LXX: προσοχθίσματα, "detestable things" — things to be loathed and abhorred. 1 Kings 11:5, 7, Milcom is called the שִׁקֻּץ of the Ammonites; and Chemosh, of the Moabites; and Molech, of the children of Ammon. The LXX everywhere render it εἴδωλον. See Ezekiel 20:7–8; Zechariah 9:7; Jeremiah 4:1, 32:34; Isaiah 66:3.

XXIII. Finally, by the utmost contempt, they are called גִּלּוּלִים, that is, "filth, dung, wallowing-places": Ezekiel 22:3, "she hath made idols against herself to defile herself" — dungy gods. Leviticus 26:30; Deuteronomy 29:16; it means "dung," Job 20:7; Ezekiel 4:12, 15. Hence this name was given to the gods of the nations, since they deserved nothing more honorable.

XXIV. With these things premised, let us now proceed to review, in the order in which they are recorded in the sacred writings, all those idols which, before the Babylonian captivity, either the whole people worshipped, or at least such a part of the people that its defection could most justly be imputed to the whole.

Chapter 4

The first foreign god worshipped by the Israelites, Baal-peor or Baal-phegor — An idol of the Moabites — In its worship a snare was laid for the Israelites by the Midianites, with Balaam as instructor — Whence the name Pehor — בָּעַר — Whether Baal-peor was Priapus — The obscenities commonly said to have been employed in the worship of this idol — Sacrifices of the dead — A Moabite mountain called Pehor — Whence Baal was called Pehorian.

I. The first foreign god with whose worship the people, on their return from Egypt, defiled themselves, was Baal-peor. He is first mentioned at Numbers 25:3, "Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor." Likewise Psalm 106:28, "They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacrifices of the dead." And Hosea 9:10, "They went to Baal-peor, and separated themselves unto that shameful thing." He is also called simply Peor, Numbers 25:18, "they have beguiled you in the matter of Peor"; and Joshua 22:17, "we are not cleansed from the iniquity of Peor unto this day."

II. Baal-peor was a Moabite idol. Yet the Midianites, along with the Moabites, performed sacred rites to him. For the Moabites employed their wiles against the Israelites by sacrificing to him; the Midianites, however, did so with Balaam as instructor, Numbers 31:15–16; and in the New Testament these enticements to fornication are called "the doctrine of Balaam," Revelation 2:14. Josephus relates with what blandishments and arguments the Midianite women enticed the Israelites into the deceit and wickedness of both kinds of adultery, Antiquities, book 4, chapter 6.

III. What sort of idol it was is much disputed. Perhaps this name was applied by the Holy Spirit, in contempt, to the abomination of the Midianites or Moabites, though it was called otherwise by its worshippers. For most say that Pehor signifies something obscene and filthy; the word is indeed of very uncertain origin. פָּעַר signifies "to open"; also, in Chaldee, "to void food eaten"; and also "to bare" and "to uncover." Bucer derives the word's origin from this, on Psalm 106; Calvin mentions this etymology at the same place, but does not venture to embrace it. The rabbis chiefly use this word when they make mention of this idol: "uncovering himself before Baal-peor" (פוער עצמו לפני בעל פעור), Tractate Sanhedrin, folio 60.

IV. Most of the ancients believed that Baal-peor was Priapus: so Jerome, on Hosea 9, and Against Jovinian, book 1, chapter 32 — for no other reason, I think, than that the Midianites, at the same time as they enticed the Israelites into fornication, defiled them with the rites of this idol at that same time. But Priapus was not yet born — that is, the Priapus of Lampsacus on the Hellespont, who, driven out of his homeland for his crimes, was afterward numbered among the gods, for reasons it would be shameful to relate. Nor, moreover, did those acts of fornication belong to the rites of the idol; for the notorious case (ἔνστασις) of Zimri and Cozbi proves that some committed that crime within the very camp of Israel itself.

V. From the meaning of the word Peor, and the fiction added to it about Priapus, some take occasion, in explaining the mysteries of this idol, to bring forward obscenities of a kind that cannot be pleasing to modest minds and ears, and ought not to be forced upon others. Let anyone who wishes consult the learned Vossius, On the Origin of Idolatry, book 2, chapter 1. In one phrase, the Hebrews put it thus: "It is called Peor, because they uncovered themselves before it at the anus and voided excrement" (נקרא פעור שפורעין לפניו פי הטבעת ומוציאין רעי). But other reasons might also be given why the idol got its name from פָּעַר, "to open." Perhaps it was so called from the immense gaping of the mouth with which it was carved; or, as Isidore suggests, because others gazed upon the image with mouths agape and open. But it is only too probable that, just as the fornications of the Israelites gave Christians occasion to think this idol was Priapus, so from the meaning of the word the Jews seized the occasion to attribute to its worship everything filthy and obscene.

VI. To the worship of this idol is added, in Psalm 106, the eating of sacrifices of the dead. Some understand this of sacred rites celebrated for the spirits of the dead. But that superstition had not yet matured — indeed, had scarcely been born. We showed above that all idols, with respect to efficacy and power, are dead, and are so called. Baal-peor here was one of them; eating of the sacrifices offered to him, they, having forsaken the living God, ate the sacrifices of the dead.

VII. It is not yet, therefore, established what god this Baal-peor actually was. We shall consider Baal later; it is the addition "Peor" that creates all the difficulty, and from it the various conjectures we have related have sprung. But Peor was a Moabite mountain: Numbers 23:28, "Balak brought Balaam unto the top of Peor." On that mountain a sacred house had been built, which was called Beth-peor. Deuteronomy 34:6, Moses is said to have been buried "in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor" — that is, over against the mountain on which the sacred house was built. The idol itself, then, was simply called Baal, and is so named absolutely, Numbers 22:41, "Balak brought Balaam up to the high places of Baal." Baal, therefore, at the place where he was worshipped among the Moabites, was called Baal-peor — just as Jupiter was called Capitoline and Olympian, and the Virgin, of Halle or of Loreto. Suidas gives this account of the epithet, under Βελφέγωρ: "Baal," he says, "is Cronus, and Phegor is the place where he was honored." So too Theodoret, on Psalm 106. But since Peor is named absolutely from the place of worship, as Capitoline or Olympian is named without the addition of the name Jupiter, so too Baal is named without the addition Peor. Baal-peor, therefore, is Baal as worshipped on Mount Peor. So much, then, for the learned rubbish which scholars heap up on this matter. Baal alone remains, concerning whom we shall make some conjectures in the next chapter.

Chapter 5

The worship of Baal, Judges 2:11 — The progress of his worship under the reign of Ahab — Whether a notice renouncing Jehovah was affixed to the gates of Samaria — בְּעָלִים in the plural — Whether Baal was a name common to several idols — Every image of Baal was called Baal — τῇ Βάαλ — Baal-zebub — Whence Baal is so called — What the idol's proper name was among the idolaters — "Lord of the fly," the reason for the name — Apollo Σμινθεύς, Jupiter Μύαγρος — The temple at Jerusalem in no way troubled by flies — Βεελζεβούλ, prince of the demons — Why so called — זֶבֶל, "dung" — Βεελσαμήν of the Tyrians — בַּעַל שָׁמַיִם, "lord of heaven" — Baal-berith, "lord of the covenant" — Berytus, a Phoenician city — All these, one Baal.

I. The next place in Israel's apostasy is occupied by Baal himself, so called absolutely — an idol most celebrated throughout the whole East. The Holy Spirit first mentions him at Judges 2:11, "they forsook Jehovah, and served Baal." By the superstition of this idol the people defiled themselves at intervals down to the Babylonian captivity. Under the reign of Ahab, who had married a Phoenician wife mad after this idolatry, it advanced so far that this putrid idol was openly preferred to the God of Israel among the ten tribes. Indeed, scarcely anyone known to the most discerning Elijah remained free of that atrocious wickedness — for that remnant of seven thousand, which God had reserved for himself, hiding for fear of the fury of Jezebel's persecution, was invisible even to him. The rabbis relate that Ahab affixed to the gates of the city of Samaria a notice renouncing Jehovah. But this is a Jewish fable — that is, a trifling and mythical tale: for Jezebel herself, the fiercest champion of the worship of Baal, when plotting the supreme and fatal crime of the house of Ahab, did away with Naboth under the pretext (προφάσει) of the law forbidding the blaspheming of the name of Jehovah.

II. At Judges 2:11 he is called בְּעָלִים, in the plural number, and often elsewhere too. Hence some think that Baal is not the proper name of some one idol, but an appellative, denoting all the gods of Syria. Indeed, the Hebrews assert that all the images of the nations are called Baalim, since they are the lords and masters of those who serve them (which is what the name signifies): "they are as a lord to their worshippers" (שהם כאדון לעובדיהם). The prophets, therefore, are to be judged as attacking under the name of Baal not merely the impious veneration of some one idol, but all superstition and arbitrary worship, by which anyone grants dominion over his conscience to any other than the one true God.

III. But at Judges 10, the Baalim are listed by name and distinguished from the gods of Syria, Sidon, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and the Philistines. Also, at verse thirteen of that chapter, where the first mention of this idol is made, the name is pronounced in the singular, designating some one particular idol.

IV. It is therefore more correct to say that they are called Baalim from the multitude of images set up for that one idol. For every image of Baal was itself Baal. Hence there came to be Baalim, although the one to whom they all referred was a single being; and Baalim and Baal are used indiscriminately. Indeed, the Holy Spirit had regard so consistently to the images or likenesses themselves in the worship of Baal, that Paul uses the name Baal in the feminine gender, precisely in order to denote τὴν εἰκόνα ("the image") of Baal, Romans 11:4.

V. This same god was also Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron, a Phoenician city on the sea coast near Ashdod. When the Israelites had been deprived of all divine oracles, King Ahaziah sent to him to inquire whether he would recover from his sickness, 2 Kings 1:2. As with that name Peor, so with the reason for this addition "zebub" the conjectures of scholars vary. It denotes a fly. Perhaps the epithet was added in reproach of the idolaters — that he was a god who cared for flies, or one who could not even drive flies away. Scaliger thinks the idol was called by another name among the Philistines, namely בַּעַל זְבָחִים, which is "lord of sacrifices" — whence, by a slight change made in contempt, בַּעַל זְבוּב was formed. It is commonly supposed to have been so called from the multitude of flies which, drawn by the blood of the sacrifices, swarmed into the idol's temple; some, however, think it was because he was supposed to drive away the most pernicious and deadly flies which infested the inhabitants of the region of Ekron along the seacoast. Munster denies that the reason for the name can be found among the Hebrews. But such epithets are not uncommon among the nations: thus Apollo was called Σμινθεύς ("mouse-god") among the Phrygians, from the mouse; and among others Hercules was called Κορνωπίων ("locust-averter"), and Jupiter Μύαγρος ("fly-averter"). The Jews agree — and the thing is not improbable — that the temple at Jerusalem was, by a special divine favor, kept free of flies, although so great a number of sacrifices was slaughtered there daily. It is not unlikely, then, that the infestation of flies elsewhere was cast as a reproach against the idols and idolaters by contrast.

VI. But we read in the New Testament that this name, changed to Βεελζεβούλ, is attributed to "the prince of the demons." For since the gods of the nations were demons, who under various pretexts offered themselves to be worshipped in images consecrated to another purpose, the reason is plain why the name of that idol, which was everywhere held in the highest veneration, should be assigned to their prince. Now זבוב was changed into זֶבֶל, to the greater disgrace of the idolaters. For "Zebel" is "dung" — a name by which, as we showed above under גִלוּלִים, the gods of the nations were called. This word therefore means "dungy Baal"; for no reason can be given for deriving it from Zebul, "habitation."

VII. Among the Tyrians, from whom this whole Baalite worship sprang, this idol was called Βεελσαμήν, on the testimony of Sanchuniathon — that is, "lord of heaven." So Augustine, Questions, book 7, question 16: "The Carthaginians," he says, "appear to say Baal for 'lord'; whence Baal-samen is understood to mean, as it were, 'lord of heaven.' For among them the heavens are called Samen." That is, בַּעַל שָׁמַיִם, "lord of the heavens," or Ζεύς οὐράνιος ("heavenly Zeus"). In all these names, therefore, we have no other idol than the one Baal.

VIII. At Judges 8:33 and 9:4, the deity of the Shechemites is called Baal-berith, that is, "lord of the covenant." The LXX translators supposed that the Israelites, forsaking God, entered into a covenant with Baal, that he should be a god to them. Thus they render the words: Ἔθηκαν ἑαυτοῖς τῷ Βάαλ διαθήκην τοῦ εἶναι αὐτοῖς εἰς θεόν ("they made for themselves a covenant with Baal, that he should be to them for a god"). And Jerome: "He had struck a covenant with Baal, that he should be to them for a god." Likewise the Chaldee interpreter has בעל קים. But the fourth verse of the ninth chapter proves that the idol itself was called Baal-berith; and there the elders retain that very word. Others therefore conjecture that this god belonged to the people of Berytus, or the inhabitants of the neighboring Phoenician city called Berytus, from whom the Israelites learned his worship.

IX. But all these gods, as has been said, were only the one Baal, to whose name various epithets were added on various occasions.

Chapter 6

The worship of Baal — Religious worship twofold: moral, and instituted — Among the superstitious, the place of the latter is occupied by arbitrary worship — Baal was worshipped in both ways — Faith and hope placed in him — Solemn invocation of his name — Swearing by the name of Baal — Kneeling; adoration; kisses — The temples of Baal, and the occasion of their building — Altars — Images — Groves, natural and artificial, and the occasion of their being made — Priests: who were the worshippers of Baal — Servants, priests, prophets — The Chemarim, whence so called — Priestly vestments — The high priest — Sacrifices — Oil, new wine, grain, incense — Bull calves fattened for that purpose — Human sacrifice — Who Baal was — Not an appellative name — The sun — The sole god among the Phoenicians — Sacrifices offered to Baal, to the sun — The sun's many names — Whether the Israelites understood the sun by Baal.

I. It remains for us to show briefly in what manner the apostate Israelites venerated this Baal in the holy land; and then, who he himself was, for whose sake they declared war on the God of their fathers. All divine worship is either moral — that is, natural — or instituted according to God's own good pleasure; among the apostates, the place of the latter is occupied by worship of their own devising. The Holy Spirit teaches us this in the example of Jeroboam, 1 Kings 12:31–33, who in performing sacred rites did "according to what he had devised in his own mind." See 2 Chronicles 13:9. The deserters stripped God of both kinds of worship and bestowed them upon Baal.

II. Moral worship consists in faith, hope, love, and, in all things, the soul's religious subjection. These affections of the soul are expressed by invocations, or prayers, vows, and the sacred and solemn testimonies made to the deity as one present, all-seeing, and all-ruling. They also show themselves simply, and almost naturally, in kneeling, prostrations of the body, acts of adoration, and other similar outward signs of the mind's disposition. With all of these the idolaters paid religious honor to Baal.

III. That they placed faith and hope in him, they showed by the solemn invocation of his name: 1 Kings 18:26, יִקְרְאוּ בְשֵׁם הַבַּעַל, "they called upon the name of Baal," saying, namely, "Baal, hear us." And Elijah shows that they had chosen him as God, by the choice which he allowed the people, whether to follow the Lord or Baal, verse 21. Then they swore by his name, by which they made him the most present God, a καρδιογνώστης ("knower of hearts") and the supreme governor of all actions: Jeremiah 12:16, "they taught my people to swear by Baal," or by the name of Baal. To this they added kneeling, or prostration of the body, with kisses: 1 Kings 16:31, "he served Baal, וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ לוֹ, and bowed himself to him." Hence God distinguishes the remnant that feared him from the deserters, in that they "had not bowed the knee, nor given kisses to Baal," 1 Kings 19:18.

IV. In the arbitrary worship which they rendered to the idol, they seem to have designed a kind of image of the whole of divinely instituted worship, and, besides, they added a great many things, either devised by themselves or borrowed from their Baal-worshipping neighbors. They built temples, or sacred houses, for him: 1 Kings 16:32, "Ahab built a house for Baal in Samaria." Mention of these houses occurs everywhere; they were finally demolished by Jehu, along with all their superstitious apparatus and furnishings, and turned into latrines, 2 Kings 10:27. Now it was this same Ahab who was the first to build him a temple. The older idolaters were content with groves and altars, as appears from the history of Gideon's reformation, Judges 6:28. But after Solomon, at God's command, had prepared a temple for him, the ancient rival and ape of God, on taking the next opportunity, saw to it that a sacred house should be erected for himself as well.

V. In that house they dedicated altars for offering sacrifices to him: 1 Kings 16:32, "he set up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal." It is shown that there were several altars in that same house, 2 Chronicles 23:17; and images along with the altars, 2 Kings 3:2; 2 Chronicles 23:17. But in what form they fashioned these images is altogether uncertain.

VI. To the apparatus of idolatry also belonged sacred groves. There were two kinds of these: some were natural — that is, planted with trees — which idolaters used far and wide throughout the whole world in their sacred rites; such was that grove which Gideon cut down, Judges 6:28, and such as it was customary to plant on the high places. There were also artificial groves — that is, contrived images and likenesses of natural ones — which they brought into their sacred houses and used in some manner in religious worship. Such was that grove which King Josiah brought out of the house of God and burned, 2 Kings 23:6. What is here called simply הָאֲשֵׁרָה, "the grove," is called at chapter 21:7 פֶּסֶל הָאֲשֵׁרָה, "a carved thing," or "the image of the grove." It seems to me that, just as, once the temple at Jerusalem had been built, they brought into it the tabernacle which they had previously used in celebrating divine worship, 1 Kings 8:4, so likewise the idolaters, after they had caused a house to be built for Baal, since they could not bring into it the actual groves with which they had long been accustomed to venerate him, brought in instead their images, or contrived and painted likenesses.

VII. To provide for the worship of Baal, they assembled a great crowd of priests — eight hundred and fifty are recorded, 1 Kings 18:19. Of these, 450 performed sacred rites in the Samaritan house of Baal, the rest town by town and village by village in the groves. These were commonly called עֹבְדֵי הַבַּעַל, "servants of Baal," or the servants or worshippers of Baal, 2 Kings 10:21. They were divided into three kinds: some were עֹבְדִים, properly so called, who performed menial labors, conforming themselves to the nod and will of their superiors; others were כֹּהֲנִים, or "priests," to whom was entrusted the care of offering the sacrifices; others were נְבִיאִים, or "prophets," whose office it was to deceive the people with their teaching, and the princes with their predictions. See 2 Kings 10:19.

VIII. All these were called by the particular name כְּמָרִים: Zephaniah 1:4, "I will cut off אֶת־שֵׁם הַכְּמָרִים, the name of the Chemarim" — that is, the Chemarim themselves, or the priests of Baal, of whom he had made mention immediately before. The same word is used at 2 Kings 23:5, Hosea 10:5, in the same sense. And in Chaldee, כּוּמָר is rendered by Buxtorf as "a sacrificing priest, a gentile priest, an idolatrous hierophant, a minister and priest of idols." Nor is it used anywhere in the sacred text in any other sense; and wherever כֹּהֵן is applied to the priests of idols, the Chaldee renders it by כּוּמָר, as at Judges 17:5. The Syriac paraphrast, however, twice or thrice takes the name in a good sense, for the priests of God. And in the Epistle to the Hebrews 2:17, Christ himself is called by that paraphrast רַב כּוּמְרָא ("great priest"). Most think that the priests of Baal were so called from the black or dark-colored vestment they were accustomed to wear; but כָּמַר also signifies "to grow hot" and "to burn." Why, then, should we not suppose that they were so named from that most savage office which they performed in the burning of infants — a sense which the word's alternative meaning also embraces, since in that work they would contract a blackness of face? That in their sacred rites they used a particular vestment is implied by the history of Jehu, 2 Kings 10:22.

Over all of these a single individual presided as high priest. His name was Mattan, at the time when Jehoiada was procuring the reformation of divine worship, 2 Kings 11:18.

To this idol they offered every kind of sacrifice. That they gave oil, new wine, and grain to Baal, God complains through the prophet, Hosea 2:8. We showed elsewhere that these were the first of the offerings made to idols. Jeremiah testifies several times that they burned incense to him, chapters 7:9 and 11:13, 17. And that they offered bull calves, 1 Kings 18:26. The Hebrew commentators on Judges 6:25–26 teach that some of these were fattened for several years for this very purpose, so that more handsome victims might fall. To these they added human sacrifice, Jeremiah 19:5, 32:35 — a wickedness of which we shall say more in the next chapter.

IX. Let us now see briefly who it actually was whom they venerated with such elaborate apparatus. Some think Baal is an appellative name, denoting whatever idol superstitious worship was paid to. But that fancy is most clearly refuted by these words of Elijah: 1 Kings 18:21, "If the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal, follow him." For just as Jehovah was the proper name of the God of Israel, so Baal was the proper name of that false god whom the idolaters worshipped. I will say in one word who he was: namely, the sun. We have shown that the Phoenicians taught them this Baal-worship. Among them, the sun was μόνος οὐρανοῦ θεός ("the sole god of heaven"), and βεελσαμήν, or "lord of heaven." For the sun was called Baal, or "lord," from that dominion which he appears to hold over light, and accordingly over all things. He was the first of the creatures to be regarded as God. Nor is it an objection that at 2 Kings 23:5 they are said to have offered sacrifices "to Baal, to the sun, and to the moon," as though Baal were something other than the sun; for since there is, in the Hebrew, no mark distinguishing Baal from the sun, the name "sun" may be placed there exegetically (ἐξηγητικῶς), as though it had said, "to Baal, that is, to the sun" (לַבַּעַל לַשֶּׁמֶשׁ). Nor does a multiplication of names always indicate a distinction of things; for the same idols were worshipped under various names. We showed above the many names of the sun. Since that foolish and stubborn people had taken to themselves the idols of all the nations to worship, it could not but happen that the same idols were venerated under various names and with various rites. I do not, however, wish to affirm that the Israelites always understood the sun expressly by Baal, since they had it in mind only to worship the gods of those nations whom they saw enjoying prosperity and having their affairs flow according to their will. For this reason that impious Ahaz sacrificed to the gods of Damascus, whom he suspected of having brought aid to his enemies against him.

Chapter 7

Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon — The same as Moloch, Milcom — LXX: Ἄρχων — His worship and the place appointed for it — The worship: passing through the fire — Its two kinds — Burning alive, and lustration — The opinion of Vossius and Maimonides concerning purification, rejected — Burning children alive customary among the Phoenicians — The manner and rite of this unspeakable sacrifice — The custom variously reported — The image of Molech and of Saturn — Concerning lustration by two fires — In the course of time, that milder kind of torment prevailed — Idolatrous initiation through various degrees of torment — The origin of this most savage superstition — The place appointed for the worship, the valley of the son of Hinnom — A most pleasant place, whence called the valley of Hinnom — Γέεννα, גֵּיא הִנֹּם — For what reasons this name is used to designate the place of the damned — Whence Tophet is so called — Concerning the words of Job 17:6 — The word denotes the place and punishments of the damned — Molech the same as Baal-peor, that is, the sun — Saturn the sun — Adrammelech and Anammelech — Solar worship — The dedication and adoration of horses.

I. In the sacred history, Molech occupies the next place after Baal. He is called "the abomination of the children of Ammon," 1 Kings 11:7. That is, the one whom the Tyrians called Baal, or "lord," the Ammonites called Molech, or "king." Nor does it matter whether you say "king" or "lord." He is also called Moloch, Amos 5:26; and Milcom, with the ending and sense of the word slightly altered, 1 Kings 11:33; and also Malcham, Zephaniah 1:5. The LXX render the word at Leviticus 18 as Ἄρχων, a term midway between "king" and "lord" of any sort. This idol, most notorious for its most horrible worship, is first mentioned at Leviticus 18:21. Two things chiefly are recorded concerning him: the worship, and the place appointed for it. The worship was "the passing of offspring through the fire," Leviticus 18:21; Deuteronomy 18:10; 2 Kings 16:3, 23:10. There were two kinds of it — burning alive, and lustration. Vossius contends that only the latter is to be understood in the performance of this idol's rites. Maimonides is of the same opinion, Laws of Idolatry, chapter 6, sections 4–5: "Of thy seed," he says, "do not give to pass through to Molech. How was this done? A great fire being kindled, they took part of their seed" (that is, some son or daughter) "which they handed over to the priests who tended the fire. But when the priests had received the child, they restored him to his father, so that the father himself, in accordance with his own intention, might pass him through the fire. So the father, with the priests' permission, would drive the child through the fire, on foot, and command him to pass through until he had traversed all of the flame. For they did not burn the child to Molech; rather, that worship consisted only in the passing through." But the most explicit testimonies of Scripture cry out against this. The place appointed for the worship of Molech, as we shall say, was "the valley of the son of Hinnom." And there King Ahaz "burnt his children in the fire," 2 Chronicles 28:3. Jeremiah testifies that others did the same, chapter 7:31–32, and accordingly calls that valley "the valley of slaughter." And the psalmist so interprets the Molech-burning, Psalm 106:37–38: "They sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto demons, and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed." This plainly indicates burning alive. Hence the same word signifies both "to immolate" and "to pass through." And of this opinion among the Jews are also Moses of Gerona and Isaac Abravanel.

II. No one doubts that the Israelites received this Molech-superstition from the Phoenicians. We have shown elsewhere that they sacrificed their children to Saturn. So Ennius writes of the Carthaginians: "The Carthaginians were accustomed to sacrifice their children." Silius Italicus renders this same verse of Ennius similarly. So too Sophocles, in the Andromeda. And Plato, in the Minos: "It is not our custom to sacrifice human beings, but an unholy thing; but the Carthaginians sacrifice them as something holy and lawful for them, and indeed some of them even sacrifice their own sons to Cronus, as perhaps you too have heard." Likewise there is scarcely one of the ancients who does not record the Phoenicians' practice of human sacrifice (ἀνθρωποθυσία). It was by their example that the Israelites gave themselves to this wickedness.

III. The rabbis relate the rite and manner of this unspeakable sacrifice. "Molech," they say, "was a hollow image having seven compartments: one they opened for an offering of fine flour; a second for turtledoves; a third for a sheep; a fourth for a ram; a fifth for a calf; a sixth for an ox. But whoever wished to offer a son, for him the seventh chamber was opened. And the face of this idol was like the face of a calf, and its hands were spread out to receive offerings from those standing by; and meanwhile they danced, while the child was being burned in the idol, which had been heated with fire, beating drums so that the child's wailing might not be heard." From the same sources, Lyra also says: "Moloch, as the Hebrews say, was a bronze idol made in the form of a man, hollow within. And in that hollow a fire was made, until the idol was, as it were, glowing hot, and then the child was placed between the idol's hands. And the priest, beating drums, made so great a noise that the voice of the dying child could not be heard, lest the parents should be moved to pity, but should rather believe that the soul had been received by the gods in peace and without pain." Others tell it differently: "The Chemarim," they say, "kindled a great fire, and one of them would take part of the offspring from the father, and hand it over to other Chemarim; and these in turn would give the child back to its father, after it had been delivered to them, so that he might pass it through the fire by their authority. And it was the father himself who passed his son or daughter through the kindled fire by the authority of the Chemarim, making the child go from one side to the other through the midst of the flame, until the child was burned up." This handing over of the child to the Chemarim, they think, is what is meant by the words of the precept, "Thou shalt not give," or, "Thou shalt not deliver, of thy seed"; and they explain the "passing through" by means of this transit — yet they do not deny that the child was in the end killed and burned. Diodorus relates that at Carthage there was a bronze statue dedicated to Saturn, beneath which a fire was kept for burning living men; and we have shown above that a similar custom prevailed among the Druids.

IV. What is likewise said concerning lustration by fires may also have a place here. For perhaps, in the course of time, the idolaters descended to this milder kind of torment, just as, elsewhere too, growing weary of horrible slaughters, they offered images of men in place of living men. They also prefixed a kind of purification (καθαρισμός) of this sort to idolatrous initiation. For no one could be duly consecrated to the rites of certain idols unless he passed through many degrees of torment; one of these was passing through fire, by which those being initiated were not lightly burned and wounded. So Gregory Nazianzen, First Oration Against Julian: "No one could be initiated into the mysteries of Mithras unless, having passed through certain degrees of torments, he showed himself holy and unmoved by suffering." And Nonnus: "First they are afflicted with lighter torments, then with more severe ones; and so, after all the torments have been gone through, they are initiated into his mysteries — for they are tormented with fire and water and torments of this kind." Virgil also speaks of these same rites, Aeneid 11:785. On these matters, Pliny, book 7, chapter 2, should be consulted. And it is not improbable that the Israelites imitated these things as well.

V. The prophet sets forth the causes of so great a wickedness: Micah 6:6–7, "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" The deadly bitings of conscience drove these wretched hypocrites, ignorant of the true sacrifice which alone removes the conscience of sin, into that madness.

VI. The place appointed for the worship of this idol was the valley of the son of Hinnom. "It was a place," says Adrichomius, "in the suburbs of Jerusalem (facing east, below the Mount of Ascension, near the Fuller's Pool), most pleasant as the Vale of Tempe, watered by the springs of Siloam and the flow of the brook Kidron, planted with lawns and gardens, wholly wooded and full of delights." So it was; for whereas all the other idols had their groves and shrines within the city itself, the house dedicated to Molech was built outside the city walls. It was called by that name before the Israelites entered the land of Canaan; for in the first division of the land it is expressly named "the valley of the son of Hinnom," and "the valley of Hinnom," Joshua 15:8, and the origin of the word need not be sought elsewhere. For there are some who derive it from הָנַם, "he roared, he wailed," as though it were so called from the wailing which the idolaters' children, sacrificed there, sent up; but, as we have said, the place was named for its owner long before it was polluted by that crime. From גֵּיא הִנֹּם, "the valley of Hinnom," the single word Γέεννα ("Gehenna") was formed; we also have the single term גֵּיהִנֹּם, "Gehinnom," Joshua 18:16. For many reasons the place afterward came to be called by this name for the place of the damned; Jerome denies that this was done by the ancients. But indeed the Chaldee paraphrast, unknown to Jerome, very often uses that word for the place of the damned, as at Isaiah 33:14 and elsewhere. It is established that our Lord used the word Γέεννα in that sense, Matthew 5:29–30 and 10:28. For since this place was rendered horrible and abominable — first by the burning alive of wretched infants, then by the utter destruction (πανωλεθρία) of the Assyrian army under Sennacherib, and finally by the supreme pollution which Josiah brought upon it by casting in the bones of the dead — being thus heaped up with so many crimes and horrible punishments, it seemed a fitting place to call to the minds of the wicked those horrible and everlasting punishments which, at the appointed time, God is going to inflict upon them all. By bringing in the corpses, Josiah so polluted the whole valley, 2 Kings 23:10, that it does not appear ever afterward to have been set apart for superstitious use.

VII. In that valley there was a particular spot called Tophet — perhaps that word denotes the entire space which lay within the sacred enclosure: 2 Kings 23:10, "he defiled Tophet, which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom." And Jeremiah 7:31, "the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom." Most hold that Tophet is so called from תֹּף, "a drum" — for a drum was beaten while the living child was in the idol's fiery chamber, so that the wailing it sent up amid the flames might not move the impious hearts of the parents. Forerius, on Isaiah 30:33, says that תֹּפֶת signifies a portent, and that the place was so named because the sight was horrible. In confirmation of his view he adduces the words of Job 17:6, "He hath made me a byword of the people, וְתֹפֶת לְפָנִים אֶהְיֶה." The interpreters, indeed, render these words variously. Arias Montanus: "and I shall be as the fire of Gehenna beforehand." Junius: "I shall be beforehand as material for drummers." The Vulgate: "I am an example before them." The LXX: Γέλως δὲ αὐτοῖς ἀπέβην, "I became a laughingstock to them." The Chaldee: "and I shall be as one cast into the depths of Gehenna." Our translators: "and aforetime I was as a tabret"; or rather, "afore them," as they note in the margin. The holy man is without doubt complaining that he has become a reproach, a mockery, and a byword to worthless men, who mock him as though he were a drum, or beat upon him as upon a drum. But since that word תָּפְתֶּה, in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 30:33, is taken for hell, or is used to figure eternal punishments, the interpreters have judged that it holds the same meaning in this passage as well. Otherwise, there is nothing to prevent "drum" from being denoted here, rather than "portent" or "prodigy," as the learned man would have it. But that the place and punishments of the damned are described in Isaiah can be doubtful to no one who compares, a little more attentively, that fire once prepared for the king with that which our Lord teaches was prepared for the devil and his angels.

VIII. Who it actually was whom they venerated with this wicked worship is not altogether certain. That he was the same as Baal seems to be proved by the same kind of worship; for they also sacrificed children to Baal, and that too in the valley of Hinnom, Jeremiah 7:31. Further, Amos affirms that the people worshipped Molech in the wilderness, chapter 5:26; yet the history of that period records no idol worshipped by them there apart from Baal-peor. Molech, therefore, is the same as Baal-peor and Baal, that is, the sun. Some think that the sacrifices point to Saturn; but the learned Vossius shows at length that Saturn himself, the Tyrian Saturn, was the sun.

IX. Nor were Adrammelech and Anammelech, to whom the inhabitants of Sepharvaim burned their sons with fire, 2 Kings 17:31, other than this same Molech. Adrammelech is אַדִּיר מֶלֶךְ, "majestic king"; and Anammelech, עֲנָת מֶלֶךְ, "the king's answer" — from whom, that is, they sought oracular responses.

X. In these, therefore, however concealed, they venerated the sun. But at last, every disguise laid aside, they pursued the sun itself openly and avowedly with divine honors. Sacred history relates that the kings of Judah set up horses and chariots for the sun, 2 Kings 23:11. Throughout the whole East, horses were sacred to the sun. Xenophon teaches this, Cyropaedia, book 8, and Anabasis, book 4; Pausanias also, in his account of Laconia. Heliodorus, in the tenth book of his Ethiopian History, shows that chariots were added to them. These horses appear to have been like post-horses, used by mounted couriers who daily greeted the sun by the king's command; or perhaps the king himself and the princes, about to worship the sun, mounted them. Whether they were real chariots, or merely images of chariots, is uncertain. But it is certain that, beyond this dedication of horses, they worshipped the sun directly and immediately: Ezekiel 8:16, "they worshipped the sun toward the east." We have shown elsewhere that this was the most ancient form of sun-worship.

Chapter 8

Astaroth — The goddess of the Sidonians — Called "God" by the Hebrews for lack of a feminine form, worshipped by the Philistines — A town of this name — Images of sheep — The groves of Astaroth, אֲשֵׁרוֹת and עַשְׁתָּרוֹת — Astarte — Atergatis — Derceto — Concerning Queen Gatis, and ἄτερ Γάτιδος — Abstinence from fish, and the origin of the superstition — What the image of Astarte was like — The queen of heaven — The moon — The heavenly goddess, οὐρανία — The sun, lord of heaven — The moon, queen — Gad and Meni, Isaiah 65:11 — Who Gad was — Jerome's opinion — The host of heaven — The gods of Damascus — The terror-image of Maachah — Others.

I. It remains for us to treat of Astaroth, and of a few other unnamed gods that still remain. Astaroth is called אֱלֹהֵי צִידֹנִים, 1 Kings 11:5, 33 — "the god of the Sidonians," used for "goddess," since the Hebrews have no word to express a deity in the feminine gender. She is first mentioned at Judges 2:13, and again at 10:6; 1 Samuel 7:3. That this idol was worshipped not only by the Sidonians but also by the Philistines, and indeed by all who dwelt along the seacoast, is shown by 1 Samuel 31:10.

II. There was also a town of this name, Deuteronomy 1:4, Joshua 9:10, which can be doubted by no one to have taken its name from the worship of this idol; conversely, idols very often received their names from the places where superstitious worship was rendered to them.

III. The Jews commonly hold that the Astaroth were images of idols formed in the likeness of sheep, for they say that עַשְׁתֶּרֶת denotes "a ewe." Others hold that the idol took its name from the multitude of sacrifices made of sheep and cattle, 1 Samuel 7:4. The LXX translate עַשְׁתָּרוֹת by ἄλση Ἀσταρώθ, "the groves of Astaroth," joining to it another word of almost the same sound; for אֲשֵׁרוֹת signified "groves." Hence some think that this idol was worshipped in groves.

IV. This idol was also called by other names — Astarte, the most celebrated goddess of Syria, and Atergatis, and Derceto — and it is established that all these flow from that one name. For what Athenaeus, Deipnosophists, book 8, produces from Antipater the Stoic concerning this goddess, and concerning why she was called Atergatis, is idle. He invents a certain Queen Gatis, who promulgated an edict that no one should eat fish ἄτερ Γάτιδος, that is, "apart from Gatis" — without her permission. Hence, he says, the name Atergatis arose among the unlearned populace — absurdly, and after the manner of the Greeks in searching out the origins of the names of the gods; for no one fails to see that the word Atergatis is a corruption of עַשְׁתֹּרֶת.

V. From this, indeed, arose a most absurd conjecture, that abstinence from fish was part of her worship; a cause no less absurd for this practice among the Syrians is assigned, in Hyginus's Poetic Astronomy, by Diogenes of Erythrae, who writes that at a certain time Venus, together with...

"...that with his son Cupid he came into Syria, to the river Euphrates, and that at that very place the giant Typhon suddenly appeared; that Venus, together with her son, threw herself into the river and there changed her shape into that of fish, and by this means they were delivered from the danger. And so afterward the Syrians who dwell nearest those places ceased to eat fish, fearing to catch them, lest for the same reason they should seem either to be assailing the gods' own refuge, or to be catching the gods themselves."

Nothing could be more foolish than this. Most say that the idol's image was fashioned, from the thighs down to the very feet, in the shape of a fish, while the rest of the body was that of a woman. The origin of the figure is uncertain, but that it gave occasion to the cult of fish is almost certain. Nicetas, commenting on Gregory, says it was a statue of Venus. I have no doubt that it was the very same as the "queen of heaven" so often mentioned by Jeremiah. That was the moon, which by others is called both Venus and Diana, and Juno Lucina — called עַשְׁתָּרֹת ("Ashtaroth") on account of her πολυωνυμίαν ("many names") and the multitude of her sacrifices. Lucian affirms that he supposes the Syrian goddess, who is Astarte, to be the moon. Jerome agrees that the moon, ruling among the stars, is denoted by that name, in his commentary on Jeremiah 7. Thus the poet describes her — and likewise in Epode 15.1: "Amid them all the Julian star shines forth, as among lesser fires the moon" (Horace, Odes 1.12.46) — that is, the queen of heaven. Tertullian, in his Apology, chapter 24, joins the Syrian Astarte with the "Heavenly One" of Africa. By "the Heavenly One," or οὐρανίαν ("heavenly"), Venus is commonly understood, as is plain from Lucian. But that Venus is nothing other than the moon has been shown elsewhere. There is no lack, however, of those who suppose the sun to have been the "queen of heaven." For instances prove that שֶׁמֶשׁ ("sun") is sometimes of feminine gender, whereas יָרֵחַ ("moon"), the word denoting the moon, as the other denotes the sun, never is; whence among the Chaldeans the god is called "Lunus." But I could scarcely believe that this grammatical reasoning carried the point; rather, just as they called the sun בַּעַל־שָׁמַיִם ("lord of heaven"), even "king," so by the name "queen of heaven" they meant to denote the moon.

VI. Philastrius, Heresies, chapter 15, affirms that the Jews worshiped Fortune, who in Africa is called "queen of heaven." Without doubt he has in view that passage of Isaiah 65:11, "you who set a table for Gad, and who fill a mixed drink-offering for Meni." These words the interpreters render variously. The LXX translate נד ("Gad") as δαιμόνιον ("a demon"), and מְנִי ("Meni") as τύχη ("fortune"): Ἑτοιμάζοντες τῷ δαιμονίῳ τράπεζαν, καὶ πληροῦντες τῇ τύχῃ κέρασμα ("preparing a table for the demon, and filling a cup for fortune"). And in the Latin version of the Greek text preserved in Jerome, "fortune" answers to Gad, while "demon" answers to מְנִי. The Vulgate renders not מְנִי but Gad as "fortune," and treats "Meni" merely as an untranslated particle: "you who set a table for fortune, and pour libations upon it." So too Symmachus, on Jerome's testimony, who renders it "without me." Junius conveys the force of the words, translating thus: "you who furnish a table for that troop, and who fill a drink-offering for that number." For נד signifies "a troop," and מְנִי appears to derive from מָנָה, "to number." Our own [English] translators follow him: "that prepare a table for that troop, and that furnish the drink-offering unto that number" — relegating "Gad" and "Meni" to the margin. Arias Montanus: "preparing a table for Jove, and filling a drink-offering for Meni." Amid such variety it is not easy to say which rendering pleases most. It is certain that "the queen of heaven" is not meant here. Learned men heap up on this passage much concerning the star of Jupiter, concerning Mercury, concerning the constellation of the stars, concerning good fortune, concerning the horoscope, concerning a favorable ascending planet happily placed, concerning the idols of the Edomites, and other things — all of it uncertain. Yet although none of these accounts is on every point satisfactory, I confess that what the most learned Jerome once noted on this passage answers best to my own mind. "There is," he says, "in all cities, and especially in Egypt and in Alexandria, an ancient idolatrous custom, that on the last day of the year, and of their final month, they set out a table laden with food of every kind, and a cup mixed with honeyed wine, thereby taking the auspices of the fruitfulness of the past year or of the one to come. This the Israelites also did, venerating the monstrous images of every idol."

VII. Together with the sun and moon they also worshiped the whole host of heaven, that is, all the stars. Jerome, on Isaiah 15, writes that Chemosh (1 Kings 11:33) was the same as Baal-peor — more truly, the same as Molech, as may be seen from Judges 11:24.

VIII. There remain the unnamed gods. Among these occur the gods of Damascus, to whom King Ahaz sacrificed (2 Chronicles 28:23), and for whom he built an altar in the very house of God (2 Kings 16:11-13). Maachah, grandmother of King Asa (who is called his mother), set up a particular idol to be worshiped in a grove (2 Chronicles 15:16): she made "a horrid image" for an Asherah, לַאֲשֶׁרָה מִפְלֶצֶת. The Vulgate has "an image of Priapus." Others, "a horrible statue." The LXX has "Astarte." The word [מִפְלֶצֶת] signifies "a fright," or an object of terror. Hence Castellio renders it "Pan," who in groves was accustomed to strike terror into men. I judge, rather, that the Holy Spirit means to indicate an empty and vain object of terror.

IX. What is said concerning Ob and Yiddeoni, and the other kinds of ἐγγαστριμυθίας ("ventriloquism," i.e., necromancy), and concerning palmistry, augury, geomancy, sortilege, the Pythian spirits, and jugglers, does not belong to our present purpose. Let it suffice to have briefly touched upon the chief, if not all, of those idols which the apostates, having forsaken the true God, superstitiously worshiped in that wicked crime.

Chapter 9

Aaron's calf — The occasion of its making — The people demanded not the supreme God but an intermediary — They did not believe the calf to be God — So called by metonymy — Whether made after the likeness of the Egyptian Apis — The golden images made for the lost Apis — The form of a male calf — Apis a female ox — Why the calves of Jeroboam are called heifers — No other God than Jehovah worshiped in the calf — A superstition hateful to God — The lies of the Gentiles concerning the worship of an ass's head at Jerusalem — The occasion and coloring of the fiction — The passage of Tacitus noted — Moses ground the calf to powder and scattered it upon the water — Whether in imitation of the drowning of Apis — Aaron excused by the Jews ineptly, and falsely by Moncaeius — Aaron's true crime.

I. There follow now the offenses committed in the manner and means of religious worship, whereby an arbitrary worship was substituted for what had been instituted. And here first occurs Aaron's calf, Exodus 32:1-5. While Moses was absent on the mountain for some days, the carnal people, eager for a visible sign of the divine presence that had been promised them, and not yet furnished with an established worship for the whole assembly in common, forced Aaron to cast a golden calf to that end. "Come," they said, "make us gods who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him." They asked, that is, for gods not to take the place of Jehovah himself, but to take the place of Moses, through whom they might consult God. For it was scarcely possible that they should believe that what they were committing to Aaron to fashion that very day would turn out, on the morrow, to be a true deity. Yet it was customary, even among those who by no means believed the images themselves to be gods, to attribute the name of God to images by metonymy. They set about, therefore, to fashion and fabricate for themselves a visible sign of the divine presence.

II. Some suppose that Aaron fashioned this calf in the likeness of the Egyptian Apis — or rather, of the golden image which the priests were accustomed to consecrate in memory of an Apis that had died or been lost. He might also have had in mind the animal itself, always held in the highest esteem for the labor by which we obtain the fruits of the earth. Indeed Scripture seems to suggest that this calf was the image of a male calf; for in Psalm 106:20 a masculine participle, שׁוֹר אֹכֵל ("an ox that eats"), is joined to the noun signifying it, whereas Herodotus, in his Euterpe, teaches that the Egyptians consecrated female oxen to Isis, but sacrificed the males. Nor is it any obstacle that the prophet Hosea calls the calves of Jeroboam — fashioned after the likeness of this calf of the wilderness — עֶגְלוֹת ("heifers"), in chapter 10:5, a word which, being feminine, the LXX render by δαμάλεις ("heifers"); for the prophet calls them so in contempt, as Jerome most rightly notes on the passage. Scripture also suggests that the image was large, teaching that the Israelites "changed their glory into the form of an ox that eats grass" (Psalm 106:20). And it counts for something that, on account of the setting up of this calf, Stephen affirms that "in their hearts they turned back to Egypt" (Acts 7:39) — meaning, namely, that it was there they had seen images of this kind.

III. That the people had no intention of worshiping, in the calf, any other God than Jehovah is plain from the history of what took place. We have shown above that they demanded, not the supreme God in Jehovah's place, but an intermediary in the place of Moses; and when they beheld the calf they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." Seeing this, Aaron built an altar before it, and proclaimed, saying, "Tomorrow is a feast to Jehovah." "Your gods" means "your God"; for there was but a single calf, and it was consecrated to one. So too Nehemiah 9:18, "When they had made themselves a molten calf, they said, This is your God who brought you up out of Egypt" — that is, the image of your God, or the visible sign of his presence in your midst. The people were indeed senseless and rebellious; yet that they were so utterly foolish as to believe that a newly made calf, which they had made in the wilderness only the day before yesterday, had brought them up out of Egypt, no one can suppose — unless he imagines that they thought not only that they had cast one calf, but that they themselves had all been changed into calves as well. Then, when the people had been summoned to consecrate the calf, Aaron proclaimed "a feast to Jehovah." "Tomorrow," he said, "let there be a feast to Jehovah" — that is, dancing before this image, we shall celebrate Jehovah. The feast was instituted for him, not for the calf, not for Apis, not for Osiris or Isis. It is certain, therefore, that the Israelites of the wilderness resolved to worship no other God than Jehovah. This argument was once most learnedly pursued, in his books on idolatry and in his lectures on the book of Revelation, by John Rainolds, the glory of his age.

IV. With how great a crime the people bound themselves by devising this arbitrary worship, and how hateful that superstition was to God, appeared most swiftly from its horrible outcome. This is not the place to relate those matters at length; but from those words of Exodus 32:34, "In the day when I visit, I will visit this sin upon them," it passed into a proverb among the Jews, "No punishment is inflicted upon Israel in which there is not an ounce of the calf."

V. On the occasion of this crime, the whole people was besmirched among the other nations with a most shameful and lasting stain of infamy. For it was from nowhere else but from this worship of the calf that some derived the occasion for that most celebrated fabrication concerning the golden head of an ass worshiped in the temple at Jerusalem. However utterly rotten a lie this was, the fact that its tellers were not wholly without some color for it forbids us to suppose it mere folly — or rather, a madness surpassing all folly. The words of Tacitus, Histories 5.4, are: "They consecrated in the innermost shrine the image of the animal by whose guidance they had put an end to their wandering and their thirst." He had said earlier that the animal was an ass. In this terse and compressed manner of speech that distinguished man seems to have achieved something remarkable — that no one born of woman ever uttered more lies in fewer words. And yet it cannot be denied that some shadow of the true history, of what actually happened, can be discerned, however obscurely, through the twists of these lies. Sacred history teaches that the people were at times pressed and burdened by thirst and by losing their way in a vast wilderness. We know that they importunately demanded a guide for the way, and water; but that they came upon a herd of asses going to water, and used them as guides, is an old wives' tale. That they cast the golden calf, however, with the intention of using it, in their straits, as a kind of oracle — a visible sign of God's presence — and of continuing their journey under its auspices, is plain from the narrative of what actually happened. Long afterward too, once settled in their fixed dwellings in Canaan, led by no example but that one of the wilderness, they consecrated the very same image in certain shrines — namely at Dan and Bethel. By a strange confusion of everything, the Gentiles transformed the golden calf into a living ass, the miracle of bringing water out of the rock into a spring or stream discovered by the help of asses, and Dan and Bethel into Jerusalem. But so as to give the Gentiles no occasion to continue these lies, Josephus — otherwise the most diligent narrator of the antiquities and history of his own nation — passed over this history of Aaron's golden calf in deep silence. The Targum of Uzziel says of this crime: "Their evil report went out among the peoples of the earth, and they acquired for themselves an evil name throughout their generations."

VI. Having ground this calf to powder, "Moses scattered it upon the surface of the water, and made the people drink it" (Exodus 32:20). From this act of Moses, Selden and Grotius conjecture that he was alluding to the drowning of the Egyptian Apis; for at an appointed time they would solemnly drown Apis in the Nile. But that drowning of Apis was itself part of the idolatrous worship, and indeed the most superstitious part of it. That Moses should have imitated it — especially in that very act by which he inflicted punishment on the idolaters with the utmost ignominy — is in itself incredible, and plainly contrary to the sacred history.

VII. From those words of Aaron, "I cast the gold into the fire, and out came this calf" (Exodus 32:24), the Jewish teachers — to acquit him of the crime — invent the notion that he cast the mass of gold into the fire with the intention of stripping the Israelites of those ornaments which they would otherwise have foolishly squandered on idolatry, and that the calf came forth by the work of magicians, some of whom belonged to that Egyptian rabble which had gone up with the people into the wilderness. Ben Uzziel [holds] that Satan slipped into the midst of the gold and produced that shape. These accounts scarcely agree with what the sacred history records of Aaron's actual deed, verse 4 — namely, that "he took the gold from the people's hand, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made of it a molten calf." Francis Moncaeius likewise tries to remove from Aaron every suspicion of the crime, in that book to which he gave the title Aaron Purged. In those dissertations — not to say anything harsher — gotten up for the display of his own cleverness, he boldly and rashly invents a great many things which I marvel could ever have entered the mind of any mortal in his right senses. He pretends that Aaron was already high priest at that time; he pretends that he saw the likeness of the calf on the mountain, even though God had expressly said that no one had seen any likeness at all; he pretends that Aaron fashioned the calf after the pattern of the cherubim, which Moses afterward erected at God's command; he forgets that God had strictly forbidden them to fashion any image at all; he contradicts the Holy Spirit to his face on a great many points, and puts forward much else that it is wearisome to recount. Yet although Aaron did not, in the calf, set before the people any other god to worship besides Jehovah, he nonetheless bound both himself and the people in the manifest crime of having devised, without God's command, a way and manner of arbitrary worship in a visible sign.

Chapter 10

The calves of Jeroboam — The occasion of their making — The impelling reasons, and their use — The teraphim: what kind of images, and how made — The necromancy (νεκυομαντεία) of Micah's teraphim — Gideon's ephod — The bronze serpent — The captivity of the ten tribes.

I. After the pattern of Aaron's calf, long afterward two other golden calves were set up by Jeroboam. To this I trace the origin and occasion of the Jeroboamic superstition. What some relate concerning Joseph is far too strained: they say that a calf had once been dedicated in Egypt in his memory — which is indeed most uncertain — and that Jeroboam, an Ephraimite of Joseph's line, chose this figure to dedicate in his sanctuaries in order to keep the people bound in veneration of his own family. But this, as I have said, seems too harsh and forced. It is more satisfactory that the memory of Aaron's calf furnished the occasion for the making of these others. For how great was the veneration in which that people held the ancient deeds of their fathers, whether rightly or wrongly done, is attested by what is recorded concerning the bronze serpent likewise of the wilderness, and Gideon's ephod, and other such things. The Holy Spirit relates the history of these calves at 1 Kings 12:28-32. The motives for Jeroboam's plan are set out more fully at 2 Chronicles 13:6-9. The whole tribe of Levi, along with a great many of the godly Israelites, adhering to God's institutions, left their ancestral homes and withdrew into the territory of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin; for it is not to be doubted that they had no freedom to go into Judah's territory and return whenever they wished. For after the manner of those who seize power — especially where the novelty of a kingdom and the lust to reign combine to twist every pretext of religion to bad ends — this Jeroboam judged that those who went up to Jerusalem to worship God could safely plot to throw off his yoke, and accordingly took away from them all such liberty. What was he to do, seeing that by the law all males were bound three times a year to present themselves before the Lord at the temple? If they had obeyed that precept, the king would each time have been left destitute of all his subjects, who would all then have been in the power of his bitterest enemy. He reckoned that no kingdom accustomed to such a practice would endure. What then was he to do? Should he openly fall away from Jehovah and his worship, and drag the people into the same crime? It is indeed probable that this wicked man, who set all things divine and human below his own ambition, would have attempted this, had there been any hope of driving the people — among whom he held a recent and precarious rule — to that pitch of impiety. He therefore called to mind that calf of Aaron's, and persuaded the people that Jehovah could be worshiped in the manner Aaron had devised. 1 Kings 12:28: "Having taken counsel, the king made two golden calves, and said to the Israelites, It is enough for you that you should not go up to Jerusalem: behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." He used the very same words Aaron had used in dedicating his calf. It is plain that Jeroboam and the people worshiped Jehovah in these calves, which they set up not against God himself, but against the worship at Jerusalem. And so, although the worship of Baal — that is, of the sun — was later abolished by Jehu, the people of the ten tribes clung stubbornly, even to their final and everlasting captivity, to this worship of God in the calves.

II. Of this kind were the תְּרָפִים ("teraphim"). They are first mentioned among the Jews at Judges 17:5. We said something about them in our account of Abrahamic theology, on Genesis 31:19. What exactly they were is not yet settled. "Images made to a fixed position of the stars, with figures," says Grotius. That little images were made in human form is indicated by the story of Michal, Saul's daughter, who, to deceive her father's messengers sent to kill David, placed the teraphim in his bed; deceived by their appearance and shape, they are supposed to have taken them for David himself, lying sick (1 Samuel 19:13). R. David Kimchi, in his Book of Roots, writes that they were made in the likeness of a human face. Elijah, in his Tishbi, describes the manner of their fashioning: "They would slaughter," he says, "a firstborn man, twisting off his head. The severed head they would then embalm with salt, and write upon a golden plate the name of an unclean spirit, and thus, lighting candles before it, they would worship it." Divination by means of the dead was familiar to the ancients. The Emperor Hadrian killed his favorite Antinous so as to consult the gods through his entrails, and afterward numbered him among the gods. The custom of lighting candles before images still persists among some. That the teraphim were also used to elicit oracles, sacred history teaches: Zechariah 10:2, "The teraphim have spoken vanity"; Ezekiel 21:21, "He consulted the teraphim." That they were consecrated among the Jews in the manner Elijah describes is a Jewish fiction; for in their use of them the Jews had no intention of worshiping any god other than Jehovah. They were merely a kind of small image, easily carried, like household lares and penates. Thus concerning the silver out of which Micah's idols were cast, his mother affirms that she had "consecrated it to Jehovah, to make teraphim" (Judges 17:3). Micah's mind was also greatly delighted that he had obtained a Levite as priest (verse 10) — though it would have made no difference to him from what family his priest sprang, had he not resolved to worship Jehovah (see verse 13). This teraphim was accompanied by an ephod, that is, "a linen priestly vestment." The author of the book of Judges relates that these endured down to the captivity (Judges 18:30). Hosea foretold that after the captivity the Israelites would live without them (Hosea 3:4); nor do I agree with those who suppose that the prophet there mentions true and false worship side by side — the ephod, they say, belonging to the Lord, the teraphim to idols. Rather, both were the equipment of superstition; for the Israelites' use of the ephod was no more lawful than their use of the teraphim.

III. To this belongs also Gideon's ephod (Judges 8:27). There is no need to say anything of the form of this garment, since it is described at length in the book of Exodus. It was a gilded vestment: at first a μνημόσυνον ("memorial") of victory, afterward turned to superstitious use. Augustine supposes that "ephod" is here taken synecdochically, and that Gideon made all the pontifical vestments, in order to draw the worship of God into his own city of Ophrah. Perhaps out of good zeal, but with a most evil outcome. For he instituted these things without God's command; yet the Gideonites did not wholly forsake God himself.

IV. Well known to all are the matters concerning the bronze serpent of the wilderness. Set up at first for an evangelical purpose, it was afterward turned to superstitious use, and the pious king Hezekiah broke it in pieces and cast it away with the utmost contempt.

V. And these were, if not all, at least the chief idols and the means and instruments of false worship by which that people, most utterly given over to idolatry, initiated into this apostasy, polluted and defiled themselves after rejecting the first foundation of Mosaic theology. Wallowing incurably in the foul filth of these idolatries, the church of the ten tribes was, by God's providence, carried away into everlasting captivity, without hope or promise of return (2 Chronicles 36:16). A few things yet remain to be said concerning the Jewish church.

Chapter 11

The progress and outcome of the falling away of the Jewish church.

I. We have shown at length that the apostates repudiated, by the introduction of arbitrary and idolatrous worship, the first foundation of Mosaic theology. It remains for me to show briefly that they also spurned those other principles of the same truth which, as has likewise been shown, held a place in that theology equal to that first one. That theology also taught free justification and eternal salvation to be obtained through the merits and mediation of the Messiah. In the course of time there gained ground a most pernicious error concerning righteousness by the works of the law and the observance of ceremonial rites. Puffed up with this opinion, the stubborn people, full of themselves, exalted themselves grandly in all things and everywhere, as though they alone were worthy of God's care. At length, having spurned moral obedience and given themselves over to vice, they placed all their hope in sacrifices alone and in external rites. God met these most pernicious errors by the ministry of the prophets. But even by this they were not cast down from that corrupt opinion of their own righteousness, with the leaven of which those who are furthest removed from all righteousness are most often puffed up; rather, this at last proved to be a great part of the initial stage of this falling away.

II. The promise of the Messiah, who together with righteousness and everlasting peace would institute new rites of divine worship once those Mosaic rites — imposed for a time under a fixed appointment — had been abolished, constituted the third foundation of Jewish theology. But beginning to dream of an absolute eternity for the ceremonies, they cast off regard for this principle as well.

III. This was that partial falling away of the Jewish church which it pleased God, using the utmost gentleness and mercy, to correct by a seventy-year captivity. For after the people refused to allow themselves to be torn away, by the prophetic ministry, from these wicked ways and errors, and were moreover heaped up with every kind of injustice, lust, plunder, fornication, murder, and oppression, the church was reduced to such a condition that — partly because of its national constitution, partly because by far the greater part of the people had consented to the apostasy — a reformation of the church by the separation of the good became utterly impossible. It therefore pleased God to bring in a general μετοικησία ("deportation," i.e., removal from one's homeland), so that the people, on returning to their native land, might begin all over again, as it were from the very foundations, everything pertaining to the observance of Mosaic theology.

IV. Thus did this partial apostasy of the Jewish church meet its dreadful end: the city itself, and the temple — the single seat of all solemn worship — were laid waste by fire and sword and razed to the ground, and the remaining people were driven off into captivity, the celebration of worship being wholly cut off.

V. Yet God had not thereby spent the whole of his love toward this people, nor had he cast off all care and hope for this church; he willed that it should undergo another trial — of the very kind that the rabbis fancifully imagine happens to individual souls.

Chapter 12

The necessity of the Babylonian captivity for the reformation of the church — The heads of the Ezraic reformation — The great synagogue restored: its origin and work — The feast of tabernacles restored, pleasing to God — The single rule of ecclesiastical reformation — The repudiation of polygamy — The accuracy of the biblical text — The origin of the Hebrew points.

I. That God had not cast off all care for the church carried away into captivity is plain both from the outcome, and from what he himself, by his promises, had already done for the godly. Indeed, for a most merciful Father, that brief μετοικησία was punishment enough for their very great crimes. The condition of that people during the captivity was quite different, far different, from what it now is for that same people, most utterly cut off from God. For at that time they were destitute neither of the written word, nor of the Holy Spirit, nor of the prophetic ministry, nor of a most certain hope of return. But, as we have said, it was impossible that this church should be restored to a good condition without a total interruption of the solemn observances. For since the temple was holy, the city holy, and the whole land, since the priests all sprang from one particular family, and the sacred administrations were bound to a single place, and since the greater part of both priests and people was corrupt and stubbornly clinging to their apostate defection, a removal from the church's former general seat had to be laid down as necessary for its reformation. When the appointed term of the captivity had run its course, the returning people, under the auspices of godly princes, priests, and prophets, undertook a most thorough reformation of the church according to the standard of Mosaic theology — as is attested by the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the historical books, and Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the prophetic.

II. This reformation, which we shall call, after its principal author, the Ezraic reformation, had six chief parts, namely: 1. The restoration of the temple; 2. The establishment of the great synagogue; 3. The most diligent examination of the copies of the sacred books; 4. The diligent preaching of the word of God; 5. The solemn excommunication of the Cuthites; 6. Separation from the mixed populace.

III. What pertains to the restoration of the temple, since it has been vexed more than enough by others on account of certain chronological difficulties, and does not properly belong to our present purpose, we have thought best to pass over.

IV. We reckon the second part of the Ezraic reformation to be the establishment of the great synagogue — or, אַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה ("the men of the great assembly") — which is remembered among the Jews with great renown; "the men of the great synagogue" is the most common periphrasis for those reformers. Whoever wishes to know more about it should consult, besides the Jews, Martin Raymund, Pugio Fidei, part 2, chapter 4; Peter Galatinus, Arcana, book 4, chapter 6; Bodin, De Republica, book 6, chapter 8; Baronius, Annals, vol. 1, A.D. 31.10-11, 33.19; Lorinus on Numbers 11:16; Casaubon, Exercitationes 13.5; Cappellus, Vindiciae pro Casaubono, book 3, chapter 2; Cunaeus, De Republica Hebraeorum; Constantine l'Empereur, on the Mishnah tractate Middoth, chapter 5, section 3.

V. The council of seventy-one members had been instituted by Moses in the wilderness, which, in comparison with the lesser courts of judges, they commonly call "the great [Sanhedrin]." Some affirm that it served only the era of the wilderness, and did not continue in the land of Canaan once judges or kings were established; but Selden — the keenest defender of these councils — shows that they are gravely mistaken in this, though he does not deny that it was many times interrupted. The returning people restored this council in the first place. There are, I confess, some to whom this most eminent part of the Ezraic reformation is distasteful, and who regard what is said of it as Jewish fictions — while they themselves stand ready to believe whatever the lying Talmud dares to invent by way of tradition, provided only that it serves the advantage of the opinions they cherish. But as we have said, the origin of this council of seventy-one members was sacred, proceeding from an express command of God. As for those who dream that those great men and prophets, returned from captivity, most thoroughly instructed in the law of God and burning with zeal for a thoroughgoing reformation, did not restore this assembly — without which they could preserve neither order nor authority — they will find in me no rival. For it is nowhere found that these men were so wanting in their duty in other matters that we should suspect them of having been negligent in an institution of such great usefulness, and so necessary for the governance of the people.

VI. Moreover, this assembly of reformers was called "the great synagogue" κατ' ἐξοχήν ("by way of eminence") — not from the number of its members, which was precisely fixed, but on account of the dignity of the persons who made it up. For most of those who made it up were θεόπνευστοι ("divinely inspired") men, prophets, and amanuenses of the Holy Spirit. This church had never, from the days of Moses, seen an assembly of this kind; no one, therefore, ought to be surprised if it restored to sacred practice those things, instituted by God, which had lain despised and neglected almost from the very beginnings of the church, and if, resting on divine authority, it established certain things concerning the sacred Scripture itself, for the use and benefit of all the faithful even to the end of the world. The reformation of a church comes closest to its first institution. It was necessary, therefore, that all these prophets and men of God should be, as it were, a single Moses; for a great and arduous work lay upon them, by which the ruin wrought by many generations had to be repaired. It pleases me to add, by way of one or two examples, a specimen of the utmost diligence with which they restored everything precisely to the standard of Mosaic theology.

VII. Let the first example be the restoration of the feast of tabernacles, Nehemiah 8:14, 16-18: "When they found it written in the law that Jehovah had commanded through Moses that the Israelites should dwell in booths during their feast of the seventh month... the people went out... and made themselves booths, each on his roof, or in his courts, and in the courts of the house of God, and even in the square of the Water Gate. So all that congregation of those returned from captivity made booths, and dwelt in the booths; for the children of Israel had not done so from the days of Joshua the son of Nun until that day, and there was very great gladness." That is, although they had observed the feast of the seventh month, they had not dwelt in booths since the days of Joshua. But what need was there, you will say, to revive an antiquated institution which Samuel the prophet, King David, and Josiah — the greatest of the reformers before the captivity — had all omitted? Was it not mere excessive scrupulosity to look, in their reformation, even beyond the days of David, in which the religious observance of divine worship most flourished? But it did not seem so to God. For in order to testify that this duty of theirs was pleasing and acceptable to him, he immediately, through the prophet, not only extols that feast with great praise, but moreover, in its very name, celebrates the introduction of the spiritual worship of the gospel (Zechariah 14:16-19) — namely, so that the godly reformers might learn from this how highly God values a strict and exact attention, in their work, to the standard of Mosaic theology, setting aside every other consideration.

VIII. We shall soon show that this synagogue banished from the church's borders even unlawful intermarriage (ἀθέμιτον μίξιν) with the Gentiles, which had scarcely been religiously avoided from the days of Solomon onward; but they rose to something still higher. For men equipped with the spirit of prophecy set themselves against a most ancient custom — one never approved by the true God — of taking many wives, and of dismissing, for trivial reasons, those to whom they had legitimately bound themselves by covenant, a custom which had prevailed among the whole nation from of old (ἀπ' ἀρχαίων). Malachi 2:14-16: "Jehovah has testified between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you deal treacherously, though she is your companion, and the wife of your covenant. For did he not make one, though the residue of the Spirit was his? And why one? He sought a godly seed... For I hate divorce, says Jehovah, the God of Israel." This is an illustrious testimony against polygamy, such as does not exist elsewhere in the whole Old Testament before the captivity. I confess the earlier words are ambiguous, verse 15, וְלֹא־אֶחָד עָשָׂה, which the interpreters render variously: "Did not one make?" "Did he not make one?" Καὶ οὐκ ἄλλος ἐποίησε ("and no other made it"). For אֶחָד ("one"), being masculine, does not seem able to denote a female. But it does not have a feminine form derived from it; for אַחַת is not from אֶחָד, which would produce אַחֶדֶת, but from אָה, as R. David Kimchi teaches in his Michlol. It is no wonder, then, if אֶחָד is sometimes used in a feminine sense, inasmuch as by force of its meaning it signifies neutrally, as at Zechariah 11:7; and the following words admit of no other sense. The Targum of Jonathan trifles with some nonsense about Abraham alone. But the words are plainly to be interpreted either of the single woman created in the beginning — as the sense seems to be rendered by the very author and best interpreter of Scripture, our Lord Jesus Christ — or of the purpose of the one God to join one man and one woman in lawful marriage.

IX. Neither are the words in which the prophet treats of divorce free from all ambiguity, verse 16: כִּי־שָׂנֵא שַׁלַּח אָמַר יְהוָה. Jerome: "If you hate her, put her away, says the Lord." The old English version: "If he hate her, let him put her away" — a reading the King James translation retains in the margin, though in the text it interprets the words in quite another sense, "The LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away," in keeping with the mind of the Holy Spirit. For since the words are put elliptically, the sense that arises most naturally, without arbitrary supplements, is the one to be embraced. It is therefore stated absolutely, and God testifies that he hates this very act of putting away.

X. In this manner were laid the first foundations of the reformation of the Jewish church returning from captivity. Tracking down, with the utmost fidelity and diligence, God's own original institutions — however antiquated and consigned to oblivion through so many ages — they most scrupulously adhered to them.

XI. We mentioned next in order the accuracy of the sacred Scripture. This is the church's greatest treasure, to which, under God's care and the administration of the Spirit, it owes its very existence on earth. This is the single law of the whole reformation, and for that reason it had to be attended to with the utmost care in the first place. No one can rightly doubt that Ezra and his prophetic associates had in their possession ancient copies preserved with the utmost fidelity. They devoted their utmost effort to transcribing these most accurately, and to removing the errors that could not impossibly have crept in from other copies during the dispersion. Some ascribe to this collation the origin of the qere and ketiv ("read" and "written" — the Masoretic marginal and textual variant readings). In the whole work they employed the most immediate inspiration and guidance of God. That Ezra neither wished, nor ought, nor was able, nor had need to change the ancient letters in which the amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, following the prophets, had written the sacred word after the pattern which God himself first traced out, we have proved before. There is also another fiction, which has, among certain great men, gained more credit than it ought — namely, that the whole of sacred Scripture was lost, and restored by Ezra from memory and committed to writing. A most inept lie, and a blasphemy besides! God forbid that anyone should hereafter cast this reproach upon his care, providence, and love toward his church!

XII. Most learned men judge that the invention of the Hebrew pointing belongs to this Ezraic accuracy of the biblical text. I go along with their opinion so far as to consider it most probable. For once the prophetic ministry had ceased in the Jewish church, it is a matter of religious scruple even to consider that any others undertook that work. Whether, then, we say that the vowels were coeval with the letters themselves, or that they were devised by Ezra, comes to the same thing, since both opinions ascribe to them a divine origin. There are some, however, who hold the whole of the Hebrew pointing to be a post-Talmudic rabbinic invention (εὕρημα). What I myself think on this matter — since the plan of this work requires it — I hope I may set forth without giving offense to anyone, here or elsewhere; although another attempt of mine did not turn out so happily in this respect, by which I unwittingly frightened off a hen clucking over an egg already hatched.

Digression: On the Origin of the Hebrew Pointing

I. That Ezra and his colleagues, the assessors of the great synagogue, invented the Hebrew pointing while they were bringing accuracy to the sacred Scriptures — since before that time the Jews used only the twenty-two consonantal letters in writing — is the opinion of great men. For my part I am not unwilling to disagree with the opinion of those who hold that the vowels were coeval with the letters, nor do I stubbornly insist on the other view, since even those who trace the origin of the points to Ezra assert plainly that it was divine. It is therefore no one's business, after Ezra's time, to assign an origin to the Hebrew pointing which we now use by God's kindness — this is the position whose defense we undertake in this digression — or, what comes to the same thing, that it had a divine and infallible origin. For there are some who suppose that certain post-Talmudic rabbis devised it; and they do not merely suppose this, but hold that those who think otherwise deserve to be met with abuse. As for their opinion, I am not so frightened by the monstrous confidence with which they hold it as to refrain from examining it. For the wrath, and the sesquipedalian words, which — as though pleading the cause of truth, though their minds are puffed up with disdain and excessive self-opinion, or inflamed by the leaven of partisan zeal — some parade, are things that whoever has not learned to despise, or at least to disregard, will in these exulcerated times find himself compelled to abandon all hope and care of defending the truth.

II. When this divergence of opinion first arose among learned men, it seemed a matter of very little consequence, however the dispute might be settled. Elias Levita is almost the only one among the Jews who inclines to the opinion that the pointing is a novelty. Yet he, since he had always held that it was a part of the oral law — that shadow, or cloud, on which that most superstitious nation dotes — committed to writing only by the rabbis, was unconcerned about its divine authority. Perhaps, too, it made no difference to him whether it was reckoned to have proceeded from God himself, or from the teachers who all but occupy God's place. The Christians who first embraced this opinion could not foresee the evils that would arise from it. But since the boldness of certain men in tampering with the sacred Scriptures has ceased to be tolerable, and advances daily, lest in the end nothing at all be left sacred and untouched (ἀκίνητον, "unmoved") in the sacred writings, it appears to be in the interest of all who are held by due reverence for the divine word to defend most scrupulously every jot of the Hebrew text. For from this one error alone — concerning the rabbinic and arbitrary invention of the Hebrew points — we see that a great many evils, threatening destruction to the most sacred truth, have poured themselves out upon the church of God. Hence some affirm that the individual words of sacred Scripture ought to be considered and weighed apart from all connection with the rest, as though they were so many hieroglyphic signs; others, that the sacred Scriptures have been corrupted by the Jews in that arrangement or fixation of the points which we now use — among them Bellarmine, On the Word of God, book 2, chapter 2. John Morinus contends that the sense of the Hebrew text cannot be perceived by us without the help of the points, and therefore, since the points owe their origin to the effort of uncertain men — fallible in everything, and in some things plainly mistaken — that the Hebrew text cannot serve as the rule and standard of faith (Exercitationes, book 1, chapter 2). Gregory of Valentia accordingly wishes it to be corrected to the model of the common Latin version (vol. 1, disputation 5, question 3). Another — whom, out of respect, and for other reasons, I do not name — holds that this rabbinic invention (εὕρημα) is not so perfect that it could not be bettered. Yet another judges that the pointing may be changed by anyone at his own pleasure, provided a more convenient sense of the words is thereby elicited. Cappellus adds that many discrepancies between the Hebrew text and the ancient versions — especially the Greek of the LXX — arose from the fact that it was made before the invention of the points, and accordingly followed the reading then in use, from which the Masoretes in their pointing many times departed. I fear, however, that once this door has been opened, still greater monstrosities of opinion may be looked for from the curious and itching minds of this age, especially if diligence should be joined to boldness. No one who cares to know of such things is unaware how recently this dispute was agitated among learned men, especially between Buxtorf and Cappellus. What has recently been said by certain others is almost entirely borrowed from these two. Indeed, I am well satisfied that certain men would by no means have advanced so heavily armed with rabbinic testimonies for the novelty of the points, had they not so thoroughly "ploughed with the calf" of the most distinguished Buxtorf as to turn to their own use what he himself had brought forward by way of objecting to himself.

III. It is now two years and more since I wrote and published, in our own vernacular tongue, some things on this question of the origin of the points. This was received by more than one person in the manner that befits one who feels it belongs to his honor to display the greatest contempt for others. It would be easy, were that the business now in hand, to strip that little crow of the borrowed colors on which, relying, he arrogates everything to himself. But our present undertaking does not permit this; nor, since the work already in hand is growing to an unforeseen bulk, would it allow me to pursue here everything bearing on the untangling of this question and the settling of the dispute, as I had originally resolved to do. Briefly touching, therefore, on the main points of the arguments on which I still rest my continued adherence to the opinion of the divine origin of the Hebrew pointing, and submitting to examination the chief objections by which some contend to overthrow it, I shall press on to what remains to be said concerning the Ezraic reformation.

IV. First, therefore, we argue from the catholic (universal) practice and possession of the church. So great a treasure's possession is not lightly to be abandoned. The whole church of God holds this pointing of the Scriptures of the Old Testament as its own peculiar treasure. Our opponents will not deny that great benefit is lodged therein. Nowhere among the nations does any monument exist of a copy pointed more anciently than ours. No legitimate ground of prescription, therefore, can be brought against this possession. Whatever is said on the opposing side is mere conjecture. It is indeed true that there are very many copies, and that copies written without points once existed from every earlier age; but that none exists coeval with the time at which the champions of the novelty of the points fancy them to have been invented, they themselves, I think, will confess. The possession, therefore, is legitimate, and the prescription duly established by antiquity. Among Selden's books, now kept in the Bodleian Library, there is a most ancient Pentateuch, most beautifully written out in two volumes, with verses alternating in Hebrew and Chaldee, so that the Targum accompanies the text throughout. At first sight of the book I at once perceived that the vowel points had been added and inserted long after the writing of the letters — the manner of writing and the color of the ink attest this. But it can be shown by many signs that this codex was written only some centuries after the fictitious invention of the rabbinic pointing. Although this argument by itself is not strong enough to settle the whole dispute, unless the most weighty considerations to the contrary are also brought forward, it will be found to have quite enough force to repel the objections. Whoever grants that grammatical trifles, the silence of one or another ancient writer concerning the points, sophistical quibbles, the most uncertain conjectures, and things of that sort, suffice to eject the church of God from this possession, is — in my judgment — being too easy-going in a case that is not his own. The arguments, therefore, that are commonly brought forward to overturn the divine origin of the points are not to be weighed in an even balance, inclining neither this way nor that, against those that fight for it; since on this side also depends the weight of this possession, which must be dislodged from its place before the opposing arguments can be reckoned to advance on equal footing. In other matters there are few who labor under such carelessness and negligence as readily to allow themselves to be thus circumscribed and driven out of their inherited goods. Let everyone do as he pleases; for my part, I shall yield this possession only unwillingly, and when overborne by argument.

V. 2. The very nature of the thing itself shows plainly that it is ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ("from heaven"), not ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ("from men"). Something divine (θεῖόν τι) breathes everywhere in it. From the beginning to the very end of the holy books, uniform with itself, consistent with itself, everywhere sincerely and infallibly fixing the sense of the letters, this pointing indicates and expresses the mind of the Holy Spirit. Those on the opposing side (οἱ ἐξ ἐναντίας) will never produce a single objection to the contrary that carries any real weight. This is especially evident in the most obscure prophecies, hiding the most profound mysteries, in understanding which all the Jews are blinder than moles, and have always been so since the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. I hope that grave and learned men would not wish to sell, for the price of the most uncertain conjectures, that light which the pointing brings to countless passages of sacred Scripture — unless there were present an ἀμετρία ἀνθολκῆς ("an immoderate counter-pull," i.e., an unreasonable pulling in the opposite direction). That certain accents are superfluous and useless, that the silent sheva is often added in vain and multiplied without cause, and other such λεπτολογίας ("hairsplittings") which Cappellus hints at, in his reform of the grammar, in support of his hypothesis, are so frivolous and inept that I marvel that learned men could ever have dwelt on them, or brought themselves to believe them. I think learned men will not say that they rightly grasp the reason for every single jot in the sacred Scriptures; certainly I know of some who have told me — in published writings and books, that is — that certain jots in the Hebrew pointing are utterly useless, and certain accents superfluous; but who told them the same thing, I do not know; nor am I inclined, in so great a matter, to lend credit and authority to grammatical trifles and the bold conjectures of overinflated men. Others say that the Hebrew pointing is not so perfect a work that it could not be corrected, emended, and rendered more perfect. Why they are so puffed up with their own opinion, or knowingly and willingly carry themselves more grandly than their merits warrant, so as to look down on others with such disdain, I judge to spring from more than one cause. Come now — if they are men, and it please them, let them try their strength. We shall at once see how far "brass differs from lupine-seed" — that is, how far counterfeit differs from true coin. They will never equal him, and the wisdom of him who produced the pointing, even should they burst themselves trying. Let them proceed by way of actual instances, or it will do no good to pour out empty words, of which there is "much law here and there" — plenty of rule-mongering, but no substance. Whoever weighs this work seriously will find it perfect, divine, most absolute — like the other works of God, to which nothing can be added, and from which nothing can be taken away. To him who would emend or correct it I would say, זְכֹר מִלְחָמָה אַל־תּוֹסף ("remember the battle, do it no more"; Job 41:8). Nor, indeed, can I sufficiently marvel what could have entered into the minds of learned men, that they should ascribe such a work — one which the whole nation of the learned has always been, and still is, unequal to emending in any particular — to certain ignorant rascals, destitute of every resource, both spiritual and of secular learning.

VI. 3. In this question, which is a matter of fact, the testimonies of the Jews themselves are of no small weight. All of them agree on this point: that the origin of the pointing was divine. Elias Levita himself — almost alone among his own people in daring to ascribe the marking of the open sounds by little points to the post-Talmudic Masoretes of Tiberias — nevertheless everywhere contends that it was a part of the oral law delivered by God himself on Mount Sinai, and preserved no less holily and inviolate than if it had been committed to writing from its very origin. But the very great majority, and the most learned, of them consistently assign this writing to Moses or to Ezra. Whoever wishes to see this proved by testimonies should consult the most learned dissertation of the distinguished Buxtorf on the origin of the Hebrew pointing, and Joseph de Voisin in his most erudite preface to Martin Raymund's Pugio Fidei. Now when I had said elsewhere that the testimonies of the rabbis carry much weight in this cause, it was thrown back at me that they should therefore be reckoned fit to have invented the pointing themselves. But the folly of this most unfair comparison betrays itself. For some can testify that a thing was divinely done — at least, that neither they nor their fathers made it — who are nevertheless wholly unequal and unfit to have made the thing itself. But in order to mock the testimonies of the Hebrews, they say that the dispute is not about the sounds of the vowels, but only about the signs. For they acknowledge that the Hebrews always had the very same vowel sounds which they still use, and that this language was thus never destitute of vowels. Someone not long ago judged the observation of this distinction to be of such importance for settling this whole dispute that he fell upon me with unbridled temper, because, in relating this controversy, I had taken, he thought, no account of it. But I could not suppose that the question at issue was whether all the Hebrews, down to the time of the Tiberian Masoretes, were utterly dumb. For if they had been destitute of vowel sounds, they would also have been dumb, and could never have uttered a single complete word. For that nothing can be spoken by means of the bare letters alone, without open vowel sounds, is known even to those "not yet dry behind the ears." That the Hebrew language had vowels in this sense — not only before it occurred to anyone to express them by marks or figures, but even before a single consonantal letter was ever written or inscribed — whoever undertakes to prove by reasons and arguments doubtless needs a case for which it is easy "to seem eloquent." Meanwhile, it is the origin of the points, not of the sounds, that we are investigating. But since the champions of the novelty of the points judge it to be in the interest of their cause that this distinction between sounds and the figures of the vowels be carefully weighed in the discussion of this question, come, let us grant that the Hebrews were not dumb before the invention of the points, but spoke after the manner of other men. What, then, they can extract from this to the aid of their cause, we have yet to see.

VII. 4. Since I have set forth elsewhere the utmost usefulness, if not the absolute necessity, of the points and accents for rightly understanding the sacred text, I have no wish to enlarge on it further here. I leave this to the judgment of all who have ever seriously employed the Hebrew language in the study of the sacred writings. R. Bechai, in his section Beshalach on Exodus 13:17, cites for this purpose a notable testimony from the book Bahir: דמין נקודתא באתותא דאוריתא דמשה כנשמתא דחיי בגופא דאנוש ("the points are to the letters of the law of Moses as the soul of life is to the human body") — that is, "The points are joined to the letters of the law of Moses as the living soul is to the human body." Now if that heavenly light, which is owing to the truth from the fixing and restricting of the sense of the words which the Holy Spirit employs, is to be reckoned the product of human wit and will, no one can easily conjecture how many evils, and what prejudices to the faith, would immediately arise from this. The memory of certain men's attempts, which this supposition has produced, is a most unwelcome one. Hence we have seen some men boasting of the uncertainty and obscurity of the Hebrew text, of the need to institute a correction by means of the versions, and even of conjectures — provided only, forsooth, that one is willing to use them modestly — in the judgment of those very men who, in order to show themselves skilled craftsmen at concocting learned conjectures, are ready to cast off all reverence for God and man, resting, without any of the horror and most just indignation it deserves, on conjectures doubtful, uncertain, indeed most inept. The itching and ambitious wits of this age compel us to fear still worse things yet. Let the vowel points be taken away, all the distinctive accents, and let the bare letters remain — or rather, thus stripped bare — with no distinction employed throughout any book, each word divided from the rest by some point, as among the Samaritans, or at least an imaginary one; how great an "Iliad of evils," how many scandals and dangers, would at once be seen to overwhelm the church. But because all these things could thus be removed and cast away — indeed perhaps even ought to be, if the whole pointing is the εὕρημα ("invention") of uncertain men, of Jewish rabbis — no reason of any real weight can be brought forward to the contrary.

They say, however, that those letters called "the mothers of reading" — א, ו, י, and ה — were, before the invention of the points, either themselves vowels, or were used in place of vowels, by whose help readers could easily remedy all those inconveniences that seem to attend the absence of vowels; and that the points were not affixed by the Tiberian Masoretes arbitrarily or at their own pleasure, and that the pointing therefore does not rest on their authority. But I should first gladly know whether those letters alone which are called the mothers of reading, which now appear in the sacred text, were used for that purpose, or whether they were also added and inserted in all the other places where the sound of the word requires their presence. If they say that only those were formerly so used which still cling to the text, in those very places and words where they now stand, it is clearer than the noonday light that they could not have supplied the place of vowels, nor made up for their absence; since there are countless words in which they nowhere appear, and even, where they are present, they do not always correctly serve the pronunciation, at least if any credit is to be given to the present pointing. For it would be necessary that the single letter א by itself should render almost every open sound, which everyone sees would be ridiculous to imagine. But if they say instead that these vowel letters were formerly multiplied throughout the text, and written everywhere according to the standard of the sound of the words — so that, for example, דָּבָר was written דאבאר — then I should like to know who they were who dared to tear out and cast away so many thousands of letters written in the sacred Scriptures by God himself and the prophets, or when we are to suppose this was done. Neither the religion nor even the superstition of the Jews will allow us to ascribe so bold a deed to them. It is not the way of that very same people, who hold every single letter used in the whole of the Bible sacredly in account, to have spontaneously cast away so many thousands. This fiction, therefore, refuses to heal the wound that the novel opinion concerning the newness of the points inflicts on the light of truth and the clarity of the Scriptures. As for the claim also put forward, that the Hebrew text was, by means of these vowel letters, once rendered in Greek characters — this is proved by no arguments or testimonies whatsoever. It is not fair that any room should be given, in so great a cause, to bare assertions, suspicions, and conjectures. One could learn the pronunciation of the Hebrew language from the usage of the Jews, or from the points themselves, so that there was no need at all of this fictitious and most imperfect device for representing the Hebrew text in Greek characters.

Next, as to the second part of the answer given above — that the Tiberian Masoretes did not point the Scriptures according to their own arbitrary judgment — this is something the Jews, relying on their futile tradition of an oral law, can allege with some show of modesty and plausibility; but others cannot, namely those who acknowledge that this "oral law" is nothing but a fiction of superstitious men. There is, however, one man who, in defending the novelty of the points, asserts over and over — not without abuse of those who think otherwise — that these Masoretes pointed the Scripture according to the reading then in use, which duly exhibited the mind of the Holy Spirit, and not according to their own arbitrary judgment. Let us see, then, what sound reasoning underlies this, capable of persuading anyone that this fictitious Masoretic pointing deserves to be valued at all.

"The Masoretes," they say, "affixed the points to the Bible according to the reading then received and in use." But received, I ask, among whom — this reading that is made the standard for affixing the points? Among the Masoretes themselves, of course. For whether, at the time this deed is said to have been done, there were any Christians at all who understood the Hebrew text, is uncertain. The Masoretes, therefore, pointed the Bible according to the reading received among themselves. That is the best one can hope for. Although we have shown elsewhere that these men, if they existed at all, were the worst of rogues, forever indulging a bold license to invent whatever they pleased; let it be granted, however, that in this particular undertaking it suited them to be honest.

What follows, then? "The reading they received, to which they attended in affixing the points, exhibited the genuine sense of the Holy Spirit." But who, I ask, were the judges and arbiters of that sense? The Masoretes themselves, without doubt. So then, the Masoretes affixed the points not according to their own arbitrary judgment but according to the reading received among them, and the sense which they judged best and true — but if I denied this, how, I ask, would our adversary prove it? Will he show that they conducted themselves in good faith in other matters? He will never do it. Will he produce witnesses? He has none. And Seneca teaches us that no one ever required an oath from a historian.

Let us then deal fairly and generously, and grant what cannot be proved. But in fact these two things are not mutually exclusive: that they could have used their own judgment in discerning the true reading and in investigating the sense of the Holy Spirit, and yet have had no fixed form or rule of pointing, and so have been arbitrary judges of the work they undertook — unless no one is to be reckoned as acting arbitrarily except when he acts perversely. Marcus Tullius, in his oration for Roscius, affirms that strict judgment is one thing and arbitrium (discretionary judgment) another. Yet the laws would nowhere have established arbitrators if it were necessary that whoever decides something at his own discretion must decide it without judgment. Indeed, when we commit something to the discretion of others, we do not mean by this that in passing judgment concerning us and our affairs they should indulge their own whims, with no regard for what is fair and right.

So when I have said that the Masoretes affixed the points to the Bible at their own discretion, I meant nothing else, nor could I have meant anything else, than that they carried out this work using their own judgment, and trusting to it. According to this view, then, the knowledge, skill, judgment, and integrity of the Tiberian rabbis — all of which I would not buy for a rotten nut — are the sole foundation of the present reading of all the Hebrew codices. For there is no mortal who has learned to make use of the copies that are still written without points, except by the help of the points.

But, you say, relying on tradition and not on their own judgment, they exhibited in their pointing the reading received from the fathers. Yet how faithful guardians of traditions they were, how skilled fabricators and peddlers of the silliest fables — indeed of horrendous blasphemies — under the name of most ancient traditions, as though they counted it a matter of praise to overturn every trace of truth utterly, I do not wish to say more of here, since the matter is plain and will be spoken of hereafter. Therefore, since they set themselves up by their own authority as the guardians and conservators of this tradition, if not its promulgators, we are not yet freed from having to rest our confidence for the reading of the whole Hebrew text upon the good faith of a pack of rogues.

They say further, moreover, that the true reading of the text was preserved, after that language ceased to be a living vernacular, not so much by oral tradition as by the very writing of the text itself, which always remained intact. But this too seems strange to me; for it does not easily admit of explanation how the true reading could be preserved for the writing by means of a text that cannot be read. For I would gladly know, since consonant letters cannot be pronounced without the use of open sounds, that is, vowels, and can mean whatever the person who supplies those sounds pleases, how the distinguishing of the vowels and their legitimate use can depend upon the letters themselves. But it does not please me to dwell any longer on these things, lest I fall once more upon disputants of this sort, who would think the pernicious consequences that the rabbinic invention of the points would bring in — a position whose defense they have undertaken — ought to be charged instead to those who are confident of their divine origin.

VIII. 5. Further: the opinion of the ancient and sacred origin of the points gains strength and authority from the uncertainty and fluctuation of the authors of the contrary opinion in assigning their origin. They will not have it that Ezra invented the points; who then was the author of the work? When, in what part of the world did he live? To what end did he undertake the work? By whose command, persuasion, or authority? What overseers, arbiters, judges did the work have — what did those most concerned that it be carried out precisely judge or determine about the work once undertaken and completed? That they are ignorant of all these things they either openly confess themselves, or it is easily proved. It is said to have been the joint work of the Tiberian Masoretes. Elias Levita said so, to be sure. Some hold it was completed in the fifth century after Christ's birth, others in the sixth, Morinus in the seventh or eighth.

But what if I should say that these Tiberian Masoretes never existed at all, and that the authors of this opinion, in order to invent the claim that the points were devised by these Masoretes, first had to invent the Masoretes themselves? Could they convict me of falsehood from any attested history, from any record of past events? I know well enough that they could not. I grant indeed that around the year 350, when Jerome was in Palestine, the Jews had an obscure and undistinguished school in the city of Tiberias. Whether it lasted in that place down to the time to which its inventors and fabricators must needs assign this imaginary work is uncertain, and indeed improbable. For such was the condition of that nation at that time that nowhere within the bounds of the Roman Empire — which they had so often shaken with slaughters, dissensions, and wars — could they have long remained safely in any great number. Indeed, in that very place where they are said to have completed this work, they had not long before been struck with a great disaster by Gallus, the deputy of the Emperor Constantius. From that time on, whether any trace of a Masoretic school remained at Tiberias is altogether uncertain.

Further: whatever knowledge or learning there ever was among the Jews was, at that time, cultivated more diligently in the East around Babylon — where they held more settled seats — than in Palestine. After the western rabbis had, for a century and more, been almost as mute as fish, there came forth from the East that great and most consummate work of fables and trifles, the Talmud, which is called the Babylonian. That a few obscure, undistinguished nobodies of no name or worth undertook and completed so great a work, while other famous men of the same profession knew nothing of it and were never consulted, is something only those will believe who are ready and easy to give credence to whatever serves their cause.

Further: whoever has even glanced at Jewish writings knows that the Jews, one and all, both are and ever since their final rejection have been the most insolent heralds of whatever they or their own have — as it seems to them — accomplished splendidly. In this arena they have always taken such care never to pass over in silence anything true, that they will everywhere put forward, lying most shamelessly, things false, fabricated, and unheard-of. Yet concerning this most divine invention — than which that nation never produced anything equal or comparable — there is among them the deepest silence for several centuries. After a thousand years there at last appeared Elias, who suspects that certain Tiberian Masoretes devised this work. Was there no one among the inventors themselves who could have committed to writing, for posterity, the origin of this divine art — especially since its glory and usefulness were so great that nowhere on earth, Christian or Jew, learned or unlearned, has anyone been found who was willing, or dared, to contradict its use or its perfection, whether in part, in whole, or in the smallest particular? Or is it credible that, given so triumphant and successful an undertaking, the fame of it should have utterly perished within the space of a brief age, among a nation most tenacious of retaining every tradition, even about the most trifling and worthless matters? I confess I do not have so much credulity stored up as would enable me to give credence to such monstrous conjectures.

IX. That the pointing of the Bible is a most excellent invention, no one, I think, will deny. It must be plainly said: nothing else of its kind has ever arisen, nor will arise. The church has received an immortal benefit in its use. There are learned men who hold that it is absolutely and indispensably necessary for the true understanding of the sacred letters. "Without the points," says Marcus Marinus in his preface to his Hebrew Lexicon, "no certain teaching concerning this language can be handed down, since everything can be read in different ways, so that the confusion of this one language alone would be greater than that of Babylon." And Rodolphus Chevalier, in his Rudiments of the Hebrew Language, chapter 4: "As for the antiquity of the vowels and accents, I subscribe to the opinion of those who affirm that the Hebrew language, as the most absolute ἀρχέτυπον ("archetype, original pattern") of all others, was written thus plainly from the beginning; since those who think otherwise not only cast doubt on the authority of Holy Scripture, but in my judgment tear it up by the very roots, since without vowels and marks of distinction it would have nothing certain or firm." Franciscus Junius is of the same opinion, in his Animadversions on Bellarmine's book 2, chapter 2, On the Word of God, where, citing John Isaac, a converted Jew, he compares "one who undertakes to read the Scriptures without points to an unbridled horse (ἀχαλίνωτος — 'unbridled')."

I will not repeat what Jerome said of Jovinian's writings, following someone else's remark about the plays of Plautus — "no one but the Sibyl will read these" — but I may borrow that line of the poet, δοκὸς δ᾽ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τέτυκται ("a beam lies across them all" — that is, an obstacle stands in everyone's way); so on every side difficulties present themselves in the bare letters. Worth noting, too, is what Engelbert Engels says in his preface to Valentine Schindler's lexicon: "There are many most learned and distinguished men who, because certain Jewish rabbis assert that the points were invented by men long after the twenty-two letters of the alphabet, therefore suppose that the Hebrew vowels did not exist at one and the same time with the consonants; but if the passages of Scripture — of which only a few out of many are here enumerated — are considered more carefully, it will become clear that the points arose together with the twenty-two letters, or else that the Scripture was once, like wax, flexible now this way, now that. And if the points were invented by men, it necessarily follows that Scripture, in our present time, has an authority not divine but human."

Hence that saying of Aben-Ezra, in his Statera Linguae Sanctae (Balance of the Holy Tongue), כל פירוש שאינו על דון הטעמים לא תאבה לו לא תשמע אליו ("any exposition that is not according to the reckoning of the accents, do not consent to it nor listen to it") — that is, "Whatever exposition is not in accordance with the sense of the accents, do not acquiesce in it, nor give ear to it." He has similar statements in other places; I will add only what he says in his Commentary on Exodus 20: כגופות הם המלות נידע והטעמים הם כנשמות והגוף לנשמה כמלבוש ("know that the words are like bodies, and the accents like souls; and the body is, as it were, a garment for the soul") — that is, "Know that the words are as bodies, and the accents as souls; and the body is as a garment to the soul."

X. The far greater part of theologians who have been trained in this discipline hold the same view. Indeed, not a few among the Roman Catholics readily concede that the Hebrew text, with the pointing removed, can be understood either not at all, or only with great difficulty and very imperfectly. Then again, seizing most boldly upon the concessions of certain great men who, writing incidentally and about other matters, without weighing at all everything relevant to this question, pronounced too hasty an opinion on it, they triumph — with astonishing boldness — over the sacred Hebrew truth, as though it were useless and scarcely, or not even scarcely, intelligible. Indeed, there are those who level a grave charge against those who most firmly believe in the divine origin of the pointing, on the ground that, according to the opinion of those who hold its origin to be rabbinic, it could — and perhaps even ought to — be removed altogether; as though these men were doing an injury to the sacred Scriptures, and working to detract greatly from the perspicuity of the text. By the same reasoning, some Socinian might say that I deny Christ ought to be worshipped with religious worship, because I deny that he ought to be so worshipped unless he is that supreme and only God — while he himself is entirely persuaded that Christ is not that supreme God.

In this point, then, we have all learned men as our supporters: namely, that the use of the vowel points and accents is of such weight for grasping the true and genuine sense of Holy Scripture, that if they were removed, almost everything would be thrown into wondrous confusion and become uncertain. It is true, indeed, that those who have attained the true reading of the text by means of the pointing, and who retain a knowledge of the sense which the pointed words and the passages distinguished by accents yield, can make much progress in the study of the Scriptures by the help of other means as well. But let us suppose these points had never been devised, and let us set aside entirely every sense and understanding which, by their benefit, we have drawn in any way from the sacred Scriptures — whether directly, or through the mediation of other men's studies and labors; let us approach the bare letters empty of preconceived opinions; we shall see at once into what great difficulties, uncertainties, and darkness we have been cast.

For once every man's own judgment has been made the rule of the pronunciation of words, of the reading of sentences, and of all pauses and distinctions, who will prevent the whole nation of the learned from falling at once into inextricable and pernicious disputes? That single word of God would become nothing but an apple of discord (μῆλον ἔριδος). Whether proud and extravagant minds, swollen with a conceit of their own learning, or laboring after a reputation for erudition, would leave anything ἀκίνητον ("unmoved, fixed") and undoubted in it, is altogether uncertain — indeed, it is almost certain that they would leave nothing of the kind. Upon this pointing rest all those means which we use in learning this language, and the very many aids to progress in a solid knowledge of it as well. If all these were cast away (not this or that conjugation only, as Cappel would have it, since the case is the same for all of them) — aids without whose help and benefit even the Jews themselves, who are wholly given to the study of this language, would have nothing certain to rest upon — then most certainly, not so much a wide window as a main gate would be thrown open to endless disputes.

For is there scarcely any man of somewhat greater learning who would not feel ashamed, and irked at his own laziness, if he could think of nothing new which, by his own judgment and testimony, would serve to emend the true and genuine reading of Holy Scripture, and to fix and establish rightly the divisions of its sentences? And shall we suppose that no one would immediately be found who, in order to show himself a more excellent craftsman than his neighbor, or more skilled at framing learned conjectures, would tear down another's attempt? Whoever thinks otherwise must be a stranger to the whole world of letters, and to criticism especially.

But there is no need, they say, for the present reading or pointing to be changed in any respect. But, I say, in order for some work to be held so sacred that no one has the right to change it in any respect, or to innovate anything in it, this must belong to it either from the excellence of the work itself, or else from the supreme and inviolable authority of its author. Where only the excellence and reasonableness of the work is put forward, it is fair that this excellence and reasonableness be weighed accurately and diligently, so that it may appear that it is not alleged in vain. But once the examination has been undertaken, the examiner is fully free to reject whatever seems less to agree with right reason. And there is nothing that forbids this being done in the present case as well.

They say, indeed, that this device of pointing is most excellent, and therefore not easily to be rejected in any respect. Very well; but it is not exempted from free examination on account of its excellence — far from it. Indeed, where, by changing it, a truer reading, in the judgment of the examiners, or a more fitting sense, can be elicited — since it can only hold its place by being subjected to examination on its own merits — such a change will not merely be permissible but even necessary. And it is plain that this must be said of every sentence, indeed of every single word. Come then, let them try their strength; let the critics exhaust here the whole force of their δοξαστική ("art of conjecture, faculty of forming opinions"); let them bring up whole wagon-loads of annotations, let them devise new readings, new senses — it is gone, it has perished, it has taken ship and sailed away: that most faithful guardian of sacred truth, namely, reverence for the received reading.

Many things, I admit, are put forward by the champions of the novelty of the points, in answering the argument drawn from the impossibility of learning this language, and of attaining the genuine sense of Scripture in many places, without the benefit of the pointing. John Morinus confesses that the matter truly stands so, and that an accurate knowledge of this language is simply impossible; and he ridicules those who suppose that the Masoretes, by their pointing, preserved the correct pronunciation of the language. It is true that the Hebrew language, compared to other languages, is contained in very few words. But this does not thereby make it easy, or quick to learn. For although the words or terms are few, yet many bear the same meaning; and there is scarcely one that does not admit of more than one sense — most of them, many senses. The same letters exhibit various, often quite different meanings. דבר ("word, thing, matter") is well known. שלמה is both "Solomon," and "perfect" (feminine), and "recompense," and "garment." Countless examples of this kind could be gathered from any dictionary or concordance of this language.

Indeed, while it was still a living, vernacular tongue, spoken daily by countless multitudes of people, it was not at all difficult to perceive rightly the force of each word and to retain it by use. But once it ceased to be in common use, and there was no longer anyone for whom it was a native, vernacular tongue, and it was preserved entire only in a single book, it is plainly impossible that its correct pronunciation could have been maintained except from consideration of the text of that very book. Some press the point that the Greek language once lacked accents, and yet remained sufficiently open to the understanding. But whoever holds that the Greek accents are to be compared with the Hebrew points and accents does not seem to grasp sufficiently the use or function of either, in either language. The Greek language has such copiousness that almost everything in it is redundant. Moreover, there is in it such regular variation of words, and such mutual dependence of one upon another in construction, that the accents contribute little or nothing to the understanding of a sentence. There are very few words which, agreeing in the same letters in certain tenses, are distinguished in sense by their accents. In Hebrew everything is quite otherwise: the variation of words is minimal; the dependence within the order of a sentence is rare and abrupt; ellipses are extremely frequent; and the ambiguity of words is almost infinite.

And yet even in Greek itself, where a word — though this does not often happen — is truly of doubtful meaning for want of an accent, it is not difficult to go astray. Let an example be the oversight (παρόραμα — "oversight, slip") of the great Jerome. Eusebius wrote in his Chronicle, at the year 1426: ΕΠΙΜΕΝΙΔΗΣ ΤΑΣ ΑΘΗΝΑΣ ΚΑΘΑΙΡΕΙ ("Epimenides purifies Athens"). Jerome translated it, "Epimenides overthrows Athens," instead of "purifies" — since it was doubtful whether καθαιρεῖ ("he overthrows") or καθαίρει ("he purifies") should be read; but the matter is known from history, for Epimenides did not overthrow the land of Attica, but purified it with sacrifices. Also — as some think — the true sense of a proverbial saying escaped even Aristotle himself, which he mentions in the Nicomachean Ethics, book 3, chapter 5: Οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν πονηρὸς, οὐδ᾽ ἄκων μάκαρ ("No one is wicked willingly, nor blessed unwillingly"). Since he understands by πονηρός (with the accent on the last syllable) "wicked," whereas without doubt the saying means πόνηρος (with the accent on the first syllable), that is, "wretched" and "toilsome." For πόνηρος ("wretched") and μάκαρ ("blessed") are rightly opposed to each other; πονηρός ("wicked") and μάκαρ are not opposed at all. The same holds, and the same distinction applies to the word μοχθηρός, which means "wicked," and μόχθηρος, which signifies one who leads a wretched life — each word forming its superlative as μοχθηρότατος; whence that question, proposed ambiguously by Stratonicus in Athenaeus's Deipnosophists, book 8: "Who are the most wretched/wicked (μοχθηρότατοι) of the Pamphylians?" — since the life of the Pamphylians was both miserable and notorious for banditry.

Indeed, even the greatest men have sometimes been deceived as to the sense of words, when an ambiguous term occurs with no accent to mark it distinctly, even though careful attention to the whole περιοχῆς ("context, the scope of the passage") might seem to require precisely one sense. Marcus Tullius Cicero himself is an example of this — the most learned man in Greek and Latin ever born among men. In the first book of the Tusculan Disputations, chapter 42, he reports the words of Leonidas to the Spartans, who were about to fight against Xerxes believing without doubt that they would die in the battle, as follows: "Go forward with stout heart; perhaps we shall dine below among the dead." Now ἄριστον ("ariston") means "breakfast"; but it also signifies "best" or "most valiant in war," as though derived from Ἄρης ("Ares," the god of war). Diodorus Siculus, however, in book 11, chapter 9, says that Leonidas ordered them ταχέως ἀριστοποιεῖσθαι ("to take their breakfast quickly"); he said, Ἀριστᾶτε ("Breakfast!"), or Ἀριστοποιεῖτε ταχέως ("Take your breakfast quickly!") — that is, "Dine promptly." This is the sense required by the logic of the ἀντίθεσις ("antithesis, contrast") — namely, that they would presently "dine" among the dead. But Cicero, not attending to this contrast, and taking ἀριστᾶν ("to breakfast") as though it were said — like ἀριστεύειν ("to excel, to be bravest") — from ἄριστος ("best"), which signifies a brave man, translated it, "Go forward with a stout heart." There are other ἐνστάσεις ("objections, counter-instances") ready to hand, but a poorly chosen comparison does not allow me to dwell on them any longer.

You will perhaps say that the pointing rests on authority to such a degree that it would be sacrilege to reject it outright. But it has all its authority from its authors, and from nowhere else. That we may therefore come to the point we are driving at, let us briefly consider who, according to the opinion of those who oppose the divine origin of the pointing, were its authors.

XI. Those who deny that the Bible was pointed by Ezra, as we said before, assign this work with one voice to certain Masoretes, or Tiberian Jewish rabbis. In fixing the time, however, they hold contrary opinions. They conjecture that some Masoretes lived at Tiberias after the completion of both Talmudic works, which they place prior to this εὕρημα ("invention, discovery") of the points; for they are unable to prove this by any suitable argument or testimony. We admit, indeed, that the Jews had a school there some centuries earlier, but we say that it was deserted and desolate by the time the Babylonian Talmud was compiled. But let us grant — since the learned men wish it so strongly — that a number of Jewish rabbis, more or fewer, did live at Tiberias at that time; let us set aside, without unjustly detracting from their reputation, the question of who or what sort of men they were, and what is to be credited to their learning, judgment, and integrity.

XII. I do not wish here to repeat what I have written elsewhere about the state, condition, and dreadful hardening of the Jews after the second temple and the final rejection of the nation by God. Let it suffice for the present purpose to set down what, being known to everyone, can be denied by no one.

The apostle tells us, in Romans 3:2, that the greatest privilege the Jews once had was ὅτι ἐπιστεύθησαν τὰ λόγια τοῦ Θεοῦ ("that they were entrusted with the oracles of God"). But they had long since forfeited that privilege; for the Word has in no way been committed any longer to their care or trust. Indeed, the word had been entrusted to their fathers by a divine covenant (Isaiah 59:21); but when they had fallen from it through unbelief, and had ceased to be the people and church of God, they began to be nothing but bad-faith possessors of that very word. Along with their lawful right to the use of the word, they also lost entirely the Holy Spirit, who was likewise promised by that same covenant. It would be easy to show what ought to be expected concerning, or around, the Word of God from men to whom it has in no way been entrusted, and who are destitute of the Spirit — were they not themselves so dreadful an example. Approaching the most holy Word of God with unwashed hands and with conscience and mind impure, they foully contaminate every sacred thing, being themselves contaminated by everything; for, as the apostle says of these very men in Titus 1:15, μεμιασμένοις καὶ ἀπίστοις οὐδὲν καθαρὸν ἀλλὰ μεμίανται αὐτῶν καὶ ὁ νοῦς καὶ ἡ συνείδησις ("to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled").

Moreover, they have been so far from perceiving the true sense of the Spirit in the word that they have set themselves in obstinate, stubborn, and most pertinacious opposition to the whole truth uniquely contained in those very books which they handle daily with their hands. Whatever in the whole of Scripture pertains to the glory of God, whatever pertains to their own salvation, all of it has been to them an object of the utmost hatred and abomination. Indeed, from the time of Rabbi Judah the Prince, who composed the Mishnah, and onward, they have most superstitiously cultivated a certain new religion, wholly alien to that prescribed to their fathers — that is, to the Mosaic theology — and diametrically opposed to the Christian religion which that Mosaic theology served. For, continually oppressed under God's horrible curse for having rejected and slain his most holy Son, the Savior of the world, they have vainly striven, by piling up new crimes, to free themselves from its bond and penalty — meanwhile remaining, past all belief, utterly ignorant of all good arts and sciences, of all history, and of everything useful in human life.

Both Talmuds teach that their greatest masters were a foolish, futile, raving, magical, idolatrous, superstitious, unlearned, and depraved sort of men, so occupied in inventing monstrous fables that they seem to have entered the arena together as if competing to outdo one another in lying. As for the claim that from such utterly shameless, vain, foolish, lying, accursed, and God-hated little men the Biblical pointing should have proceeded, and that it should immediately have persuaded all Jews and Christians alike — without any prior examination or the least hesitation — to receive and adopt it as the norm for all reading, private as well as public, and indeed for all expositions and interpretations as well: whoever believes that will hold such credulity entirely alone, without me as his rival.

XIII. I know indeed that most learned men have employed other and more numerous arguments in this cause; let it suffice for me to have briefly indicated those which carry such weight with me that I cannot — and do not wish to — depart from the opinion which their authority supports. The learned men, too, who have undertaken to champion the rabbinic origin of the pointing, have reasons which they put forward in support of their opinion, and these remain to be considered.

XIV. In the first place, they list the names of certain great men who favor the opinion that maintains the novelty of the points. Yet a hundred years ago, or thereabouts, it would have been impossible for anyone to use this argument; scarcely a century has passed since this bold conjecture became widespread, nor does it have so much stability that there is not hope it may vanish within an even shorter span of time. Now although I am a man than whom none rises more gladly to honor the names of learned men, there are more reasons than one why I should not spend much effort here on an argument drawn merely from the testimony of a few. For since there is no shortage of men equally celebrated, of no less renown in literary matters, whom it would be very easy to set against these, the prudent reader will judge that no decision of this dispute can follow from such a clash — not so much of testimonies as of men. Besides, I find that learned men do not always exercise the diligence that is proper in citing their authorities. Take as an example those who praise Valentin Schindler as though he agreed with the opinion that the points were a rabbinic invention; yet in his discussion of the word שָׁבַל ("shabal") he shows that he judged them to be older even than the age of Ezra. Some are uncertain; others settle this dispute only in passing, while occupied with something else; those who have expressly undertaken the defense of that opinion are exceedingly few. As for some of these men, who were, in their lifetime, deservedly of great name in theology and in the church of God, and who still are among a posterity not ungrateful to them — had they been able to foresee the purpose to which certain persons would put their words, I think they would have pronounced nothing on this question except after carefully weighing the force of the arguments.

XV. Secondly, they say: "The ancient Hebrew letters were the Samaritan letters; but the Samaritans never had vowel points; therefore neither did the ancient Hebrews." Answer. Were learned men not lacking in arguments to confirm their opinion, they would doubtless not rely on such utterly uncertain conjectures as this. We have shown above that the ancient Hebrew letters were the very same ones still in use among the Jews. It is, moreover, quite uncertain whether the Samaritans ever used vowel points in writing. Postel affirms that they did. Nor is there any reason for anyone to be surprised that that foolish people should have lost the use and skill of so excellent an art. Furthermore: granting that Ezra rejected the ancient letters in favor of new ones, either devised by himself or borrowed from elsewhere — by what reasoning, I ask, does it seem to follow that, in introducing these new letters, he did not also invent the points? But since even those who once used this argument have at last abandoned it as feeble and useless, there is no reason for me to pursue it any further.

XVI. Thirdly, they say: "The Jews keep in their synagogues a scroll of the Law written without points, which they all but worship, and which they claim represents Moses's own autograph; Israelites are also found in China, in whose most ancient books no points appear, although some of these were written six hundred years ago; from which they conclude that it was not Moses or Ezra, but the post-Talmudic rabbis, who devised the art of Hebrew pointing." Answer. We have shown elsewhere how slight — indeed, of no weight at all — this argument is in this matter; here we shall only set out the heads of our reply.

We say, then, first, that this practice of the Jews is proved by no adequate testimony to be catholic — that is, common to the whole nation in every synagogue everywhere; and it makes no difference to us what a few Western Jews do in their own synagogues, since the practice of the majority is wholly unknown to us. Second, no one has yet shown that it is ancient; most of those synagogue customs are superstitious and idolatrous, and very many are recent, all of them post-Talmudic. Third, the Jews themselves — at least the majority and the most learned of them — constantly deny that by this practice they mean to teach that the ancient Bible was unpointed, since they themselves adhere to the opinion of the divine origin of the whole pointing. Fourth, although that synagogue scroll lacks points, it nevertheless has the קרי וכתיב ("qere and ketiv," the marginal "read" and the textual "written" readings), which those who use this argument will no more concede to be from Moses than the points themselves. Either, then, this scroll — or rather this custom of certain Jews — does not prove that the points are not coeval with the letters, or it proves the same of the qere-and-ketiv apparatus.

Fifth, those who most boldly seize on this synagogue practice of the Jews for their own purpose say that the rabbis devised the points for a twofold reason: first, that the reading of the sacred text might be rendered easier, and equally accessible to others as to themselves; second, that some who were less learned might, with their help, read the Biblical text in the synagogues. By this they themselves concede that pointed manuscripts were formerly customarily read in the synagogues. Indeed, it is entirely certain that in ancient times the Ἑλληνίζοντες ("Hellenizing," i.e. Greek-speaking) Jews used the Greek version of the Law in their synagogues; so that nothing certain can be gathered from this modern custom of some Jews.

Sixth, the Jews themselves give other reasons for this custom; we have listed some of them elsewhere from Azariah's Imre Binah, chapter 59. Whoever weighs those twenty-one rules which the masters lay down as necessarily to be observed in transcribing the codex to be used in the sacred services of the synagogue will easily see that they use an unpointed codex not without reason, since an accurate observance of all those rules in transcribing the points is simply impossible. The chief reason for this custom, if not the only one, seems to be this: that no one should presume to read the Law publicly in the synagogues until he is so far skilled that he can exactly observe all the points, both vocal and accentual, in reading from manuscripts in which they are not written out. For in reciting that book, they not only most carefully distinguish all the vowel points in their pronunciation, but even chant every single word according to the modulation of the accents.

There is also another reason for this custom — perhaps the truest of all, which we too have pointed out elsewhere — which can be gathered from what John Morin most truly states in his Grammatica Samaritana, chapter 25: "Such a text," he says, "is liable to far more senses than one which writes out the words together with their vowels, and is therefore far more fertile ground for mystical interpretations, which can be learned only from tradition πατροπαράδοτος ("handed down from the fathers")."

Finally, granting that they say they mean by this book to represent the αὐτόγραφον ("autograph") of Moses — which some of them fancy to have been written out like a single continuous word, without any division between the words — it in no way follows from this that Ezra did not point the Bible; this practice of the Jews therefore contributes nothing at all toward settling this dispute.

XVII. Fourthly, they adduce the testimony of Elijah Levita, who lived around the year 1520 in Germany. He not only openly affirms that the post-Talmudic Tiberian Masoretes invented the points, but labors to prove it with a number of arguments. What then, I ask? "Therefore this opinion is most true." Why so? For what reason ought Elijah alone carry greater authority with us than a great many others, far earlier in age and no less celebrated for their learning? It would be easy to overwhelm his testimony, not only in number but in weight, with that of others.

But there is no lack of reason, they say, why the authority of Elijah alone should outweigh that of all the other masters of the same profession who hold the opposite view. And what is that reason? The Jews, they say, are always eager to claim for themselves and their own people everything that redounds in any way to the honor of the nation; to that end they lie shamelessly on every occasion; therefore no credence is to be given to such men when they speak in their own cause. But since Elijah embraces an opinion that greatly detracts from antiquity, and hence from the honor of the points, he must be thought to have gone over to it only because compelled by the force of the truth.

But the matter stands quite otherwise. Since the rabbinic name arose, nothing has ever been done, either by these men or by the whole nation, that could be compared with this splendid invention. What, I ask, could be imagined more magnificent for the honor of the nation than that some of them should have been endowed with such wisdom and such skill in the sense of Scripture that they were able — and with such holiness and faithfulness that they were willing — to discover and produce the Biblical pointing, a work universally agreed to be the most perfect and useful that has ever come to light since the birth of mankind? I would venture to say that all the opponents of the divine origin of the points would most readily grant that the whole Jewish nation, from the day it was rejected by God, has never undertaken or accomplished anything that could be set beside this invention of theirs.

I would not deny that some of the masters, after devoting themselves to the Peripatetic philosophy recovered for the light and use of mankind by the Saracens, ceased to trifle and wrote things that can be read with some profit. But that all the earlier Mishnaic and Talmudic masters patched together nothing but ravings, dreams, deceptions, and lies, all learned men agree, and the matter itself testifies. That the pointing was affixed to the sacred letters with the utmost judgment, conscience, love of truth, and knowledge, there is no one, so far as I know, who denies. There is, then, nothing that would equally redound to the honor of the whole nation, of the Tiberian masters, nothing that would equally reduce all Christians to servitude under the rabbis, as this Elian fiction about the rabbinic invention of the pointing. And indeed it is quite probable that Elijah was carried to that opinion for no other reason than that he well understood that, once it was admitted and established, all students of the sacred letters would be forced to acknowledge themselves bound by an undying debt of gratitude to those Tiberian rabbis.

XVIII. They add, besides, the testimony of Aben-Ezra, whose antiquity and authority are greater. In his commentary on Exodus 25:31, he has these words: "I have seen in books examined by the sages of Tiberias, concerning which certain of their elders would swear that they had three times diligently examined every word, every pointing, and each word both plene and defective, that there was written a yod in the word תִּיעָשֶׂה ("it shall be made"); but I have not found it so in the books of Spain and France, nor in those from overseas."

Readers will easily perceive that those who produce testimonies of this sort are laboring under a great scarcity of evidence — testimonies so far from supporting the opinion they would wish established that they plainly confirm the contrary. They say, I admit, that "the Tiberians examined these codices to know whether the pointing exactly corresponded to the true pronunciation." But nothing of the sort occurs in the author himself. He affirms only that they examined those codices to know, namely, whether they were written accurately. Nor was the question he was treating about any point at all, but about the letter yod, which he shows, from an accurate examination of those manuscripts, ought to be present in the word תִּיעָשֶׂה.

He says, therefore, that some of the scribes of those manuscripts (so that the authority might be made the clearer of those which he himself had seen, in which the yod was found written in that word) swore that they had diligently examined every word, every term, and the whole pointing — namely, according to the standard of those ancient exemplars which they had in their possession. Nor does it follow from this any more that they devised the points than that they devised the letters themselves, since they subjected every word, every term — that is, all the letters — no less than the pointing, to examination. Rabbi Aben-Ezra therefore reports nothing else about these Tiberian elders than that they swore they had most diligently examined the text of these manuscripts (one of which he himself had seen), consisting consistently of both letters and points.

XIX. Fifth, some press the silence of both Talmuds concerning the points — though not the distinguished Vossius, who contends only that no mention of them is made in the Mishnah, while conceding that mention is made in both Talmuds. Two things, however, are assumed in this argument: first, that both Talmuds are entirely silent about the points — for if they are mentioned anywhere, even in a single passage, the whole force of this testimony instantly vanishes; and second, that it necessarily follows from the silence of the Talmuds that the use of the points was unknown at that time.

XX. First, then, learned men deny that any mention of the points is made anywhere in the whole Talmudic corpus. But since it is highly probable that some of those who use this argument have by no means read through those enormous volumes so diligently that they can safely declare them all utterly silent about the points, some point to certain passages where, had the points been known or in use at that time, it could not have happened, by the judgment even of these same critics, that they would not have been mentioned.

Answer. Although I would by no means grant that the points had not yet been invented, even if it were established beyond contradiction that no mention of them is made in the Talmudic corpus — since it is quite certain that there are very many matters pertaining to the teaching of the Hebrew language about which it is profoundly silent, so that I could pass over this whole argument without the least loss or prejudice to the truth — nevertheless, since there is no shortage of testimonies drawn from both Talmuds which prove that the pointing was already known when those works were composed, it is clearer than daylight that this argument is exceedingly feeble and of no force whatsoever. There is no need for me to transcribe here the passages which the most erudite Buxtorf produced in his Tiberias, and which his most learned son soundly vindicated from Cappel's objections. Let the reader consult what Rabbi Azariah gathered in Imre Binah, chapter 59, from the Jerusalem Talmud, tractate Megillah, chapter 4, and the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Megillah 1, folio 3, and tractate Nedarim, folio 37.

XXI. But they press further, saying that no mention of the points is made in places where it would evidently have been necessary, had the art of pointing already been devised at that time. For when the Talmudic doctors wished to distinguish the different senses of the words דבר ("davar," meaning "word" or "thing," depending on the vowels) and also בניך ("banayikh," meaning "your sons" or other senses depending on the vowels) — words which signify plainly different things according to the different vowels that can be affixed to, or pronounced with, the letters — they say nothing at all about vowel points, but instead show, by simply repeating the words themselves, that they were indicating the distinction by pronunciation, because they could not mark it in writing. For how easy would it have been for them to indicate that this word, written or pronounced with kamets, or with tsere, or with holem, or hirik, meant this or that — if only these points had been known to them?

Answer. We grant that the vowel points were not formerly distinguished by their technical names. These were imposed on them at the discretion of the grammarians, a long time afterward; the same thing has happened in other languages too. The Masoretes very often call tsere simply kamets, sometimes kamets katon, these names not yet being distinguished. Segol, likewise, is called by them patach katon, and kibbuts, shurek. The open sounds which these points denote were the earliest names. Although, therefore, the Talmudic doctors may perhaps not have been able to designate the vowels by those names by which a later age of grammarians distinguished them from one another, nothing nevertheless prevents us from judging that they knew how to write out their shapes.

Furthermore, how can it be proved that the Talmud was written without points? The Jews constantly assert that the Mishnah, which is older than both Talmuds, was pointed from ancient times, even though for many centuries no such manuscripts anywhere appeared — until quite recently an accurate one was again produced at Amsterdam. But the whole force of this argument depends on the assumption that they did not use points in writing at that time, which is ἐν ἀρχῇ ("[assuming] the very point at issue" — a begging of the question). Moreover, the distinguished Buxtorf has long since shown that, in the passages where the various senses of those little words are discussed, the sequence of the discourse is such that no addition of points is needed in order to mark the distinction.

XXII. Sixth, Cappel draws an argument against the antiquity of the pointing from the number of the vowels and accents, which he calls laborious and useless. There are fourteen vowels; many of them, it is said, are at least useless, since there are not as many distinct sounds in human speech. Furthermore, they say that no account can be given of most of the accents, since they signify nothing at all, distinguish nothing, exhibit no understanding, and are of no help or assistance either in learning the language or in reading it. It therefore seems that both kinds of points, vocalic as well as accentual, were a rabbinic εὕρημα ("invention"), and moreover one not well suited to the very purpose it is meant to serve.

There are, however, those who think they can reach the same conclusion by an altogether opposite route, from a consideration of the number and distinctions of the vowels. For, they say, these points exhibit all the open sounds, or vowels, so exactly and accurately that the invention seems too artfully contrived to be attributed to the first inventors of the letters, whose only necessary concern was to express the sounds. Thus, in the judgment of some, they are superfluous and useless; in the judgment of others, they are precisely fitted to the vocal sounds; in neither judgment — for entirely opposite reasons — are they divine.

But both of these little objections are easily resolved. Those who recognize the most exact perfection in this pointing certainly have no just cause to deny that it proceeds by divine order; for the more perfect anything is in its kind, the more divine it ought to be reckoned. Most learned men judge, not without the weightiest reasons, that the Hebrew language — the oldest and most perfect of all languages — was given by God himself, and by divine men equipped with a prophetic spirit, as the standard for all the others. Nor would I deny that there is force in this argument, were we not attributing the origin of the points to a wisdom that is utterly perfect and comprehends all things at once.

As for those who complain that many of the vowels and accents are useless, their argument is plainly futile and arrogant. How, I ask, will these petty scholars ever persuade us that everything in the sacred letters whose rationale they themselves do not grasp is therefore useless? Is this treating the matter seriously? Is this arguing? "We do not understand the rationale, use, or utility of many of the accents; therefore they are superfluous, and were devised by the rabbis at their own discretion." It would indeed be easy to settle any dispute whatsoever in that fashion. But ought we to make pronouncements about the Word of God on the basis of our own ignorance and lack of skill? Will that in the end be reckoned fair? I, for my part, would rather trust the man who professes to know nothing than the one who professes to know everything.

What if some one person, entirely unknown to us, was helped by some accent to perceive the sense of even the smallest little word in the sacred letters, or was guided by it in reading in that manner which God approved while the carnal ordinances of the Jewish church were still in force — shall we petty men, to whom, among countless other things, that use is unknown, judge it useless? Without doubt, had learned men not already settled it with themselves, for other reasons, that the pointing was not of divine origin, they would never have been able to bring themselves to use so bold a cavil in this cause.

"The Jews themselves think that no one exists today to whom the full rationale of the accents is known," writes Sebastian Münster, in the epistle prefixed to his commentary on Rabbi David Kimchi on Amos. Elijah Levita himself, indeed, testifies in a Hebrew letter to that same Münster that he had written a book on the rationale of the accents, which perished at Rome. Had that work been published, learned and modest men would perhaps possess something for the knowledge of which they would have no cause at all to be sorry.

XXIII. Seventh, they also contend that Jerome was ignorant of the points, since, as they say, he nowhere makes any mention of them. They suppose that this most learned man committed to writing everything he knew, whether or not he ever had occasion to do so — a view with which I cannot for my part agree. I would wish them next to show by what reasoning Jerome, in relating that the Hebrews used not only letters but also vowels in writing their own language, differs from every other nation known to him, all of whom did the same. There is no ancient historian who has handed down more, or more reliable, information about the affairs of the Carthaginians than Polybius of Megalopolis. He shows throughout not merely that he understood the Punic language, but that he had read their records. For when in the third book of his history he had carefully described with what forces Hannibal entered Italy, he affirms that he gathered everything he reported from bronze tablets inscribed by Hannibal himself. And yet this same Polybius nowhere in his histories mentions that unusual manner of writing from right to left which the Carthaginians used — a fact he could not possibly have failed to know. Little support, then, is to be looked for from Jerome's silence for this opinion. For it is certain that he could have known the points and yet not mentioned them in his writings; it is certain that they could have existed and yet escaped his notice, since there were always many copies transcribed without them; it is certain, too, that Jerome had access to very few copies, and made use of one teacher, or at most two — so that it should be no wonder at all if he never saw a pointed manuscript. There were, moreover, no grammars in existence, nor had anyone at that time cultivated the art of that language. To rest, then, upon his silence is not to argue against the truth with arguments or reasoned judgments, but with the most uncertain conjectures. But testimonies are not lacking, drawn from Jerome's own works, which openly show that he both saw and recognized points of both kinds. Elsewhere I cited that passage addressed to Evagrius: "The Hebrews very rarely use vowel-letters in the middle [of a word]." The same words, to the same purport, are cited by Rabbi Azariah in the Imre Bina ("Words of Understanding"), chapter 59. Simeon de Muis, in his Defence of the Hebrew Truth, and Joseph de Voisin, in the preface to the Pugio Fidei, answer that Jerome called the letters א, ו, and י ("aleph, vav, and yod") "vowel-letters," since in other languages they perform that office. Indeed they are vowels, in the sense that they receive added points; although very often they take the place of consonants otherwise than happens in the Greek language — and that any of them was ever purely a vowel has not yet been proven; each is also frequently pronounced with a different sound from what it would give forth were it truly a vowel. Those bare letters, then, are not the "vowels" that Jerome indicates. Again, in his Exposition on Jonah, chapter 3, he has these words: "I wonder greatly why it was so translated, since in the Hebrew there is no correspondence of letters, of syllables, of accents, or of word." I do not know how anyone could mention accents more plainly — yet no one will say that accents were in use before the vowel-points. So too on Genesis 19:33, on the word בְקוֹמָהּ ("in her rising"), he says, "They point it above, as though it were incredible that anyone should lie with a woman unknowingly," thereby noting an irregular pointing. And on Ezekiel 27 he writes: "Hebrew names are frequently interpreted in various ways because of the diversity of accents and the change of letters and vowels, which properties they possess in the highest degree among that people." And in his letter to Paula and Eustochium, or preface to Isaiah, he affirms that that prophecy "is written among the Hebrews in cola and commata." In his Hebrew Questions on Genesis 47:31 he says: "And in this passage some vainly pretend that Jacob worshipped the top of Joseph's sceptre — that is, that in honoring his son he worshipped his power — whereas in the Hebrew it reads quite differently: 'And Israel worshipped,' he says, 'toward the head of the bed.'" מִטָה is the word about which the question arises. Jerome knew that the apostle had rendered that word by ῥάβδος ("staff"). If it had not been so pointed that it truly ought to be rendered "bed," how, I ask, would he have dared to say "it is read otherwise in the Hebrew," when without points it cannot be read any one way rather than another? Was Jerome bound to listen to his own private informant against a translation employed by the apostle himself, and the sense he gave to the passage, and boldly to pronounce "it is read otherwise in the Hebrew" — which, unless we grant that he knew the points, is utterly false? It is therefore sufficiently established that Jerome knew the vowel-points and the accents, and made a plainer mention of them than was to be expected from one who had no other occasions of recalling them. But Jerome, some say, could have learned from common usage that the word מִטָה was in that place to be pronounced in such a way as to mean "bed." But of the pronunciation of the word in Jerome there is nothing said; what he shows is how it was read in the Hebrew — that is, by every reader who examined the text; and pray what was that "common usage" he is supposed to have followed? He used, as we said, one teacher, or at most two. That he preferred the whisper of some obscure teacher to the authority of the apostle is not credible — especially since the run of the sentence admits either sense; for it is most certain that Jacob worshipped God, leaning upon the top of his staff.

XXIV. In the last place, some claim a kinship between the Arabic and Syriac tongues and the Hebrew: those languages, they say, only very recently admitted pointing, and the condition of the Hebrew language in ancient times is thought to have been the same. Response: At what time the Arabs and Syrians first obtained the use of letters, and of points, is altogether uncertain. The illustrious Golius, in his preface to Surah 31 of the Alcoran, shows that the ancient Arabic character fell out of use many centuries ago. What other changes the vicissitudes of time and circumstance introduced into that language we simply do not know. Perhaps the points, too, fell into disuse, and were called back into common use again by the Saracens. In truth, there exists no trustworthy testimony as to when vowel-points first came into use among the Arabs and Syrians. But even granting that all these Oriental languages lacked vowel-points from the beginning, what does that hinder our holding that Ezra added them to the use of the sacred language?

XXV. These, then, are the principal heads of the arguments by which learned men suppose they have proven that the Hebrew pointing was an invention (εὕρημα, "discovery") of the post-Talmudic rabbis; and whoever is content to let himself be dispossessed of so great a treasure on their account will by no means have me for a companion.

XXVI. Many also suppose that from that same care which Ezra applied to the sacred Scriptures proceeded that well-known variation found in the sacred Bible under the name of Keri and Kethib ("read" and "written"). It is not fitting here to repeat what we have written elsewhere on the nature and number of these variant readings. There are those who ascribe this variety to the first amanuenses of the Holy Spirit; some of these suppose that a mystery underlies it; others hold that its cause was some ambiguity, or a בת קול ("daughter of a voice," a heavenly voice). There are those who assert that the Kerioth-notes are Masoretic marks — partly various readings gathered from different manuscripts, and partly critical corrections of the text; this is the opinion of those who think too little about what ought to be held concerning the purity of the Hebrew text they call "Masoretic," as though such a mark of distinction were needed, or as though any other biblical text had ever been in use among men. Having read through the opinions and arguments of many learned men, I confess I find myself at a loss here; yet I am glad to add what Isaac Abarbanel has on this matter, in his preface to the prophet Jeremiah. Having rejected the less satisfactory opinion of others, he adds: "But it truly seems to me that the matter stands thus: that Ezra, together with the men of the great synagogue, found the books perfect and complete, just as they had been written; but before he instituted the pointing, the accents, and the division of the verses, he attended to the reading; and if anything occurred to him that was foreign to the nature or property of the language, and to the rules of grammar, he reckoned with himself that this had happened for one of two reasons. First, that the scribe, in these irregular forms, had in view some one of the mysteries of the law, in keeping with the dignity of his prophecy and the depth of his wisdom, and therefore did not dare to attempt to delete anything from the divine books; for he understood that those books had been written with such singular wisdom, and that the defective and redundant letters, and such foreign expressions, had not been written without cause. For this reason he left them in the text just as they had actually been written; but in the margin he placed the Keri, or exposition of this exotic form of writing according to the property of the language and the simple sense. It could also be that Ezra thought that in the sacred Scripture there existed letters and expressions written irregularly for no other reason than that the one who uttered them had not expressed them correctly, as he ought, whether through unfamiliarity with the Hebrew language or through unfamiliarity with its orthography; and therefore it was necessary to set out the true spelling and reading of the word according to the rules of grammar. This is the reasoning behind the Keri, which the holy scribe placed in the margin, fearing to lay hands upon the very words of authors speaking by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit."

Chapter 13

The remaining parts of the reformation of the Ezraic church — The solemn restoration of the preaching of the divine word, Nehemiah 8:1, 8 — Its neglect before the captivity — Jehoshaphat's endeavors toward its restoration, 2 Chronicles 17:7–9 — Princes joined to the priests and Levites in that work — The diligence and success of the earliest reformers of the church in that work; the follies of the Jews, and of others — The excommunication of the Cuthites, Ezra 4:2–3 — The people's separation from impure admixtures.

I. We proceed to the reformation of the church returning from captivity. We assigned to these reformers, in the third place, the utmost diligence in the preaching of the divine word, by which the returning people — who had long lain in Babylonian darkness — might be instructed in the knowledge of God and in the right discharge of their duty. The history of this truly divine undertaking stands in Nehemiah 8:1, 8: "All the people were gathered together; for they read in that book, the law of God, distinctly, and by expounding the sense gave understanding through that reading." This duty of instructing the people through sacred sermons and solemn expositions of the word of God had been scorned and neglected during the former defection, so far as it belonged to the ordinary charge of the priests and Levites. The extraordinary preaching of the word by the prophets was so much a matter of divine provision that the church was, on that account, neither to be praised nor blamed. God had appointed "that the lips of the priests should keep knowledge," Malachi 2:7. It was the people's duty to seek from them the law of God — that is, the sense of God's mind as set forth in the law. For their neglect of this work, therefore, God severely rebukes the priests, Hosea 4:6. The Levites likewise had laid upon them the office of instructing the people, Deuteronomy 33:10. Hence, when Jehoshaphat set about reforming the church according to the will of God, nothing was of greater moment to him than his care for the preaching of that word throughout the whole church; and since the priests and Levites — whether from want of numbers, or because most of them were themselves entangled in the shameful crime of ignorance of the divine law — proved unequal to the task, he joined to them, by common right, other men, princes and great men, who had the reformation of the church at heart, 2 Chronicles 17:7–9. For the neglect of the administration of this office is a most certain proof (τεκμήριον) of ecclesiastical defection; and its careful exercise is by no means the least part of reformation. The godly reformers, therefore, took the most diligent account of this office. They also applied themselves to that work with admirable success — those whom it pleased God to use in recovering his churches from the long servitude of mystical Babylon.

II. The more recent Jews suppose that the Chaldee paraphrase is indicated by those words which we have quoted from Nehemiah. Some among the Christians either fall in with that opinion, or show themselves akin to its folly, after having settled upon another no less absurd view — being slaves to a presupposition (δουλεύειν ὑποθέσει). But we have shown above that the use and competent knowledge of the Hebrew tongue had not yet perished from among the people, as they would have it. Moreover, it is expressly said that these Ezraic preachers first "read the book of the law distinctly," and then, "by exposition of the sense," gave understanding. To what end, I ask, would that distinct reading serve, if the common people had not understood so much as the very sound of the words? What is recorded, then, was the solemn and assiduous restoration of the divine ordinance of the preaching of the word. There follows the excommunication of the Cuthites, or rather their rejection. The history stands in Ezra 4:2–3: "They came to Zerubbabel and to the chief of the fathers, and said to them, Let us build with you: for we seek your God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of Esar-haddon king of Assyria, who brought us up hither. But Zerubbabel and Joshua, and the rest of the chief of the fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to build a house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto the LORD, the God of Israel." There was no true participation in divine worship here, but only the favor of the Persian kings — which the Jews then enjoyed — that these hypocrites sought after. For had they sought with a sincere mind to join themselves to the God of Israel, they were not to have been rejected. But the matter was plainly otherwise, as the outcome made clear; and, feigning religion, they had nothing else in mind than what the Shechemites, in a like case, had so many ages before, Genesis 34:23.

III. To the rejection of the Samaritans was added the people's separation from impure minglings with profane nations. This is narrated at length in Ezra, chapters 9 and 10, and in the last chapter of Nehemiah. And thus at last that renowned (διαβόητος) reformation of the church was completed, and Mosaic theology restored to its former place, honor, use, and dignity.

Chapter 14

The final apostasy of the Jewish church — Its general occasions — The people mixed with the Gentiles — The entrance of philosophy — Various evils arising from it — Disputes, quarrels — Sects — Forgetfulness of the sacred tongue, oppression and ignorance of the common people — The ambition and blindness of the doctors — Corruption of morals — Versions of the Scriptures.

I. Upon God's grace shown in the restoration of the church there followed, in process of time, the defection of an ungrateful people, and its fall and horrible ruin. That we should set this out briefly as well is required by the plan of our undertaking. So long as the new church, founded upon the prophetic ministry, endured, it retained — though not free from all fault — a purity acceptable to a merciful God. Once that ministry was taken away, the whole fabric of the church gradually sank toward ruin. We shall briefly indicate what drove it onto the rocks from which it was never able to emerge, and then the nature of its total defection.

II. From the time the reformation was completed, the people, oppressed by the tyranny and exactions of the kings of Syria and Egypt, scattered here and there by various calamities, and compelled even to endure foreigners in the holy land, were at once infected by the contagion of a great many evils. In those centuries the Greeks brought forth, far and wide throughout the whole East — with the arms of the Macedonians serving as midwife — that contentious philosophy, stuffed with empty wranglings, which they had not long before been laboring to bring to birth. This too the doctors of the Jews drank in. So long as the temple of Solomon stood, and the people worshipped God there with sincere and rightful, chaste devotion, that philosophy was utterly unknown to all the godly. For before the Babylonian captivity there occurs among that nation no mention at all of literary pursuits or foreign sciences, with the single exception of mathematics, which, having received it from the Chaldeans, they seem to have perverted to idolatrous uses. For all human wisdom is prone to pride and superstition (δεισιδαιμονία), especially where it lodges in a mind not yet brought into subjection to obedience to the truth. This Greek philosophy, however, once gradually introduced into the church, very quickly proved to be not merely a great evil, but the ruin of purer theology. Hence those whose religion consisted only in faith and in obedience to the commandments of God began to erect schools — utterly unlike those over which the ancient prophets had presided — to set up endless disputations, to tie knots, and to split off into sects, in no way differently, we know, than happened among the Greeks on account of that same philosophy. The names of Plato, of Aristotle, of Zeno were no more the banners of disputatious factions among the Greeks than were those of Shammai, of Hillel, and others among the Jews. The Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes rivaled the Academics, Peripatetics, and Stoics; yet the itch for disputation among the former proved more pernicious than among the latter, because they entered their quarrels not over trifles, or over fictions which, like the Greeks, they had spun like spiders' webs out of their own brains, but over religion, over the worship of God, over the sense of the Scriptures — all things sacred and to be revered.

III. Next, the people had in large part forgotten the sacred tongue. This was the second fruit of their mixing with the Gentiles. Those who lived in the dispersion spoke Greek; those who lived in their ancestral seats spoke Syriac. Thus the common people were gradually brought to the utmost ignorance of the law of God, since they scarcely understood the language in which alone it was written. Relying on that ignorance, petty doctors began to strut and swagger, to arrogate everything to themselves, as though they alone possessed wisdom, to despise the people and lord it over their faith, to assume magisterial titles, to contend against one another, and — with every concern for the fear of God cast off — some did not even scruple to deny it outright. It would take too long to pursue here the origins, distinctions, opinions, crimes, and pretexts of the sects. Since I must, for the sake of my design, deal with matters already well known and taken up by others, it will suffice to touch briefly only upon their principal heads. Let it be enough, then, to have reckoned, in summary, among the causes of the general defection, the ignorance of the people, and the pride, vanity, and blindness of the doctors, seeing that the one was destitute of the letter itself, and the other of the Spirit.

IV. Add to this that, after the Hasmoneans had for some time held power, they cast aside the theocracy (θεοκρατία) divinely instituted, and in their political government openly fell away into Greek manners and rites. Greek were the names — Hyrcanus, Alexander, Aristobulus, Antigonus — of those who ruled the people after the Macedonian fashion. And from this, too, no small evils arose. Since, then, the prophetic ministry had ceased in the church, the people, exposed to profane admixture with the Gentiles, had all but forgotten their own tongue, and the doctors, splitting off into various sects after the manner of the philosophers, consulted only their own honor, while there was no one to cut down the harvest of crimes daily springing up ever thicker — everything was openly hastening toward final ruin. But before I go through the heads of this fatal defection, it is necessary that we say something about the versions of sacred Scripture which many suppose to have arisen around this period, when the people had lost their competence in the sacred tongue; and I hope these matters can be dispatched in the briefest of digressions.

Digression 2

On the Greek version of the sacred Scriptures made by the seventy elders.

I. Concerning the Greek version of the Scriptures made by the LXX, which is commonly assigned to this interval of time, while the Jewish church was sliding toward its general defection, I find I must say what Protagoras once said of the gods of the nations, as Laertius reports, book 9, 51: Περὶ μὲν θεῶν οὐκ ἔχω εἰδέναι, εἴθ' ὡς εἰσίν, εἴθ' ὡς οὐκ εἰσίν· πολλὰ γὰρ τὰ κωλύοντα εἰδέναι, ἥ τε ἀδηλότης, καὶ βραχὺς ὢν ὁ βίος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ("Concerning the gods, I am not able to know either that they exist or that they do not exist; for there is much that prevents knowledge — both the obscurity of the matter, and the shortness of man's life"). For everything commonly said about that version is so uncertain, and there are so many, and such fierce, clashes of opinion concerning it, that a whole lifetime would scarcely suffice to examine them all accurately; so that, as he once said, we have seen many uncertain men contend over this matter.

II. That some version of the Scriptures was made in this period by seventy-two men is agreed upon by most; yet there is no lack of those who reject the entire history of it as damaged goods, a purely Jewish fable. Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria assign that work to the time of Ptolemy Lagus; Aristeas — that well-known father of the story, as reported in Josephus — and Josephus himself, to the time of Philadelphus; some, to the time of Philometor. That Philadelphus sent to Herod, king of the Jews, to have those translators sent to him is the claim of Justin, Apology 2 — a lack of historical accuracy, or chronological slip, in so great a man, which proves that he gave all-too-ready credence to the rumors commonly bandied about concerning that version. Most writers say that Demetrius of Phalerum was the one who advised Philadelphus to obtain the books of the Jewish law; but others hold that Philadelphus never made use of the services of this same Demetrius in furnishing his library, since Demetrius was in great disfavor with that king, and Laertius writes that he in fact died, at the very outset of Philadelphus's reign, from the bite of an asp, near Diospolis. Nor could the illustrious Vossius meet this testimony in any way but by asserting — against the common belief of all the ancients — that Philadelphus established his library while his father still reigned; yet not even this wedge is enough to split the knot, for Philadelphus pursued Demetrius with mortal hatred long before his father's death. Moreover, most writers all but dare to swear that six men were sent from every tribe by the Jewish high priest to Philadelphus to accomplish that work; yet there are those who will not believe, even on oath, that so great a number of learned men then lived in Jerusalem from each tribe. Some would have it that they were not so much translators as seers — among whom, at one time, was Augustine, City of God, book 18, chapter 43 — a view no one ever managed to persuade Jerome of. Justin affirms that, distributed into seventy-two cells, each one completed the whole work separately, and yet they did not disagree in rendering a single word; Jerome gently laughs this fiction to scorn; Serarius and others, following Justin, give credit to the story; while more side with Jerome in rejecting it. Some write that the entire version was completed in seventy-two days; others reject that appalling haste. Some — such as Aristeas, Josephus, Philo, and nearly all the Talmudic doctors — write that they translated only the Pentateuch; Espieres, Morin, and most of the moderns say the whole of the Old Testament Scripture. Some hold that the Jews greatly rejoiced over that work; others, that on account of the undertaking they solemnly instituted a fast of compulsion (angaria — that is, one of the quarterly Ember-day fasts, as Martinius explains the term in his Lexicon Philologicum), and cursed the work itself. Philo asserts that the LXX made their version not from the Hebrew original but from the Chaldee Targum — with whom some of the rabbis agree; Cappel holds it was made from a Hebrew text written without points, as do those who, in the controversy over the points, owe him everything. Some say that a manuscript, if not actually written in gold letters, was at least ornamented as a mark of honor and sent to Philadelphus by the high priest; most of the rabbis cry out that any such manuscript is profane and fit for no use whatsoever. Some affirm that the translators were men equipped with the utmost skill in languages, and employed the utmost fidelity in producing the work; others, that in many places they deliberately corrupted the sense for various reasons; Munster and Ximenez, that they lacked either fidelity or understanding. Truly remarkable are the things Jerome writes about this version to Augustine. And in his letter to Paula and Eustochium, or preface to Isaiah, he expressly affirms that the translators were unwilling to disclose the mysteries of their faith plainly to the heathen. Many conjecture that the Greek version still extant today under their name is the very same one that they once produced; Drusius — and he is not alone — contends that the ancient version perished long ago. If it does survive, most concede — Bellarmine among them — that it has been very badly corrupted in many places since Jerome's day; Morin asserts that it has been preserved pure and unimpaired. Some, as we said before, reckon the entire tradition about this version a Jewish fable. Heinsius, in his Aristarchus, chapter 10, holds that the fable-makers took their occasion for concocting it from Exodus 24:7, 11. "It is said," he writes, "that Moses, Aaron, and the seventy elders went up to God, and that he laid not his hand upon the princes of the children of Israel; for which last words the Hellenists have, Καὶ τῶν ἐπιλεκτῶν τοῦ Ἰσραὴλ διεφώνησεν οὐδὲ εἷς ('and of the chosen ones of Israel not one disagreed') — that is, 'not one of the elect of Israel dissented.' Hence, no doubt, comes the story of Ptolemy and those seventy elders ... hence those famous scenes which the blessed Jerome explodes; hence that invention, that in so great a number no one disagreed in rendering the sacred text." This conjecture of a most learned man might perhaps have pleased those who are not unaware how skilled the Jews are at fashioning the most monstrous falsehoods out of the slightest occasions — had not a more recent Aristarchus, after he had ceased to be among the living, pronounced him a mere grammarian, a vain man, to be laughed at for his arrogance. To subject these various opinions, and the other wranglings over this version, to examination here would be foreign to the work I have undertaken. But since it is commonly referred to this period we are discussing, nothing, so far as I know, prevents my saying briefly what I think of it.

III. That a version of the law, or the Mosaic Pentateuch, was made into the Greek tongue around the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus is established by the testimonies of many writers and by celebrated tradition. It is probable that this work was undertaken by the Alexandrian Jews for the benefit of those in that dispersion who used the Greek language and were not learned in Hebrew. Whether any Targum, as some would have it, existed at that time is altogether uncertain. Certainly the greater part of the people at that time used the Syro-Chaldee dialect. There were, then, perhaps among them some who, in the work of translating the Scriptures into the vernacular tongue, went before the Hellenists. But what is said about this is mere conjecture, since no trace of any such labor survives. In the course of time, what remained of the Old Testament Scriptures was added to the Pentateuch. That the whole work did not proceed from the same authors both learned men generally admit, and sure indications of it exist. That the Targumic work was likewise completed in the same fashion we shall shortly see. But from whomever it proceeded, this much is plain: that the work was undertaken and completed while the Jewish church was already rushing headlong to its ruin; and from this it may be conjectured how highly that version would be esteemed, if it still existed whole and uncorrupted. But whatever remains of that first Alexandrian version, Jerome himself shows throughout that it had been variously corrupted and interpolated by his own day. It would be well if, from that time on, the common Greek version then extant had suffered no further harm. However that may have come about, it cannot be denied that it now disagrees with the Hebrew original in six hundred places, and very often gives words that bear no tolerable sense; there is no need to say how vainly interpreters labor to explain such passages — the matter speaks for itself. There are, nevertheless, those who affirm that our Savior made use of that version, and thereby commended it to the church — much as a certain little priest once wrote that he was accustomed to chant the Mass. Concerning the writers of the New Testament, this can be affirmed with a greater appearance of probability. For many passages of the Old Testament are quoted in their writings in the very same words that still stand in the Greek version — although they very often appear, in some respects, to differ from the Hebrew. Many have shown that this discrepancy is only one of wording, not of sense; some hold, further, that the apostles in fact followed the Hebrew text in places where they are commonly thought to have adhered to the Greek version. Most agreeable of all is the opinion of those who affirm that the Holy Spirit, the author of the whole of Scripture, expounding his own mind as he pleased, carried testimonies from the Old Testament into the New using whatever words he chose, and that the Christian copyists of the Greek version gradually inserted those very words into it.

IV. There is no lack of very strong arguments on which the proponents of this opinion rely. It will suffice for me here to point out just one, which I do not know that anyone has yet observed. It is well known that certain testimonies are set forth in the New Testament in a somewhat obscure fashion, so that it is not easy for anyone to tell at once from what passage of the Old they are drawn. Of some of these it is certain that they were inserted into the Greek text in places where before there was no trace of them at all, and from which they neither were, nor could have been, drawn. Take as an example those words which the apostle quotes in Hebrews 1:6: Καὶ προσκυνησάτωσαν αὐτῷ πάντες ἄγγελοι Θεοῦ ("And let all the angels of God worship him"). Since some did not know from where the apostle had borrowed these words, they thought to insert them into Deuteronomy 32:43; and so, after the words Εὐφράνθητε οὐρανοὶ ἅμα αὐτῷ ("Rejoice, O heavens, together with him"), they added, "and let all the angels of God worship him" — words of which there is in the Hebrew text neither trace nor vestige, nor anything that could give the least occasion for their insertion. But that we may understand the passage to be an interpolation, immediately after this violent intrusion of those words, they repeat that "rejoice," so that the sense of the Mosaic sentence might thereby proceed in proper order. But that the apostle did not draw those words from that passage — quite apart from the fact that they are not the words of the Holy Spirit, in whose name he adduces them — is made plain by the preface which he prefixes to the testimony: "But when," he says, εἰσαγάγῃ τὸν πρωτότοκον εἰς τὴν οἰκουμένην, λέγει ("he bringeth the firstborn into the world, he saith") — whereas in that Mosaic passage concerning the bringing of the firstborn into the world there are no such words at all; the exposition of that bringing-in is rather the direct aim of the Holy Spirit in Psalm 97, in which that testimony is in fact really spoken.

V. I will add just one more passage, and a very well-known one — drawn from those words of Moses, Genesis 47:31, וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל עַל־רֹאשׁ הַמִּטָה ("And Israel bowed himself upon the head of the bed"). The apostle shows that Jacob worshipped God, leaning upon the top of his rod or staff — being, that is, strong in faith, though all but at the point of death. Those apostolic words have crept into the Greek text: Καὶ προσεκύνησεν ἐπὶ τὸ ἄκρον τῆς ῥάβδου αὐτοῦ ("And he worshipped upon the top of his staff") — as though the apostle had so translated those words of Moses. But that the Greek translators did not originally render מִתָּה in that passage by ῥάβδος ("staff") is quite evident from the fact that this same word, repeated several times in the same history concerning the same person and matter, they consistently render by κλίνην, that is, "couch" or "little bed," as may be seen in chapter 48:2, and again in chapter 49:33. But of these matters, God granting, elsewhere.

Digression 3

On the origin of the Targums, or Chaldee paraphrases.

I. To this interval of time, when the Jewish church was already rushing toward destruction, most assign the origin of the Chaldee paraphrases, or the Targums (תרגומים), at least of some parts of them. Whether there once existed more versions of sacred Scripture in that tongue than now survive has been left uncertain by what some of the ancients said about the Greek version of the LXX having been made from a Chaldee paraphrase. All learned men, Jews and Christians alike, admit that a complete paraphrase of the whole of Scripture, the work of one man, or of several men, in the same time or century, never existed. There still survives a threefold Targum on the law, or the Pentateuch of Moses. Of these, one bears the name of Onkelos; another is distinguished by the name of Jonathan Ben Uzziel; the third, for a reason I do not know, is called the Jerusalem Targum. The one extant on the historical books and the prophets carries the name of the same Jonathan, or of another. That on the books of Psalms, Job, and Proverbs is ascribed to a certain Joseph, one-eyed or blind, whoever he was. Of altogether uncertain authorship are the fabulous and old-wivish commentaries that exist under the name of Targum on Esther, the Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes. The books of Ezra and Daniel never had a Targum, since they were from the outset written partly in Chaldee. Elijah Levita does indeed mention a Targum of Daniel, in his preface to the Methurgeman; but the run of his discussion shows that by "Targum" he there means the Chaldee tongue itself, not an ancient paraphrase; and this is why he wishes a Chaldee grammar to be drawn up on the model of the Targum of Daniel. Ravius recently indicated that a Targum on the books of Chronicles survives; the worthy Samuel Clarke, Architypographer of the University of Oxford — a man most deserving, for his manifold learning, of a better lot — has at last obtained a copy of it and is soon to publish it; and thus the chain of paraphrase over all the books of the Old Testament will be complete.

II. What is said among writers concerning the time when these Targums were composed is all extremely uncertain. Josephus, Origen, and Jerome — the most diligent investigators of literary monuments of this kind — are silent on the matter. Sixtus of Siena supposed that some Targum was known to the ancients under the name of a Syriac codex. That work, when it was finally published (if it really was published), shows itself to be a Christian composition, quite different from those Chaldee paraphrases of the Jews. Some suspect that this Jonathan son of Uzziel was, on account of the equivalence of the names, the same as Theodotion, the well-known translator of the Scriptures, of whom every one of the ancients makes mention. But no one records that this proselyte from Pontus interpreted the Scriptures into Chaldee, since his Greek translation was very well known. The ancient Christians therefore seem to have been altogether ignorant of all these paraphrases. Some accordingly suppose that they were all written not only after the destruction of the city and temple, but even after the time of Jerome. For it is known that he spent his life in places where it seems impossible that the names and doings of these Jewish worthies could have been entirely hidden from him. Some allege as the cause of this silence the hatred that subsisted between Christians and Jews, on account of which neither people thought fit to celebrate the achievements of the other. That the common people on both sides were so disposed is indeed credible. But what does this have to do with Josephus, the most learned of the Jews, who — holding himself far removed from any motive of anger or partisan zeal against the Christians — most diligently set forth all the doings of his own nation, weaving even a fairly long and honorable account of the Greek version? What does it have to do with Jerome, the most curious investigator not only of all books but of Hebrew traditions as well? There must be some other reason why these men made no mention of these paraphrases. But I do not wish to cling stubbornly to this argument. It is certain that Jerome did not see all the books, all the literary monuments, that existed in his day; for neither the weakness of human capacity nor the brevity of this life suffices for so great a task. Nor is it credible that he committed to writing everything he saw or knew. We have also shown above that an argument drawn from the silence of certain ancient writers is not fit to overturn the antiquity of books, or the trustworthiness of their contents. Let the reader consult Peter Galatinus, De Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis, book 1, chapter 3, pages 7–9; Raymund Martini, Pugio Fidei, book 1; William Schickard, Bechinat Ha-Perushim, page 37; Buxtorf, De Origine Punctorum, page 127; Joseph de Voisin, preface to the Pugio Fidei; Cocceius, on Sanhedrin, page 226; Buxtorf, Abbreviaturae, page 120; Morin, preface to the Greek Bible; Hoornbeeck, preface to Controversiae Judaicae; Hottinger, Thesaurus Philologicus, book 1, chapter 3, section 1, page 259; Rivet, Isagoge to Sacred Scripture, page 119.

III. Let me deal briefly with each of them in turn. Among all the Targumists, if we look to the merit of the work, first place is by common consent of the learned owed to Onkelos. I do not know whether the Jews agree — men who so greatly delight in fictions and falsehoods, of which there is a smaller store in this Targum than in the rest. In what century he lived, or who he was, is not yet settled. Some suppose that he was a proselyte, and that he lived in the days of Hillel and Shammai — that is, at the very least a hundred years before the destruction of the city. Rabbi Azariah, in the Imre Bina, subscribes to this conjecture, as does the author of the Zohar, column 131: ולא אודיעו ליה לאנקלוס שמאי והלל מלה תורת עד דאתגזר — "Shammai and Hillel did not teach Onkelos the word of the law until he was circumcised." Others hold that he was likewise a proselyte, but the brother-in-law of the Emperor Titus, and that he accordingly lived at the very time of the destruction. So writes the author of the Sefer Yuchasin, page 52. This opinion Azariah in the Imre Bina expressly rejects, relying on no other argument than the century in which he had, on the tradition of certain teachers, affirmed him to have lived. Some suspect, on account of the similarity of the names, that this Onkelos was that same Aquila who, as Jerome testifies, in a second attempt translated the sacred Scriptures into the Greek tongue with exactness (κατ' ἀκρίβειαν). Others hand down that a certain Aquila, celebrated among the Jews, lived around that same time, whom they suppose to have been this Onkelos. Since, then, nothing certain remains concerning the time in which he lived, anyone may think as he pleases, according to his own judgment. His Targum, however, whoever its author, is among the extant Chaldee paraphrases almost the only one worth reading. For it both adheres to the text, very often rendering it word for word, and for the most part renders the sense of the Holy Spirit, nor does it deliberately wander off into old wives' fables (μύθους γραώδεις), as is customary with all the rest. Led by this reason alone, I conjecture that this paraphrast lived before the destruction of the city; for from that time on, all of them without exception, being utterly destitute of the Holy Spirit, trifled childishly and ridiculously. In what esteem or at what value this work was held among the earlier Jews is quite unknown; that some of the later Jews thought highly of it is attested by the patchwork of that manuscript in which the Hebrew text itself and this paraphrase of Onkelos are set out alternately, verse by verse; but the Jews deny that it was ever read publicly in the synagogues, nor is there any reason why it should have been, since from the final dispersion the Jewish common people were most thoroughly ignorant of the Chaldee tongue. But to suppose that this translation — of uncertain author, of uncertain origin — carries any weight or authority wherever it differs from the Hebrew original, is the judgment only of madmen.

IV. The one who translated the prophets (Daniel excepted) and the historical books into the Chaldee tongue is called Jonathan Ben Uzziel. There also exists, as we noted above, a Targum on the whole law ascribed to the same name. Concerning the time in which he lived, all that is reported is no less uncertain than what we have related about Onkelos. Most of the Jews affirm that he was a disciple of Hillel. For they are eager to ascribe to him and to Shammai, as the most famous masters of the sects, everything whose true origin they do not know. They even invent miracles said to have been shown from heaven at the beginning and the completion of this work. They write that at the start of the work there was an earthquake, and a בת קול ("heavenly voice") thundering terribly against its author for having profaned the Scriptures; and that its progress met with approval when fire fell from heaven to consume the flies which, as chance would have it, had strayed onto the parchment on which he was writing; and that, on its completion, the highest praises were given, not unlike those with which the image of Christ honored Thomas, after he had finished the first half of the second part, crying out, "Thou hast written well of me, Thomas" — whether they truly believe this is uncertain. Galatinus, book 1, chapter 3, contends that this same Jonathan, who wrote the Targum on the prophets, also translated the law in paraphrase. He also reports that he himself, at that time, saw a copy of that version, which was not made public in its entirety until a century later. And — a most certain proof that he faithfully reported what he had seen — he quotes the opening words of that paraphrase, exactly as they now stand in the printed copies. For manuscripts of the Targum of Jonathan were once extremely rare, and among the Jews themselves no more than one or two could be found in any province, as Elias Levita testifies in his preface to the Methurgeman. Rabbi Azariah, too, in the Imre Bina, chapter 9, affirms that this same Jonathan produced the translation of both the Pentateuch and the prophets. Those of a different opinion rely chiefly on the argument that it is established by the most certain indications that this paraphrast of the law lived not only after the destruction of the city, but even after the completion of the Talmudic work, which he expressly mentions on Exodus 26:2 — whereas that other, the prophetic Jonathan, lived before the coming of Christ, indeed, as some would have it, shortly after the people's return from the Babylonian captivity. But by what weight of reasoning it is proved that this prophetic Jonathan lived in that period between the return from Babylon and the destruction of the city — on which the whole force of the argument depends — has not yet been established. The testimony of the Jews, unaccompanied by any evidence drawn from the circumstances of the case, does not suffice for proof. There are also, besides Azariah, rabbis who, along with Galatinus, assert that both works are the offspring of the same author. I have no wish to make this quarrel my own. The only thing that lends any appearance of reason to the view that these two Jonathans were different men is that this prophetic Targumist does not trifle nearly so foolishly as that most disgraceful corrupter of the Pentateuch. What is to be thought of the whole work I will show in a few words. In rendering the historical books he is restrained. He seldom follows the text word for word, yet he does not wander at will wherever he pleases either. Yet there are places even in these books where he trifles so childishly and in so Talmudic a fashion that I can scarcely believe a fellow of such brazenness and ignorance ever laid hand to the exposition of the Scriptures before that church's apostasy was complete. It irks me to recount his most trifling ravings here. Let the reader make the experiment on Judges chapter 5; he will find that we have invented nothing here. He conducts himself in exactly the same manner in translating the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Wherever the sense of some passage seems a little more obscure and recondite — especially if it presents anything touching the person, grace, or office of the Messiah (though he gladly retains the name "Messiah," and even sometimes inserts it where it does not occur in the text) — he twists it, by depraved and contrived allegories, boldly and recklessly, toward carnal and legal senses — that is, in the Jewish manner. Take as an example Isaiah chapter 53, from which the reader may understand how these blind Jews twist both themselves and the words of the Holy Spirit, in order to extricate themselves from that rabbinic butchery of unbelief. In the remaining prophets, as though he had resolved on nothing else than to wander perpetually from the true sense of the words, he invents the most perverse allegories everywhere with unbridled license. True expositions of the reality "appear here and there, like rare swimmers in the vast deep."

V. There remains the exposition of the law, which one might truly call a cartload of lies. For I do not fear to affirm that more monstrous fictions are not to be found even in the Muhammadan Alcoran itself than this impure fabricator of lies has piled up in that paraphrase. There is scarcely anything among the most putrid drivel of the most inept Talmudists that this impostor of notorious audacity has not gathered into his patchwork. That dungheap of a book is plainly unworthy to occupy any place among expositions, commentaries, or Targums of the law. And I would have all this understood as said of that other one, commonly called the Jerusalem Targum.

VI. This Joseph, too, who is said to have written the paraphrase on the Hagiographa, was truly blind. If anyone wishes to have a specimen of Jewish audacity, blindness, shamelessness, ignorance, and mendacity, let him turn to this author. The whole book of Esther, from beginning to end, is defiled with the most shameless lies and ridiculous fables. The Song of Solomon everywhere teems with Talmudic absurdities; the Talmud itself is expressly commended by name at chapter 5:10; nor is the matter treated any more reverently in Ecclesiastes. The paraphrase on Job is doubtless a patchwork, cobbled together from the efforts of several hands, and is not without rabbinic ravings. The book of Psalms and the Proverbs of Solomon felt this impure man's contamination less. Yet I would not say that these Targums are of no use whatever, since they express cautiously what is said of God in Scripture in a human fashion (ἀνθρωποπαθῶς), and do not, after the manner of the more recent Jews, twist toward other referents the passages that pertain to the Messiah (for the name "Messiah" occurs among the Targumists more than fifty times, as Elias notes in the Methurgeman) — though they do wretchedly corrupt their sense; and whoever wishes to become acquainted with Jewish fables may learn them from these works.

Chapter 15

Other occasions of the final apostasy of the Jewish church — The cessation of prophecy — A summary of the occasions — The degrees of the apostasy — The first foundation of Mosaic theology — The apostates' defection from it — The origin of the traditions — And of the sects — The foundation of the oral law — The origin and nature of the oral law — Born after the destruction of the city — Jewish observances not continued in the institution of the evangelical church.

I. As the fullness of time now hastened on, in which that great prophet, promised to the church from the very foundation of the world, was to be shown forth in the flesh, and God had strictly commanded the people to give heed to the law of Moses until he should come — thereby setting, as it were, the final hand upon the revelations of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:4–6 — that prophetic and extraordinary ministry, which God had variously employed from the very beginnings of that church in its reformation, ceased entirely for several centuries. From the death of Malachi to the wilderness preaching of John — who was sent, not in order to recover that church from the ruin of the apostasy into which, by God's will, it was then hastening, but to prepare the way for the great builder of the new church — for four hundred years no one was extraordinarily commissioned by God to call back to good fruit a people prone to every wickedness. Since, then, the church was destitute of prophecy, Mosaic theology was corrupted by the philosophy of the Gentiles, the common people were mingled with the nations and had forgotten the sacred tongue, its doctors relied on that which repudiated the Holy Spirit, it was given over to the manners and vices of the age, and it was gradually falling away, on every side and in general, from all the principles and foundations of Mosaic theology — it had lapsed into utter ruin. The traces of that apostasy must therefore be briefly traced out in what follows.

II. The first foundation of Mosaic theology was laid in the self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια) of the sacred Scriptures. This we showed at greater length above. For after God had committed his word to writing, he willed that it alone should be the norm and rule of all faith, obedience, and religious worship; and he strictly forbade the church, and all theologians, to add anything to it under any pretext whatsoever. This theological principle is the basis and the fence of all the others. This the ringleaders of the apostates were the first to set at nought. There was nothing in the doctrine or manners of the impious Pharisees that our Lord Jesus Christ censured more severely; and he teaches that they had brought into the worship of God and the observance of religion countless fictions under the name and pretext of "the traditions of the elders" — that is, of teachers who were the first to dare to depart from the pure word of God. It is probable that, immediately upon the departure of the prophets, certain men who seemed wise in their own eyes began, under the pretense of expounding the legal customs and Mosaic institutions, to thrust upon the people new ceremonies of worship and new theological precepts. Once this window was opened, and so vast a field given for the vain ingenuities of petty doctors to exercise themselves in, one following in the footsteps of another, the sheer mass of arbitrary institutions and rites gradually swelled to such a multitude that their observance came to occupy almost the whole of religion. For once a man has resolved to leap over the bounds of the divine commandment, there is nothing to stop him from wandering without limit. What the teachers of one age invented, the next called "traditions." And once these traditions began to find favor and authority among a people all too ready to prefer the fictions of men to the institutions of God, whatever any man newly devised was, under that name, imposed for observance upon a credulous populace ignorant of the divine law. But since a great many applied themselves to this work in various places, there arose at last among the precepts and "inventions" (εὑρήματα) of the teachers — which they called traditions — not merely discrepancy and diversity, but even, as could not but happen, conflict and outright contrariety. So great, too, was the multitude of new fables that it was not easy for anyone so to grasp and master them all as to be fit to instruct the people in their religion and observance. Hence schools were set up — not rivals of those ancient ones in which the sons of the prophets devoted themselves to the worship of God and the study of the sacred writings, but rather of those which the Greeks had established for the endless perpetuation of philosophical disputes and quarrels. These schools were nothing other than a confusion of wranglings over the most inept ancient traditions, and workshops for minting new ones. And as each master who was set over a school grew famous — the oldest of whom on record were Shammai and Hillel — his disciples, and the people too, religiously venerated his opinions, sayings, and doctrines as though they were divinely inspired (θεόπνευστα). It was also from the diversity of the traditions that the crowd of teachers split off into various sects. The three oldest and best known of these were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes; to which Judas the Galilean, in the days of the census (ἀπογραφή), added a fourth, as Josephus testifies, and the "headless" Herodians a fifth. The atheism of the Sadducees is said to have sprung from one teacher's saying, wrongly understood. For when, under the pretext of the greatest love toward God himself, he had declared that no one ought to render obedience with an eye to eternal reward, his foolish disciples — ready to swear by their master's every word — are said to have supposed that he had denied the resurrection and eternal life. So writes the author of the Tzemach David, in his Chronicle, under the Second Temple, at the year 4460: צדוק וביתוס שניהם תלמידי אנטיגנוס חיו וטעו בדברי רבם במה שאמר אל תהיו כעבדים המשמרים את הרב על מנת לקח פרס ואמר אחד לחברו הגה הרב אמר בפירוש שאין לאדם לא גמול לא עונש — "Zadok and Boethus were both disciples of Antigonus, and they erred concerning the words of their master, in that he had said, Be not like servants who minister to their master for the sake of receiving a reward. One said to his fellow: See, our master has explicitly taught that man has neither reward nor punishment" — and it is related that, having seized upon this occasion, they fell away from the faith. Now all these traditions tended to this end: either that all authority should be plainly and directly taken away from the commandments of God, or at least that they should be so interpreted that no one would be bound by their authority to render the obedience which God requires — which comes to the same thing — while the arbitrary mandates of the teachers themselves were to be observed most punctiliously, on pain of eternal death. Wherever this Pharisaism flourishes — by which, through contrived absurdities and depraved interpretations, the virtue, efficacy, and perfection of God's commandments are emptied of force, while the arbitrary prescriptions of men, under whatever pretext at last, are strictly enjoined — there apostasy flourishes and reigns, to the exclusion of all true theology. Nor is it necessary for me to show at greater length that the Jewish church, before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, was thoroughly infected with this poison

was tainted and corrupted by this poison before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; since the gospel history everywhere sets this before the eyes of all. In this most pernicious error that church's horrible and final apostasy had its beginning. And this was the foundation of that oral law, which in the religion of the apostates has for many centuries past filled both sides of the page. For after the farrago of traditions had grown beyond all measure, and had become the sole delight of blind apostates destitute of the Spirit of God, and since — as happens in a long succession of years and events — the origin of these traditions had become unknown, new teachers arose who credited the whole of them to Moses himself. I will abridge the long fable as best I can. In sum, they recite it in the Tractate Pirke Aboth, chapter 1: משה קבל תורה מסיני ומסרה ליהושע ויהושע לזקנים וזקנים לנביאים ונביאים מסרות לאנשי כנסת הגדולה ("Moses received the law from Sinai, and delivered it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; the prophets delivered it to the men of the Great Synagogue") — that is, "Moses received the law from Mount Sinai, and delivered it to Joshua; Joshua to the elders; the elders to the prophets; the prophets delivered it to the men of the great synagogue." By this they understand תורה שבעל פה ("the law that is upon the mouth"), that is, the oral law. Rabbi Moses Maimonides relates the whole fable more fully in the preface to the Jad Chazachah: כל המצות שניתנו לו למשה בסיני בפירושן ניתנו שנאמר ואתנה לך את לוחות האבן והתורה והמצוה תורה זו תורה שבכתב והמצוה זה פירושה והמצוה לעשות את התורה על פי המצוה והמצוה זו היא הנקראת תורה שבעל פה — that is, "The precepts which were delivered to Moses at Sinai were all given together with their exposition, according to that word, 'I will give you there the tablets of stone, and the law, and the commandment' — the law, namely, the written law; and the commandment, that is, its exposition. Now God enjoined us to keep the law according to the commandment; and the commandment is the oral law." He adds further: "The whole law Moses our master wrote out with his own hand before he died, and committed a copy to each of the tribes; and one he laid up in the ark for a testimony, according to that word, 'Take this book of the law, and put it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord our God, that it may be there for a witness against thee.' But the commandment, or exposition, Moses did not write, but enjoined it upon the elders and upon Joshua, and upon all the rest of Israel, according to that word, 'Every word which I command you, that shall ye observe to do.' And therefore it is called the oral law. And this oral law, although it was not written, Moses our master taught in its entirety, in his own consistory, to the seventy elders. Eleazar, Phinehas, and Joshua — those three received it from Moses, and Joshua accordingly delivered it to his own disciple." And so he goes on in a long series to recount the names of those who, from the days of Joshua down to Rabbi Judah the Prince, received this oral law from their predecessors and delivered it to others; and at last he adds, רבינו הקודש חבר כל המשניות — "Our holy Rabbi" (that is, Rabbi Judah) "composed the Mishnayot." This, to be sure, is exactly what he intended: that those futile, inept, and absurd traditions which this Rabbi Judah compiled into the Mishnayot were that very oral law, the expositor of the written law, which they fable Moses to have received from God on Mount Sinai.

III. That this elaborate fable is a rabbinic invention has long since been shown by others. Yet it is the very foundation of all present-day Judaism. For with the smallest of exceptions — those whom they call and execrate as Karaites — the religion of the whole nation has for many centuries rested upon this fiction. But since no mention whatever is made of this oral law anywhere in the sacred writings; since students of God's law are nowhere directed to it, but everywhere to the written word; since whatever Moses heard from God he was commanded to write, and did write (Exodus 24:3–4); and since this oral law can serve no other end than to supply the defects of the written law — which God everywhere declares to be most perfect and absolute — it is plain that present-day Judaism is something wholly different from that religion which the Old Testament establishes and requires.

IV. Now although that doctrine of traditions which we have just touched upon — the very beginning of the total apostasy of the Jewish church — produced this most monstrous fiction, yet that it was devised before the destruction of the temple and city, and thus before the rejection of that whole church and people by God, has never been proved by anyone, either by weighty arguments or by credible testimonies. Philo, Josephus, and the son of Sirach make no mention whatever of this oral law, though they make abundant mention of traditions. Had it been devised in their time, let alone paraded as the foundation of theology and the worship of God, they would beyond all doubt not have passed it over in silence. Moreover our Savior, who so severely rebuked the hypocrites for their many sins and superstitions — and especially for their audacity in imposing traditions as a rule of the worship and obedience owed to God — would never have let so pernicious a fiction pass unmentioned. That serpent, then, had not yet been hatched from its egg which now flies abroad on wings as a fiery serpent. We do not, therefore, number this law among the stages of that apostasy, since it was rather its end and terminus.

V. That the leaders and standard-bearers of this defection from God — the masters of the sects — brought into the church countless most superstitious fictions and corrupt customs under the name of traditions, and by them corrupted the whole of divine worship, the gospel history plainly teaches, and we have already shown; yet there are learned men who suppose that our most holy Lord made use of certain Jewish customs and πράξεις ("practices") concerning the worship of God and the rites of religion in instituting his own church. There are those who do not shrink from asserting that the Lord's Prayer itself — which he prescribed as the norm and pattern of all our prayers — was taken from formulas most current among the Jews. They admit, indeed, that Christ put an end to the Mosaic institutions; but they teach that he committed certain observances, which the doctors of the Jews had of their own accord introduced into use, to the evangelical church, to be religiously kept, fortified now by his own authority. Since this opinion seems to me horrible enough, and injurious to our most holy Lord himself, before we proceed to set out the last stage of this church's defection, I think it proper to subject it to examination.

Digression IV

Whether our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the retaining, in the evangelical churches, of any Jewish customs, prayers, or observances.

I. Once the second temple had been built, and the ministry of the prophets and of other divinely inspired men — to whom the task of restoring the church to the norm of Mosaic theology had been entrusted — had ceased, the teachers of the following centuries, who wished to be reckoned διδάσκαλοι τοῦ Ἰσραήλ ("teachers of Israel," John 3:10), held the most divergent views on the faith itself and on the observance and ceremonies of divine worship, as I suppose no one can be ignorant of. In the first place, turning deaf ears to that most holy precept of God — that their minds should attend to it alone, until he should come who would expound all truth, a precept by which they were solemnly warned, at the very sealing of the canon of the Old Testament, to submit themselves to the discipline of the law of Moses — they gave themselves wholly to devising new rites and interpolating unwritten (ἀγράφοις) traditions. So, with prophecy having ceased, philosophy entering in, and the help of the Holy Spirit reduced to its lowest ebb, the whole church, corrupted by perverse superstitions, tended by degrees toward ruin. The gospel history reports some of what these corrupt teachers decreed in religious worship and in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and under what pretexts they used these to impose upon the people. After certain celebrated teachers — whose very names were sacred and venerable to a populace that surrendered itself wholly to the dictates of its faith — had indicated that some rite was to be observed in religion, or that this or that was the sense of some divine mandate or institution, their successors, wishing to enjoy the same authority among later generations, taught that these novel institutions — as though they were ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ("from heaven") and not ἐξ ἀνθρώπων ("from men") — were to be observed with the utmost reverence. Hence, as we noted above, the farrago of traditions grew immense within a short time; so that in the end almost nothing whole or uncorrupted remained anywhere in the whole of religion. This evil, too, was added by the passage of time to the heap: that it became simply impossible for a people wrapped in darkness to know or distinguish what belonged to divine institution, what to ancient observance, and what to recent invention. Since all sacred things among the Jews stood in this state and condition, certain learned men suppose that our Lord Jesus Christ, in instituting the evangelical church and disposing the worship of God within it according to his infinite wisdom, transferred into his own use (so they speak) some — indeed nearly all — of the rites handed down from the fathers (πατροπαραδότους) which the Jews of that time religiously observed in the worship of God, and that, having confirmed them by his own authority, he delivered them to his disciples to be observed to the end of the age. They add further that that most holy prayer — the absolute norm and pattern of all our prayers (for Christ did not command that these very words be recited, nor do we read that the apostles did so, says Grotius, Annotations on Matthew 6:9) — which he taught his disciples, he composed out of formulas most common among the Jews. And they think this is proved by the fact that among the teachers of the Jews, especially in both Talmuds, these very rites are recorded as having once been observed which we Christians still observe on the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ! and that the petitions of the Lord's Prayer — most of them at least, if not all — stand there ῥητῶς ("expressly"). Nor, they say, are these indicated as though only then arisen or received among the Jews, when the Talmudic work was compiled; rather, their antiquity and observance is established on the authority of masters and teachers who lived long before the destruction of the city; and — the chief point of the argument — they say this was part of that oral law which, handed down through many hands, Rabbi Judah the Holy set down in the Mishnayot. Now since I cannot deny that this opinion of these learned men is by no means to my stomach or taste — indeed, that I vehemently dissent from it, chiefly for this reason, that since it is merely doubtful, nay false, it seems to have taken but little, if any, care for the honor of our Lord Jesus Christ — although my own affairs, and those of the public, now compel me not merely to hasten but to rush toward the conclusion of this work, I am not willing to pass it over in silence. I shall therefore first treat the opinion as a whole in general, and then separately submit to examination the objections (ἐνστάσεις) which certain men adduce in confirmation of it.

II. Let us see, then, first, what may be granted to the learned men in this matter; and then what points I cannot admit — at least until they are confirmed by other and weightier arguments, or by credible testimonies, than those hitherto employed in this argument. I grant, first, that some sayings — indeed many — found in the evangelical writings may also be found among the Talmudic rabbis, or at least sayings very like them. The same may in particular be said of some of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. But learned men have likewise noted, from the Scriptures of both testaments, that things resembling these are also to be found in the writings of the pagan sages.

III. Further: it is granted that these same rabbis teach that certain rites were in use among the Jews not unlike those which the Lord Jesus prescribed to his disciples to be observed in the worship of God. We shall consider these later.

IV. We grant, thirdly, that the Mishnaic and Gemaric doctors do not put forward these sayings, nor make mention of these rituals, as though they were then first made known and published, nor do they affirm, resting solely on their own authority, that they were in use before the destruction of the city; but rather they introduce the teachers themselves, who lived long before those times, each expounding the sense of his own age, or even of the oral law.

V. It is further granted that our Lord made use, in the conversation he held with the common people, of certain proverbial sayings then in common use among the nation, and that these were accordingly recorded in the evangelical writings. Of this sort were: "Physician, heal thyself"; "To him that hath shall be given"; "The first shall be last, and the last first"; "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear"; and others of the same kind. And as every nation is exceedingly tenacious of its proverbial sayings, so we acknowledge that the Jews retained these and similar ones in memory through many centuries, and set them down in writing.

VI. These things, I say, we willingly grant; it remains, then, to consider whether, beyond what we have granted, the proofs of these learned men establish anything further. But it is certain that this dispute cannot be settled from these concessions. For it does not yet appear that the rites in question were really in use in the Jewish church before the destruction of the city, or were known to that people in the days of Jesus Christ's life on earth. That the truth, therefore, may be brought to light, we shall premise a few points which will make the whole controversy easy to resolve.

VII. We say, then, first, that this oral law, which the Talmudic doctors commonly set down as the fount and origin of all traditions and unwritten (ἀγράφων) rites, is a monstrous fiction, a sheer lie, wickedly devised for the total ruin of Mosaic theology and the eternal destruction of the Jewish people. For no greater mention is made of this law anywhere in the whole of sacred Scripture than of the Muslim Koran. Indeed those who dared to sew such additions — of which this law for the most part consists — onto the word of God are severely execrated and devoted to destruction. And that whole faithless and stiff-necked nation, surviving and scattered throughout the world, owes its obduracy and its horrible pertinacity in unbelief, by the most just judgment of God, to this satanic fiction. For led away from the word of God under its pretext, and bewitched by the inveterate prejudices of carnal traditions, they neither relish nor wish to relish anything beyond the most inept fables. And this, I hope, will be granted on all sides.

VIII. Secondly, the rites and ceremonies recorded among the Talmudic doctors which are not expressly instituted in the law are of two kinds. Either they pertain only to the manner of celebrating a worship already instituted, with certain additions attached, drawn by whatever arbitrary expositions of the words of Scripture may be devised; or else they are themselves altogether new rites, quite distinct from all divine institutions. No one has yet proved, nor will anyone ever prove, that any memory, monument, trace, or vestige of either kind exists, or ever existed, before the people's return from the Babylonian captivity, or during the flourishing of that church under the guidance and government of the prophets and the first reformers. All of them owe their origin either to that interval of time in which this church rushed headlong into its last and fatal apostasy and ruin, or to the period after it had ceased to be a church at all.

IX. Thirdly, we deny that our Lord fortified with his own authority any institution that was purely Mosaic. All say that he abrogated all such things. Of those, however, which are founded in the nature of things, the case is different. For since all the Mosaic rites were instituted only for the time of the "reformation" (διορθώσεως, Hebrews 9:10), and had only a shadow of the good things to come, οὐκ αὐτὴν τὴν εἰκόνα τῶν πραγμάτων ("not the very image of the things themselves," chapter 10:1), they could not maintain their place once that which they were appointed to foreshadow had been introduced, nor could they ever be recovered again from that death to which they had long since been destined.

X. Fourthly, it is most plainly established from the whole gospel history that our Lord Jesus Christ, so long as he lived subject to the Mosaic institutions, a minister of the circumcision, rejected and condemned with the utmost detestation, constantly and without exception, all the unwritten (ἀγράφους) traditions which the old teachers, or the more recent ones, had introduced. Whether they consisted of perverse interpretations of Scripture, or of curious observances and rites, he repudiated all of them without distinction, not without severe rebukes of those who were the authors of imposing them upon the people to be observed. It seems, therefore, altogether incredible that he should have snatched up rites for his own use, as some like to speak, out of these very observances.

XI. Fifthly, all acknowledge that there are certain dictates of right reason — proceeding, indeed, from the best and wisest author of nature himself — which are by nature fitted to serve the divine worship in every state of the church. These hold some place among all men who in any degree submit themselves to the rule of reason. Our Lord, therefore, did not "seize these for his own purposes," but rather, lest the observance of them should thereafter depend upon the failing and dim light of nature, he confirmed them by his own authority, and reckoned them among his own most holy institutions. But if any of these were in use among the Jews, Christ is not for that reason to be said to have received them from the Jews, since they belong no more to the Jews than to the whole human race.

XII. Sixthly, it is certain that most of the Jews — if not almost all of them — who believed in Christ before the final overthrow of the temple and destruction of the city, and before the ultimate end was set upon the Mosaic institutions, religiously observed them — at least the greater part — and kept them in worship according to the appointments of the law. For the apostles themselves, though they knew from Christ's own forewarning that the temple itself, together with the whole system of worship with which it was furnished, was shortly to be abolished forever, yet, awaiting that day of the Lord's patience, did not shrink from Mosaic worship. So long, therefore, as the Jewish church endured under God's forbearance, right up to the destruction of the city and temple, those who believed in Christ never withdrew anywhere on earth from the synagogues of the Jews or from synagogue worship, except where driven out or put to flight by force. For it was only in those places where unbelieving Jews began openly to rage against believers on account of their profession of faith and the religious worship they rendered to Christ that separate assemblies were established — the believers having been warned of that dreadful judgment of God which was very soon to be executed upon the enemies of the gospel (see 2 Peter 3:3–11). That the Jewish church continued to stand, and was not utterly cast off by God, while the temple still stood, the apostle Paul teaches throughout his whole epistle to the Hebrews. For he represents the high priesthood, and indeed the whole Mosaic worship, as due to be abolished forthwith, yet not as yet abolished. Hence the state of the church, such as it would be once every typical form of worship had been wholly removed, is there called "the world to come." He also affirms that it is "yet a little while," until these Mosaic rudiments, shaken by the death of Christ, should be taken away, so that the things of Christ's kingdom which cannot be shaken (τὰ μὴ σαλευόμενα) might be established. Nor does it stand against this that the apostles and elders, and the whole Jerusalem church, had long before, from the mind of the Holy Spirit, decreed that disciples from among the Gentiles were not bound to the law of Moses (Acts 16); for these same apostles, a long time afterward, show that all the believing Jews still adhered to its observance (Acts 21:21–22). In many other passages, too, believing Jews and those who had not yet given their names to Christ acted indiscriminately together. Thus the leading men of the city never so much as suspected that James the Just — who lived many years at Jerusalem, and was well known to the whole people for his exceptional and unfeigned sanctity — was a Christian, since he diligently frequented the worship of God in the temple, as Eusebius relates, Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chapter 33. Indeed Grotius writes that this admixture persisted in places even down to the time of Hadrian.

XIII. Seventhly, when that church had now come to the final period of divine forbearance, and the Jews everywhere, having at last become obstinate and inveterate enemies of the gospel, stirred up persecutions against the disciples of Christ, and greeted with scoffing the solemnly foretold and denounced coming of Christ to take vengeance for their unbelief and malice, a great many of that nation who had earlier given their name to Christ began to meditate a defection back to Judaism, as appears from Paul's epistle to the Hebrews. And once the temple was destroyed and the nation cut off, a great part of those who up to that time had, along with the profession of Christ's name, observed the Mosaic rites and ceremonies, staggering wretchedly between two religions which no one could any longer practice together, partly betook themselves once more to the camp of the Jews, and partly devised a new religion compounded of both — one that truly did not merely corrupt each but utterly overturned them both. Of this sort were the Ebionites, and, if Jerome is to be believed, the Chiliasts; all of whom, in the course of time, having cast off the title they had for a while vainly borne, passed over into the ranks of the Jews. And as everyone knows that they all attempted to introduce Jewish rites into that Christianity which they had embraced, so it is more than credible that some Christians who fell back into Judaism carried certain things over with them as well. But the darkness in which the affairs of the Jews were then wrapped prevents us from having clear knowledge of what was being transacted within their cloisters and hiding-places.

XIV. Eighthly, the remaining Jews (that is, whatever of the nation survived the Flavian catastrophe), driven out and put to flight from every solemn Mosaic assembly, wandered here and there, utterly uncertain what to do, by what rite to worship God, or where to set their foot. Some have shown that they established, here and there, a Sanhedrin — or rather a school, or a den of the most inept wranglings. But the whole of that history rests on conjectures, and on the testimonies of the rabbis, which are more uncertain than any conjecture. When Hadrian held the empire of the Romans, deceived by the craft and cunning of a notorious scoundrel whom they call Bar Kokhba, and driven either by the goad of their own crimes or rather by the divine curse, they flocked from every side into Judea and Galilee and stirred up a war against the Romans, disastrous enough to both sides. Conquered at last, and struck by a calamity — smaller only than that with which they had been mown down at the destruction of the city and temple — and not yet perceiving the most just indignation with which God pursued the whole nation wherever it was scattered on earth, yet broken in strength and spirit, they were partly put to flight, and partly, under sentence of death should they fail to flee, commanded to a man to go into exile from the whole of Judea. What they accomplished in their hiding-places from that time and through the century following lies buried beneath a murky night. At last there broke forth that most famous Rabbi Judah — Hakkadosh, that is — the author and prince of that superstition by whose crime God and men are, even now, everywhere on earth gravely burdened. He set his hand to the fashioning of that new Jewish religion which, swollen with countless superstitions, still prevails among the whole nation. For being set over the school, and observing with what great uncertainty everything pertaining to religious worship and observance was fluctuating, he composed — out of ancient traditions and new fictions and observances which were then current among many, torn and scraped together from every quarter — a kind of body or system of religious and civil, or forensic, constitutions, which they call the Mishnayot. Into that book the expositions, disputes, wranglings, and fables of the rabbis compose both Talmuds. For once Rabbi Judah had raised his standard, there was an immediate rush to it from every side. Whatever impure and unlearned little men could anywhere scrape together — out of old wives' traditions, out of sayings of sacred Scripture wretchedly and blasphemously twisted, out of the rites and customs of the Gentiles and of Christians not expressly opposed to the Mosaic law, which could in any way be forced to serve their purpose — all this they poured together here, as into a Lernaean swamp of fables, lies, and every kind of superstition. For just as Muhammad patched together his Koran out of Jewish traditions, gospel history most wretchedly interpolated, pagan rites, and his own fictions, so also did these rabbis compose their Talmudic work. These points being thus premised — all of which will be found beyond reproach (ἀδιάβλητα), since they are drawn from histories and monuments of past events most worthy of credit — I will state in a few words what I think concerning the question before us. My opinion, then, is this: that those evangelical institutions of which any mention is made either in the Mishnah, or in the Talmuds, or in other Jewish teachers — and indeed all the passages of purely evangelical matter which occur anywhere in them — the Jews drew from nowhere else but partly from the gospel itself, partly from the practice of apostate Jews and from the traditions that emanated from Judeo-Christian assemblies, and partly from the mouth of the common people among whom they lived. This opinion, I say, seems to me more probable than that other one, which so dangerously asserts that our Lord Jesus Christ borrowed his most holy institutions from the gaps of Judaism; indeed I judge it to be the truest of all, exposed to no exceptions of any real weight or force. For since these blind and obstinate apostates had lost their ancestral religion, the worship of God, and their fatherland (for whoever thinks that the Talmudic religion, or present-day Judaism, is the same as that which is set forth in the law and the prophets, is a stranger to these matters), and being utterly destitute of the Spirit of God, bent every effort toward devising and erecting, out of the most uncertain traditions and rumors, a new manner of worshipping God and new rites of worship, there is really no reason why anyone should find it strange that they should have snatched up for their own use some things which were in use among Judaizing Christians, or at least things very like them. And all wonder will disappear still further if we consider that some of those who patched together this new superstition were themselves apostate Christians — which is certainly neither incredible nor improbable. Hence it is that so many traces of gospel history survive in the Koran, since a certain Nestorian monk named Sergius, who had fallen away from Christianity, assisted its author and had a hand in the work.

XV. But let us weigh the force of the opposing opinion. On what authority, pray, can we know for certain that those forms of prayer now in use among the Jews, or those rites which are not expressly prescribed in the law, were in use before the destruction of the city? The Jews, they say, constantly affirm that they received these from Moses himself, by means of the oral law. But we have already proved that this oral law is a most shameless fiction, of which, before the final apostasy of the people and the destruction of the nation, no trace and no memory exists. And whatever owes its origin to this oral law cannot be older than that law itself. But, they say, the Jews had fixed hours of prayer; I grant it — Luke records, in Acts 3:1, τὴν ὥραν τῆς προσευχῆς τὴν ἐννάτην ("the ninth hour of prayer"). That there were three such hours daily, Maimonides teaches in the Mishnah, book 2, Tractate on Prayer and the Blessing of the Priests, chapter 1 — but he denies that this was instituted by the law. "Moreover," he says, "neither the number of the prayers, nor the obligation to this or that particular prayer, nor any fixed or definite time of prayer, belongs to the law." Thus they had daily three prayers, of which the first was called שחרית, or the morning prayer; the second, מנחה, mincha; the third, ערבית, the evening prayer. Tertullian, in his work On Fasting, tells us that certain of the ancient Christians observed these three hours, "while fully preserving the indifference of praying always, and everywhere, and at every time," as he himself puts it. But what then — did they also, therefore, have prescribed forms of prayer? And how, pray, is that to be established? Maimonides indeed relates that Gamaliel — whose age and lifetime are known from sacred history — composed a prayer for the extirpation of the מינים ("heretics"), that is, of the Christians; how well this agrees with the counsel that Luke ascribes to him in Acts 5:38 is not easily understood. There is, therefore, neither the appearance nor the color of proof that the Jews, before the destruction of the city, had prescribed forms of prayer humanly devised. But the Samaritans, they say, affirm that a book of prayers, written by Moses himself and transmitted to them, was preserved in the hands of the high priests of Gerizim down to the pontificate of a certain Hadrian. Let Apella believe it; no one else will — for all the Jews with one voice detest this as a most shameless lie. These are the very people who forged an eleventh commandment, well fitted to forge Mosaic forms of prayer too! If any such book had ever existed, to believe that the memory of it survived only among the Samaritans — that impious Assyrian colony, hateful to God and to the church — would be "the act of a madman, though no sane man would so swear by Orestes." I grant, indeed, that most of the Jews hold that, after the time of Ezra — when, prophecy having ceased, that church declined through contempt of the Spirit and the divine word into final apostasy — the people made use of certain fixed forms of prayer in synagogue worship, and even in that of the temple; but that the Mishnaic or Talmudic doctors, or any teachers of the following centuries, knew for certain what those forms were, or retained any memory of them, cannot be proved. For it is foolish and wicked to suspect that that church made use, in the worship of God, of those very liturgies now current among the Jews. The same must be said of the rites. Before that impostor Rabbi Judah, no Jewish writer exists in the Hebrew tongue; nor in Greek, except Philo, Josephus, and Jesus the son of Sirach. On these matters, among them, there is the deepest silence. Who, then, will persuade me that this Rabbi Judah, or his followers, did not lie when they hint that this or that rite was in use before the destruction of the city, when I know that they lie most shamelessly in matters and histories of far greater weight? Even their own fathers — better men than they, if ever any of Adam's posterity were better than they could have been — we are taught, on the testimony of truth itself, devised many things inept and superstitious. And in their lying there is no end, no aim, no limit; everywhere they seem, as it were by deliberate design, to vie with one another for the palm in devising the most dreadful lies. There is no need of examples; those not yet washed clean of bronze know them well enough. But learned men say that in matters concerning themselves they are to be believed; why, I ask? — since nowhere are men found to be triflers and liars more than in matters concerning themselves? But let us hear a most learned man pleading the cause of the rabbis in his own words, in his work On the Law of Nations among the Hebrews, book 2, chapter 2: "If anyone," he says, "here perhaps has doubt whether credit is to be given to the Talmudic corpus and its writers in matters of this kind, insofar as they are historical — that is, insofar as they are handed down in them as some sort of law recognized and practiced among the ancient Hebrews — on the ground, namely, that the corpus, as it now stands compiled, and its several writers, belong to centuries later than the destruction of the temple and city, such a one might perhaps also doubt the credit of Justinian or Tribonian, when they report or mention, in the Digest or elsewhere, the opinions and legal rulings of Modestinus, Papinian, Florentinus, Alfenus, Proculus, Celsus, and others of that sort — men some three hundred years older than Justinian, and whose sayings are found nowhere else — let alone when they narrate or mention the laws of the Twelve Tables, which precede even these by many more centuries still." Adding remarks of like sort, he at last concludes: "To admit a ground of doubt, whether in law, or in theology, or in history, or anywhere else, from this cause alone — when the other circumstances surrounding the matter in no way tell against its credibility — is nothing other than to struggle, far too perversely and peevishly, against almost the whole of antiquity and against the very historical truth of things."

XVI. There is no one, so far as I know, who has brought forward more, or more plausible, arguments for reconciling belief to these Talmudic reports which we are discussing. The most noble Joseph Scaliger says similar things. Let us see, then, in a few words, whether this most excellent man has achieved what he intended. If, indeed, the same reasoning which he proposes concerning the rabbis and the ancient jurists proceeded on equal footing, this argument would be valid. But the matter stands quite otherwise. It is most certain that the books of those authors whose sayings, opinions, and responses are cited by later writers in civil law once actually existed — indeed, existed at the very time when those famous maxims (γνῶμαι) were excerpted from them, or were drawn from authentic memoranda and from the registers, commentaries, and public records of the courts. But the Mishnaic and Talmudic doctors do not even pretend that their predecessors ever wrote anything such as they everywhere ascribe to them. Some centuries having elapsed since those men's deaths, resting on I know not what uncertain rumors and vain traditions, they bring onto the stage, at their own pleasure, whatever teachers they please, of whom they do not so much report that they said this or that, as openly invent it. If any pre-Mishnaic books existed, or had perhaps ever existed; if they rested upon any monuments of actual events that had ever had a place in the nature of things; if anything beyond their own bare word and authority could be adduced to make it a fit and adequate ground for conjecturing that the things they report really were so; if the state and condition of Jewish affairs over the course of several centuries left any room for the suspicion that they had faithfully preserved in memory the sayings and doings of their predecessors before the destruction of the city — then this comparison might seem to carry some force of just reasoning. But, as we have said, everything here stands quite otherwise. Moreover, how immensely the credibility differs among witnesses! Pups smell quite differently from swine. I am not willing to withdraw credit, on mere suspicions or bare conjectures, from those whose truthfulness in many matters is well attested to me. But to bind oneself over to belief in those whom one knows to be, in most matters — indeed in almost all — openly the most lying impostors, is scarcely worthy of a man, not to say of one who loves the truth. Those ancient jurists whom Selden cites were grave men, learned, upright, and celebrated throughout the whole world; they said and wrote nothing, and ascribed nothing to others, except openly, plainly, and in the full light of men's eyes — where, had they written anything otherwise than became the most sacred observers of justice and truth, they would have been charged with falsehood by almost the whole world. Our Talmudic masters were blind, dishonest, unlearned men, given over by God to a reprobate mind — men who, as Joseph Scaliger rightly observes in his On the Correction of Time, book 7, seem deliberately "to profess ignorance of all good things"; charlatans (halophantae), mere spinners of fables (aretologi), babbling out mere nonsense in darkness and hiding-holes, for which no reason can be given why we should believe anything they say, great or small. Let this suffice to have said in general; what points carry any weight will come to be examined in the consideration of particulars.

XVII. Let us look at the particular instances by which these learned men strive to establish their opinion. There are some — whom, out of respect, I do not name — who assert not only that our Lord Jesus Christ prescribed a form of prayer to his disciples after the manner most common among the teachers of the Jews, but even that he drew the very words and petitions from which he composed his most holy prayer from formulas most current among them. Let us see, then, by what arguments, or by what credible testimonies, they finally manage to prove this — for to me, frankly, the claim scarcely seems honest. The disciples, they say, asked Christ to teach them to pray, just as John had taught his own disciples. And John, they add, followed the custom current among the Jews, by which teachers handed down forms of prayer for their disciples to learn by heart. But that all this is most uncertain, and supported not merely by a slender but by no prop whatsoever, even a blind man could almost see. I grant that God prescribed certain solemn forms of blessing to the Aaronic priests, and that the Talmudic rabbis, in imitation of these, devised others. Whether their first inventors intended these to number eighteen after the number of bones in a man's back, as they idly babble, I do not know; if that was indeed what the original inventors had in mind, I do know that they trifled in their usual manner. In the end these grew, on account of trivial little reasons not worth recounting, to a hundred and eighteen. That every celebrated teacher taught his disciples forms of prayer is both incredible and unsupported by any testimony. That John followed the example of those teachers whom he plainly and constantly rebuked for ignorance, hypocrisy, and superstition, is asserted far too boldly. To bring John — and much more the Son of God himself — into line with the blind teachers of the Jews is, to my mind, a matter of religious scruple. That the name of God should be reverently invoked is the voice of nature itself, and an eminent part of natural worship. Whoever, then, takes it upon himself to instruct others in the knowledge and worship of God must needs teach them to pray, or to pour out prayers to him. This John performed among his disciples; by what aids and helps he made use of is uncertain; that he taught them to pray is most certain, and accordingly taught them for what things they ought chiefly to pray at that time. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who at the appointed time was, according to the promise of the new covenant, about to pour out the Holy Spirit abundantly (πλουσίως) upon his disciples, to relieve their infirmities in the offering of prayers, set forth beforehand, as it were, the most holy sum of all things that would ever be sought through his help. For as the Spirit of grace does nothing in us except according to the rule of the word, so, lest any, relying on the Spirit, should deceive themselves, they must attend to that same word in all the duties for which by his help and aid they are made fit. I am glad to append here Grotius's note on Luke 11:1, Δίδαξον ἡμᾶς προσεύχεσθαι ("Teach us to pray") — "Teach us the sum of the things to be prayed for. For at that time they were not bound to particular syllables. So too it is credible that John proposed a summary of prayers pertaining to repentance: just as this prayer of Christ's contains the heavenly kingdom. Hence it is called by Tertullian the breviary of the whole gospel, and by Cyprian the compendium of heavenly doctrine." So Grotius. Cornelius a Lapide is of the same opinion, on Matthew 6:9: "Here," he says, "Christ delivers to Christians a manner of praying, yet he does not command that we pray in these very words, but only teaches the things which are to be sought from God, and in what order, and with what brevity of words they are to be sought." And on Luke 11:2 he notes, from Jansenius, that Christ in this prayer set forth a synopsis of the whole of Christian doctrine, and that Matthew therefore, by prolepsis or anticipation, attached it to the Lord's discourse on the mount, which he delivered at the beginning of his preaching. For he is greatly mistaken who supposes that Christ taught his disciples the same form of prayer twice. But it is far too bold an assertion to say that our Lord adapted, with slight change, formulas current among the Jews, to his own purpose, as some like to put it. Vain are the ravings and dreams of the Talmudic rabbis, which certain men use to lend credit to this fiction. I know not what "Longus" of ours cites, in this connection, Joseph Albo's Ikkarim, as though "Ikkarim" were the name of the man who wrote the book, whose title is ספר עקרים. But great men have erred in matters of this kind. Baronius himself, at the year 34, number 134, by a similar error but with the opposite result, thought the name of a certain rabbinic book was "Alphes," which was in fact the name of the author himself — he being called, that is, רב אלפס. And to him he further adds "Jacob Turim," when in fact this Rabbi Jacob wrote the Arba Turim — that is, "The Four Rows" (ארבע טורים) — which is the same, says Casaubon, as if one were to cite, among authors, "Tully On Nature," because Marcus Tullius wrote books On the Nature of the Gods.

XVIII. Without doubt that most perfect pattern of all prayers, and that most exact compendium for the cultivation of our communion with God, made its way into the knowledge of those Judaizing Christians (χριστιανιζόντων) who, though at last falling away entirely from the profession of the faith, nevertheless retained the use of some things they had learned among Christians which did not run counter to the Mosaic rites. From them, and from nowhere else, arose that very thin rumor of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer which the Talmudic rabbis appear to have possessed.

XIX. Further: the most eminent Selden, in On the Sanhedrin of the Ancient Hebrews, book 1, tries at length to prove that Christ borrowed the rite of baptism from that which was then in use among the Jews. Others attempt the same. Among the Jews there were two kinds of proselytes: first, גרי תושב, "proselytes of the dwelling"; and second, גרי צדק, "proselytes of righteousness." Proselytes of righteousness shared in all the ecclesiastical privileges, and were fully reckoned among the number of God's people. Of these was Ebed-Melech (Jeremiah 39:16–18). Learned men teach that all these, upon their admission to that status, were not only circumcised but also baptized, and they confidently affirm that no one was ever made a proselyte of righteousness, however much he was circumcised, unless he had also been dipped in baptism. But the express testimonies of sacred Scripture teach that circumcision alone was needed for anyone to become a partaker of all the privileges of that church. For thus the law reads, Exodus 12:48: "And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof." Of rabbinic baptism, not a syllable (οὐδὲ γρύ). But they suppose this baptism of proselytes to have taken its origin from another legal institution. The law, they say, was the same for proselytes and for natives (Exodus 12:49; Numbers 15:15) — that is, they were bound equally, by the same law, to render the same duties. But, they say, all the Jews were baptized. Whence, I ask, does this appear? From Exodus 19:10. Before the giving of the law, the Lord commanded Moses, and said, "Go unto this people, and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments." Now the whole people having been solemnly baptized, as it were, in obedience to this divine command, there was no need for this rite to be repeated in any individual case; but proselytes, in order to be made conformable to the people, needed to undergo this rite for themselves. But that was a washing of garments. By "garments," they say, the whole body is meant. On what is this based? The teachers so instruct. But there is no reason why we should believe them against the express testimonies of Scripture. Let us hear Selden himself, On the Sanhedrin of the Ancient Hebrews, book 1, chapter 7, page 66: "It is most common," he says, "among the Talmudists, for the grounds of their own superadded customs — received by human tradition, as they say, as a 'hedge' or fortification around the sacred law — to be sought from some context or words of the sacred text, not as though from an actual institution, but by way of example or some analogy; no one at all familiar with them is ignorant of this. And this is often done in such a way that the very words are twisted, far more boldly than is right, to confirm such customs, into a sense quite other than the genuine sense of the sacred passage." That they have done this in twisting this particular passage, I am not willing merely to suspect, since the matter itself is plain. Moreover, this washing of garments served only that one occasion — namely, to show the reverence due to the peculiar divine presence at the giving of the law — and had nothing to do with the ordinary worship of God. That the necessity of baptizing bodies, as a fixed and solemn rite for all ages, should be grounded upon this single washing of garments, which never recurred again for the same cause forever, and of whose observance no memory whatever, no trace, exists anywhere in the whole Old Testament, and which is fortified by no divine command, institution, or direction — this seems altogether improbable.

XX. I grant, too, that lustral washings were customary among the pagan nations at the initiation of sacred rites. From this arose, among the followers of the papacy, the ceremony of sprinkling those who enter their temples with holy water. So Virgil, Aeneid 2.717, and again Aeneid 6.229 (the verses themselves are lost from our source and cannot safely be supplied). Now circumtulit ("he carried around") means the same as "he purged," for the purificatory offerings (februa) were carried around the person to be purified; Macrobius, Saturnalia, book 3, chapter 1, explains the distinction between sprinkling and washing. Lucian mentions this rite in his Menippus, or the Descent into Hades, 7: Περὶ μέσας νύκτας ἐπὶ τὸν Τίγρησα ποταμὸν ἀγαγὼν ἐκάθῃρε τέ με, καὶ ἀπέμαξε, καὶ περιήγνισε δᾳδὶ, καὶ σκίλλῃ, καὶ ἄλλοις πλείοσιν — "About midnight, having led me to the river Tigris, he purified me and wiped me clean, and lustrated me with a torch, and with squill, and with several other things besides." See also what Pliny records, book 36, chapter 4, from Timarchides, concerning Asterius, who touched the altar of Jupiter with unclean hands and for that reason was struck by lightning. A threefold purgation, too, was customarily performed — namely, by water, by sulfur, and by fire. Whence Ovid: "Terque senem flamma, ter aquâ, ter sulphure lustra" ("And thrice purify the old man with flame, thrice with water, thrice with sulfur").

XXI. Justin Martyr, in his Second Apology, affirms that all the lustral washings which the pagans employed in their sacred rites derived their origin from our Scriptures, through the wicked imitation (κακοζηλίαν) of demons — as also the custom of removing one's shoes upon entering shrines or temples, from that word of God to Moses when he drew near to the burning bush; which indeed does not seem at all far from the truth.

XXII. But all this is far removed from the sacred rite of baptism. A female proselyte could not be circumcised. In her admission, then, if anywhere, there would have been occasion for baptism; and yet where the ceremonies of that admission and grafting into the people of God are recounted, no mention whatever is made of baptism (Deuteronomy 21:10–13). But Paul expressly affirms that the whole "people were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea." I grant it; in the crossing of the sea, God solemnly dedicated the people to the Mosaic instruction. But that the Jews ever imitated, or were bound to reproduce, that miraculous sprinkling (ῥαντισμόν), is false. No institution of the rite of baptism is anywhere recorded in the Old Testament, no example of it exists; nor was it ever employed, throughout the whole duration of the Jewish church, in the admission of proselytes; in Philo, Josephus, and Jesus the son of Sirach, there is no mention of it whatever; nor in the gospel history. This rabbinic opinion, then, concerning the baptizing of proselytes owes its origin to the Tannaim, or the pre-Mishnaic doctors, after the destruction of the city. The most learned Schickard, in On the Law of Kings among the Hebrews, chapter 5, page 127, supposes that they wished by this to distinguish themselves from the Samaritans. "To mark their difference," he says, "from the Samaritans, they added a certain baptism" — which he proves from Rabbi Alfasi and from the Talmud itself. I judge rather that the Tannaic doctors borrowed this rite — unknown before that time — from the baptism of John, which was celebrated throughout the whole nation, and into which a great part of the people had been initiated. Justin, in his Dialogue with Trypho, does indeed mention a heresy among the Jews which he calls that of the "Baptists" (Βαπτιστῶν); but he denies that those who practiced that rite were properly called Jews. The author of the Questions and Answers to the Orthodox, moreover, proposes to himself this question — or repeats one proposed by others: Εἰ τὸ Ἰωάννου βάπτισμα μὴ κατὰ τὸν νόμον ἦν, ὥσπερ οὖν οὔτε ἦν, πῶς οὐκ ἦν παρὰ τὸν νόμον καὶ πῶς ὑπὸ τῶν ἐννόμων ἐδέχθη, πῶς δὲ οὐ παράνομοι οἱ ὑπὸ τὸν νόμον ὄντες, καὶ τὸ παρὰ τὸν νόμον δεξάμενοι βάπτισμα; ("If John's baptism was not according to the law — as indeed it was not — how was it not contrary to the law? And how was it received by those under the law? And how were those under the law not transgressors, in receiving a baptism that was contrary to the law?") To which he answers: Τὸ βάπτισμα τοῦ Ἰωάννου προοίμιον ἦν τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τῆς χάριτος, διὸ καὶ ὑπὲρ τὸν νόμον ἦν ("John's baptism was a prelude to the gospel of grace, and therefore it was above the law"). This opinion of certain learned men, then, concerning the transfer of a Jewish baptismal rite — which in fact did not exist at that time — into use among his own disciples by our Lord Jesus, lacks all probability.

XXIII. The very same must be said concerning the eucharist. This most holy institution of our Lord, together with all the circumstances pertaining to its solemn celebration, some suppose to have been drawn from Jewish rites of which no mention whatever occurs in sacred Scripture. But we have already seen that no fit testimony has yet proved that these rites were ever in use anywhere before the final destruction of the nation. Since others, however, have already treated this matter successfully enough, it does not please me, in the great haste that continually presses upon us, to go over the same ground here again.

XXIV. Ecclesiastical excommunication has its own peculiar rationale. We have already shown that some of the evangelical institutions have their foundation in the very nature of things. These belong to men as such before they belong to Christians. Now the use, among the nations, of things agreeable to the dictates of reason has always varied, according as men have given themselves more or less to the discipline of the light of nature. Excommunication is one of these. For right reason itself demands that one who offends against the duties, rights, and rules of the community of which he is a member be excluded from the privileges of that community. Among the good authors of antiquity, nothing is more frequently met with than the practice of this right. That the Jews observed this custom, they themselves teach. Whether they did so by virtue of some divine institution or by the common law, we do not now dispute. That such a custom prevailed among the pagans as well, Julius Caesar, among many other witnesses, attests, Gallic War, book 6, chapter 13: "If anyone," he says, "whether a private person or a public official, does not abide by their" (that is, the Druids') "decree, they forbid him the sacrifices. This penalty among them is the most severe. Those upon whom this ban has been laid are reckoned in the number of the impious and the wicked; all men withdraw from them, and shun their approach and conversation, lest they should receive some harm from the contagion; nor is justice administered to them though they seek it, nor is any honor shared with them." Hence some do not hesitate to affirm that this custom passed from the pagans to the Christians. I gravely doubt whether anything could be devised more to the reproach of the ancient Christians. Most are of the opinion that it passed from the Jews to the Christians. Whether ecclesiastical excommunication was divinely instituted in the Jewish church, or whether any examples of it exist from the time while the city and temple still stood, I am not willing to make a matter of contention. The Mishnaic rabbis and the Gemarists frequently mention it. But that our Lord received the use of this rite from the Jews or from the pagans is false. Reason itself commands that men, living harmoniously together, should order their life according to some rule common to all, and dwell together in communities. Whatever end they set before themselves, sacred or civil, the same law holds. It is likewise equitable that all who wish to use, enjoy, and delight in the rights and privileges of any society should keep the bond by which that society is a society, and submit themselves to its rules. Otherwise a community cannot be kept whole and sound, nor can it endure. For one unwilling to obey, exclusion from the privileges and intercourse of the society lies ready; this too right reason commands. All these things belong to our nature as men. To suppose that the human race learned these dictates of reason — which it had cultivated some thousands of years before the rabbinic name was ever heard of — from the rabbis themselves, is the part of madmen. Yet although these axioms (κύριαι δόξαι, "sovereign opinions") are founded in the very reason of things, since our Lord Jesus Christ willed that nothing at all should be religiously observed in his church except by his own authority — he being its sole head, king, and lawgiver — he fortified, by his own institution, the appropriation and application of them to the use of the evangelical assemblies; and accordingly, although these principles remain natural still — since what once agrees with rational nature cannot possibly fail always to agree with it — their application to those sacred matters which depend on Christ's own pure institution is purely evangelical. So, after the apostle had proved, from the law of nature itself, and from the equity observed among the nations, and indeed of the Mosaic institutions, that a reward is owed to the dispensers of the gospel for their labor, he immediately adds, "so also hath the Lord ordained" (1 Corinthians 9:14).

Chapter 16

The second foundation of Mosaic theology — the sinner's justification before God as gratuitous — the Judaic church's defection from it — the empty boast concerning Abraham as father — the abandonment of the acknowledgment of natural misery — the impious vow of dying Jews — the third foundation — concerning the coming and authority of the Messiah — the worst defection from it — a digression on the change and abolition of the Mosaic worship, Hebrews 7:12–15 — the whole Mosaic worship resting upon the Aaronic priesthood — its change foretold — followed by the vanishing away (ἀφανισμός) of that worship — the Messiah the great High Priest, Psalm 110:4 — what כֹּהֵן ("priest") means — the Mosaic laws liable to change — the final defection and destruction of the Judaic church.

I. We proceed to the second foundation of Mosaic theology. This consisted in the gracious justification of sinful man before God. Its chief parts we have set forth above. That the Judaic church utterly fell away from it, the gospel itself plainly shows. For whereas from the outset they ought always to have openly professed, out of an inward and deep sense of their natural misery and of their most abject condition in this world, that "a Syrian ready to perish was our father" (Deuteronomy 26:5) and much else to that effect, instead — puffed up with an excessive opinion of themselves — they thundered out on every occasion, with haughty mouth, that solemn boast, "Abraham is our father." By this empty vaunting they fortified themselves against every conviction of natural misery. Hence, at the very outset of his preparatory ministry, John the Baptist had to confront this very prejudice, Matthew 3:9. Μὴ δόξητε λέγειν ἐν ἑαυτοῖς· Πατέρα ἔχομεν τὸν Ἀβραάμ ("Do not presume to say within yourselves, We have Abraham as our father"), he says. But their stubborn pride stood in the way of amendment. For, inflated with a vain conceit of that privilege, they set themselves everywhere, boldly and obstinately, against the truth itself — that is, against the Lord Jesus calling them to repentance. There is no mention of "the perishing Syrian"; rather they never ceased boasting themselves to be "the seed of Abraham, the children of Abraham," and therefore holy, righteous, and accepted of God. By the same pernicious error many in every age are held fast, who, destitute of the power (δύναμις) and working (ἐνέργεια) of religion, strive to fortify themselves against the light of truth and the bite of conscience by an opinion of external privileges and the empty pomp of ceremonies.

II. Secondly, this foundation of Mosaic theology taught the gratuitous election of God, and the elect's own inability (ἀδυναμία) of themselves to render obedience to God as they ought. Yet against no portion of divine truth did the crowd of apostates set themselves with greater vehemence of spirit. There was scarcely anything that they would believe God to have bestowed upon them gratuitously. They boasted constantly that they were free, that they had never come under any yoke of servitude, but were by nature furnished with strength sufficient to render obedience to God. They cried out, therefore, that they were treated with the gravest injury, whenever they suspected themselves reckoned among the blind, the sick, and the guilty, who stand in need of a physician or of pardon. This error, moreover, has an inseparable companion. For those who suppose themselves naturally furnished with strength to render due obedience to God conclude that such obedience is accomplished by external observances and works. And those who think that the greatest or chief part of obedience and of divine worship consists in external works and rites have no doubt that they are equal and sufficient to perform it. By the bond of both errors together the apostates were held fast against the doctrine of this foundation.

III. Thirdly, they repudiated so obstinately the reconciliation, remission of sins, peace with God, and everlasting righteousness to be obtained through the Messiah, that they openly professed that no one can be justified except by the works of the law; and so they doggedly pursued a righteousness of the law which they were never able to attain. A spiritual redemption and deliverance from the world, from death, from hell, and from sin, they neither cared for nor expected. Concerning these things there is the deepest silence among the true and genuine Jewish writers. They assigned the whole expiation of sins partly to legal sacrifices, partly to their own merits and sufferings; as even now the dying cry out, תְּהִי מִיתָתִי כַּפָּרָה עַל כָּל עֲוֹנוֹתַי ("Let my death be an expiation for all my transgressions"). All this is so well known from the history of the gospel that there is no need to labor to prove it. Thus that church openly fell away from the second foundation of Mosaic theology, concerning the justification of sinful man before God.

IV. There remains the third; it set forth the coming and office of the Messiah. This theology taught that the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord of the church, the greatest of the prophets, was to be furnished by God the Father with such authority and dominion that it should be his right and lawful power to institute new forms of worship and new ceremonies, the old ones being abolished. All Mosaic theologians were bound, on pain of eternal extermination, to render him obedience in everything he commanded. But after they had, for so many centuries, longed for his coming, already grown heavy with defection, they showed themselves so hostile to that truth that — for no other reason more than that they suspected he would put an end to the ancient rites — they put the Messiah himself to death by the cruelest of deaths. From that time to this very day, it has become the primary foundation of apostate theology that the ceremonial law is absolutely to be everlasting, and liable to no change whatsoever. But the nearer these carnal ordinances drew to their appointed end, and the more the καιρὸς διορθώσεως ("time of reformation," cf. Hebrews 9:10) hastened on, the more madly and obstinately they defended their unchangeable immutability (ἀτρεψία). This most pernicious error the apostle, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, sets before the eyes of all by many arguments drawn from their own principles. Since, however, we are engaged with the primary head of present-day Judaism, it will not be foreign to our purpose to weigh one of those arguments here. I mean the one which the apostle pursues in chapter seven, verses 12–15, and elsewhere:

"For the priesthood being changed," he says, "there is made of necessity a change also of the law. For he of whom these things are spoken pertaineth to another tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Judah, of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood. And it is yet far more evident, for that after the similitude of Melchizedek there ariseth another priest" (Μετατιθεμένης τῆς ἱερωσύνης, ἐξ ἀνάγκης καὶ νόμου μετάθεσις γίνεται. Ἐφ᾽ ὃν γὰρ λέγεται ταῦτα, φυλῆς ἑτέρας μετέσχηκεν, ἀφ᾽ ἧς οὐδεὶς προσέσχηκε τῷ θυσιαστηρίῳ· πρόδηλον γὰρ ὅτι ἐξ Ἰούδα ἀνατέταλκεν ὁ Κύριος ἡμῶν, εἰς ἣν φυλὴν οὐδὲν περὶ ἱερωσύνης Μωσῆς ἐλάλησε. Καὶ περισσότερον ἔτι κατάδηλόν ἐστιν, εἰ κατὰ τὴν ὁμοιότητα Μελχισεδέκ ἀνίσταται ἱερεὺς ἕτερος — Hebrews 7:12–15).

Now the sum of this apostolic reasoning is this. The whole ceremonial law, all the administrations of the solemn worship and of the Mosaic institutions, rested upon the high priesthood. Upon this one hinge the whole law always turned. For this cause, in the midst of public calamities, destructions, and ruins, God preserved the family of Aaron, that is, the priestly family, to this extent — that there was never lacking from it one who might, according to the law's prescription, discharge the priesthood. For he had strictly forbidden that anyone who was not of the natural seed of Aaron should ever dare, forever, to undertake that office (Numbers 16:40). Moreover, he lent authority to this law by making dreadful examples of those who had dared to intrude upon priestly administrations — as in the case of the Levites (Numbers 18:7), and of King Uzziah (2 Chronicles 26:18–21). So close, therefore, was the association of the legal worship with the priesthood, that the same fate impended over both; so that, the priesthood being changed, it could not but be that the legal worship should undergo a change as well. Moreover, God appointed a particular place for the performance of his solemn worship. Outside of that place, none of the sacred rites common to the whole church, and expressive of its unity, could be performed, nor could any offerings or sacrifices be made. Mount Moriah, in the city of Jerusalem, was that place. But these things being thus instituted, God himself foretold that a time would come when he would raise up another priest, of another family and tribe, and therefore of another order. For he had signified beforehand that the Messiah, a king of the tribe of Judah, would also be a pontiff, or high priest. Now since God appointed a high priest neither of the seed nor of the order of Aaron, it was necessary that all those Mosaic institutions, whose administration rested solely upon that Aaronic priesthood, should at once dissolve and vanish away. All this, says the apostle, cannot but be very well known to the Hebrews everywhere. You all believe the Messiah to have sprung from the tribe of Judah — this, he says, is manifest. And you likewise confess that God never said anything of a priesthood — that is, one that should administer the Mosaic worship — as to be raised up or established in the tribe of Judah. It remains, therefore, only that I prove that the Messiah is to be the high priest. This is established beyond contradiction by the words of the Psalmist, Psalm 110:4: נִשְׁבַּע יְהוָה וְלֹא יִנָּחֵם אַתָּה כֹהֵן לְעוֹלָם עַל־דִּבְרָתִי מַלְכִּי־צֶדֶק — "The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek."

That this Psalm is prophetic, and looks to the Messiah, no Jew at that time doubted. The Targumists agree; nor does any of the ancient masters deny it. Even when our Lord Jesus Christ had, by a question drawn from this very Psalm concerning the person of the Messiah, exposed before all the people the shameful ignorance of the scribes and Pharisees, though covered with shame, they did not dare to deny that the Messiah was the one whom David there calls Lord. He, moreover, is said not merely to be a future priest, but — that the ineffable prerogative of that priesthood might be made known — God solemnly swears that he will unchangeably discharge the priesthood forever. But here today's apostates resort to a most wretched subterfuge. כֹּהֵן ("kohen"), they say, does not signify a priest only, but also a prince; and they are quite willing to grant that the Messiah will be a prince. This, indeed, is a discovery (εὕρημα) most worthy of the rabbis, being utterly frivolous and trifling. Melchizedek is called king of Salem, and כֹהֵן לְאֵל עֶלְיוֹן ("priest of God Most High") — is this the title of a prince, or of a priest of the Most High God? Why, I ask, would Scripture call him a prince, once it had already called him a king — seeing that כֹּהֵן never denotes a prince except one who is lesser and inferior to a king? Besides, it belonged to a priest, not to a prince, to bless others in God's name — which כֹּהֵן is here recorded to have done (Genesis 14:18). Nor was Melchizedek the head of some particular order as a prince, but as a priest. Nor, as we have said, does the word Cohenim, when transferred to civil rank, ever signify kings, or those endowed with supreme authority, but only those who hold a secondary or tertiary place — and such a subordinate prince the Jews are unwilling to admit their Messiah would be.

V. Furthermore: the Messiah was appointed heir not of the Melchizedekian but of the Davidic kingdom; and in David the type of his kingly office was preeminent, since David reigned in the church (Psalm 2), the other, a type among the nations. It was necessary, therefore, that the coming of the Messiah should be attended by the removal (μετάθεσις) and vanishing away (ἀφανισμός) of the Mosaic institutions. To what has already been said there also accrues an argument of no small weight. The city of Jerusalem was appointed by God's command as the seat of all solemn worship — this the apostates do not deny. But the last of the prophets foretold that, at the Messiah's coming, an offering (מִנְחָה) would be presented to God in every place throughout the whole earth (Malachi 1:11). And that nothing might be lacking to establish this truth — which brings the most immediate ruin upon Judaism — God foretells that in the days of the Messiah he would take to himself priests and Levites even from among the Gentiles themselves (Isaiah 66:21). But this can no more agree with Judaism than light with darkness. The more perceptive among the Jews, compelled at last by the force of the truth, give ground. The author of the Sepher Ikkarim not only expressly affirms that the law is changeable, but also answers the arguments by which Maimonides, in his book on the foundations of the law, attempts to prove it eternal. For having recited the reasonings of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, he adds, book 3, chapter 13: אֶלָּא שֶׁכַּאֲשֶׁר יְעֻיַּן זֶה הַדַּעַת נִמְצָא שֶׁאֵינֶנּוּ מְחֻיָּב שֶׁלֹּא תִּשְׁתַּנֶּה הַתּוֹרָה הָאֱלֹהִית — "If anyone," he says, "considers such reasonings more attentively, he will find that they do not prove the divine law to be unchangeable" — and he answers them one by one. And in chapter 20 he expressly teaches that the Messiah will be a prophet greater than Moses, and one who will have the right to change his institutions. Rabbi Moses Nachmanides teaches similar things on Deuteronomy, in the section Nitzavim. But these things only in passing (ὡς ἐν παρόδῳ).

VI. This, then, was that fatal apostasy of the Judaic church, openly falling away from all the principles and foundations of Mosaic theology. This defection was accompanied by an utter corruption of morals. Having rejected the efficacy of heavenly truth — which alone is able to set a limit and measure to men's wickedness — almost the whole people, cast headlong into every crime and ruined by their own iniquities, hastened their own final destruction. And having repudiated and wickedly taken away the Son of God — the soul and life of Mosaic theology, without whose saving and life-giving influence that body was useless, indeed a mere corpse, not unlike (perhaps the very same) that over which Michael contended with the devil (cf. Jude 9) — since it can no longer lead any theologian to God, it scarcely seems worthy any longer of the name of theology at all. For, as Anthony Hulsius rightly defines it in his preface to his book on the Messiah, Jewish theology is "a doctrine handed down by men in the Talmud, comprising a series of forensic and ecclesiastical constitutions once observed in the Jewish polity, and now to be observed again as restored in it through the Messiah, so that the Jews may live happily in the world" — a definition from which anyone may easily judge how far removed it is from the nature and end of all true theology.

VII. There was a twofold reason why this apostate world of theologians was not abolished by the fire to which it had long been destined until some years' delay had intervened after the rejection of the promised Messiah. For, first, the apostates themselves had to be rendered without excuse (ἀναπολόγητοι). It was necessary, therefore, as Paul everywhere testifies, that the gospel should be proclaimed to them, not only throughout all Judea, but through the whole dispersion (διασπορά) among the nations, before the nation should be destroyed by inescapable ruin. Then, too, there still remained hidden among the people that residue of election which was yet to be called out by grace, before the wrath should come upon them to the uttermost (εἰς τέλος). For these reasons, I say, that church was continued for some years in the tolerance and longsuffering of God, after the apostates had laid the last hand upon their fatal defection. Concerning this destruction, let the reader consult that most famous eyewitness historian (αὐτόπτης) — the preface to his book on the Jewish War, and book 6, chapters 9, 12, 26, book 7, chapters 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 24, 28. He relates not men but monsters; he records not a defeat or the destruction of a nation, but an unfathomable abyss of every misery that the human race has ever endured. And such was the end that overtook the apostate Judaic church, after God had borne with it in much longsuffering for five hundred and twenty-seven years from the Ezraic reformation.

Book Six

Concerning Evangelical Theology, Properly So Called

Chapter 1

The importance and difficulty of the work undertaken — the self-conceit (αὐθάδεια) of certain persons noted — the author of evangelical theology: the only-begotten Son of God — the time of his coming — what the "fullness of time" is — the height (ἀκμή) of idolatrous worship, and of philosophy, and also of human dominion — the expectation of a restoration of all things — the "fullness of time" as appointed by God — what the "last days" are; of the Judaic church.

I. We hasten toward the end of our work, though we have not yet attained our purpose. We undertook expressly, and by set design, to expound Christian theology first, and almost exclusively. It was not so much the doctrine of the gospel, as the disposition of mind by which we embrace it, that stood chiefly before our eyes from the very plan of this undertaking. We have therefore reserved for this place whatever pertains to theology's proper subject, insofar as it is equally relevant to the theology of sinners in general. Yet in this study of heavenly wisdom I seem to have attained no other summit than this: that when I discourse or speak of these matters, I feel myself miserably stammering. For we are occupied with things we perceive only in part (ἐκ μέρους), and whose entire knowledge no one can draw in, save him to whom it has been granted to enjoy God immediately (ἀμέσως) — 1 Corinthians 13:12. Nor need we be ashamed to confess our slenderness, or even our ignorance, since the apostle, in the eighth chapter of that same epistle, declares that whoever thinks he knows anything here (perfectly) knows nothing at all (1 Corinthians 8:2). There is indeed a certain self-conceit (αὐθάδεια) among some — young men especially — who profess to have given their names to theology, such that, though scarcely tolerably furnished with the knowledge of evangelical doctrine from three or four books, they nevertheless carry themselves with such arrogance as though they alone possessed wisdom, or deserved a name not unknown among the wisest of men. Indeed, it would be well enough if they were a Suffenus (the self-admiring fool of Catullus's poem) to themselves alone, and did not also — to their own great cost — look down on others, who are truly furnished with that wisdom which they so foolishly boast of having attained. Truly it was once said by Seneca: "I think many could have arrived at wisdom, had they not supposed they had already arrived." But "the young suppose and confidently assert that they know everything" (νέοι πάντα εἰδέναι οἴονται καὶ διϊσχυρίζονται), as Aristotle testifies; and there is no disposition of mind that renders anyone less fit for the study of theology. It was said of old, and must still be said, that "new orators arise, foolish striplings"; of such Jude speaks, verse 10: Ὅσα μὲν οὐκ οἴδασι βλασφημοῦσιν· ὅσα δὲ φυσικῶς, ὡς τὰ ἄλογα ζῶα, ἐπίστανται, ἐν τούτοις φθείρονται ("What things they know not, they blaspheme; and what things they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves"). If they have learned anything philosophically about the nature of things, they immediately swell with pride — the greatest corruption of the soul — and despise the mysteries of the gospel, of which they know nothing. God grant that students may at last understand that quite another matter is in hand here than in the schools of the philosophers; that another disposition of mind, another frame of intellect and heart, is required here than that with which men are wont to undertake the encyclopedia of human sciences. If I can contribute any counsel toward this — which may it please the grace of God to turn to the good advantage of the godly — I shall, in attaining the aim and purpose set for this whole work, count this too, among many other things, as owing to divine grace. But now let us return to our subject.

II. The Judaic church having been utterly overthrown, the purely Mosaic theology on which it rested so far lost its force that it could no longer lead anyone to God. God, therefore, was now about to set the final hand upon his revelation. The church, having been trained under various degrees of a spiritual economy (οἰκονομία), and now grown to maturity, was to be transferred into a state perfect and unchangeable of its kind. For the accomplishment of this most holy and most wise work, the only-begotten Son of God, appointed from eternity and promised from the very foundation of the world, was sent in the fullness of time. This the apostle expressly teaches us, Hebrews 1:1–2: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son" (Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ Θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις, ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν τούτων ἐλάλησεν ἡμῖν ἐν υἱῷ) — who is therefore called "the apostle and high priest of our profession" (ἀπόστολος καὶ ἀρχιερεὺς ὁμολογίας ἡμῶν, Hebrews 3:1), and also "the author and finisher of our faith" (ἀρχηγὸς καὶ τελειωτὴς τῆς πίστεως, Hebrews 12:2). What pertains to the person of Jesus Christ, the God-man (Θεάνθρωπος), the great intermediary of God, belongs not to this work, and we have treated it more fully elsewhere. The immediate author of evangelical theology, then, is Jesus Christ himself, the only-begotten Son of God. We granted, indeed, above, that all the theology of sinners can in some sense be called evangelical, since even in whatever manner it was administered, its primary author was still the Son of God himself: the holy men of God spoke as they were moved (φερόμενοι) by the Spirit of Christ (1 Peter 1:11; 2 Peter 1:21). It was he who at times showed himself present to the fathers under a human form, and he was the same angel who was with the church in the wilderness (Acts 7:38). But with respect to that particular administration, only that theology is called evangelical which the Son of God himself, in his own person, coming forth from the bosom of the Father, set forth. He, then, is the singular author of this theology; from which it follows that, as it is the most perfect, so it is God's final revelation. Tertullian rightly says: "We have no need of curiosity after Jesus Christ, nor of inquiry after the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing further to believe; for this we believe first of all — that there is nothing further which we ought to believe" (Prescription against Heretics).

III. We come now to consider the time of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and thus of the revelation of evangelical theology. I have no wish, however, to stir up chronological difficulties, nor to call the reckonings of years, days, and hours to account; for, to speak freely, I do not yet know what advantage anyone has so far gained from the most difficult and tangled disputes of chronologers. For my part I am pleased with that saying of Plutarch in his Life of Solon, where — wishing to show that he was unwilling to discredit the story of Solon's conversation with Croesus merely because some deny that Solon lived in the time of Croesus — he says: Οὐ μοὶ δοκῶ προήσεσθαι, χρονικοῖς τισι λεγομένοις κανόσιν, οὓς μυρίοι διορθοῦντες ἄχρι σήμερον, εἰς οὐδὲν αὐτοῖς ὁμολογούμενον δύνανται καταστῆσαι τὰς ἀντιλογίας — "I do not think I should give up this story on account of certain so-called chronological canons, which countless scholars, correcting them to this very day, have never been able to bring to any agreed settlement of their disputes." There are, however, things said concerning that time which pertain to theology. For Christ is said to have come "in the fullness of time" (Galatians 4:4); he is also said to have come "in the last days" (Hebrews 1:1). It must therefore be considered in what sense these two designations of time denote precisely the same time.

IV. The first passage reads thus: Ὅτε ἦλθε τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου, ἐξαπέστειλεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν υἱὸν αὐτοῦ ("When the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son," Galatians 4:4). Now "the fullness of time" is spoken of with a twofold reference: to those things which are measured by time — that is, the ages (αἰῶνες) of this world — and to the divine determination. In both respects we shall see that Christ came in the fullness of time.

V. First, the world itself, and everything within it that in any way pertained to the economy (οἰκονομία) of the divine patience, had attained its fullness (πλήρωμα). These may be reduced to four heads. The first was the worship of the gods. What idolatrous superstition (δεισιδαιμονία), or the impious worship of false gods, truly was, the world had by now fully experienced. Idolatry had reached the very summit of glory, splendor, efficacy, and universality (catholicism). How it had crept forward by degrees through an untold succession of ages and years we have set forth above. From base, foolish, and trivial beginnings it had grown to such glory that the world had never seen, nor would ever see again, anything more glorious, more sublime, or more excellent among things doomed to perish. What comfort, help, or reward was to be had from that superstition, to whose service the human race had willingly bound itself, the world had by now had ample opportunity to perceive — which it certainly would not have had, if Christ had been sent sooner, and God had called men to repentance at an earlier time. From that day on which, by the ineffable benefit of Christ's mission, he bound the world to himself, nothing further has ever accrued to the glory, adornment, and ceremonies — that is, to the fullness (πλήρωμα) — of idolatry. This part of the fullness of time Paul relates in Acts 14:15–16 and 17:30.

VI. Secondly, that endeavor, which we have described at greater length above, of restoring natural theology by means of philosophy, had reached the limits set for it by the nature of things and by human intellect itself. At that time human wisdom had attained its perfection, so far as a thing so utterly imperfect and uncertain can be called perfect. Philosophy never possessed anything more penetrating into the nature of the universe, nothing more sublime, nothing more useful, nor was it ever set forth more elegantly than at that very time. This honor the combined genius of the Greeks and the Latins may justly claim for itself. Now the apostle teaches us that this progress and height (ἀκμή) of philosophy had reference to the fullness of time, 1 Corinthians 1:21. Ἐπειδὴ γὰρ ἐν τῇ σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐκ ἔγνω ὁ κόσμος διὰ τῆς σοφίας τὸν Θεὸν, εὐδόκησεν ὁ Θεὸς διὰ τῆς μωρίας τοῦ κηρύγματος σῶσαι τοὺς πιστεύοντας — that is, "For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe": when it had become sufficiently evident, through God's most wise ordering and patience with the world, what that philosophical wisdom was capable of, whither it tended, and what was to be expected from it, it pleased God to announce the gospel, through his Son, unto the salvation of believers.

VII. Thirdly, the glory of secular power, or of human empire, had raised itself to its highest pinnacle. Many, from the age of Nimrod onward, had aspired to it in vain; the Romans had accomplished it. All earthly glory — whatever the inmost recesses and hidden places of perishing things can afford, whatever ambition, luxury, avarice, and curiosity could wring out of human nature and out of almost the whole of creation reduced to bondage and servitude, and finally the wisdom of men — was, as it were, gathered and heaped together into one city, and laid open to the eyes and consideration of all. What empire and dominion were, what force, valor, strength, and human power were, what riches were, what all the pride of the age was, what the luxury of life was, how high its buildings could rise, how deep its mine-shafts could descend — all this that epitome (ἐπιτομή) of the world displayed. From that time onward, by a continuous succession of events and fortunes, that glory has diminished, and something has daily been lost from the sum and splendor of things. By that fullness of time, men not utterly stupid, nor wholly enslaved to their vices, could easily perceive what was to be expected from all created things — seeing that the very lords of the world burned no less with avarice, envy, ambition, and lust than if they had labored under the utmost want of all things.

VIII. Fourthly, a wondrous and unusual expectation had taken hold of the minds of men, of the coming of a great king, of the beginning of a happy age and of everlasting peace, of the dawning and first beginnings of a restoration of all things. The Jews daily sought and at the same time awaited the appearing (ἐπιφάνεια) of the king Messiah; the Gentiles, the return of a golden age. That a rumor had spread abroad — some said from the East, others said from the very nature of things — that a great king would presently be brought forth, is the constant and unanimous testimony of the most celebrated historians. When, therefore, the human race had exerted itself to the utmost of its powers — in superstition and in wisdom, in dominion and in luxury, in vices and in virtues — that is, in the fullness of time, God graciously sent his Son, announcing peace to them that were near and to them that were far off.

IX. Secondly, there was also present the fullness of time appointed of old by God. Peter testifies that Christ was "foreknown before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20). According to this foreknowledge (πρόγνωσις), or eternal appointment, God had promised through the prophets, from the foundation of the world, that he would come (Luke 1:70). Hence he is called "he that should come" (ὁ ἐρχόμενος) — this is the sense of John's question in Matthew 11:3, "Art thou he that should come?" — and he was awaited from the time of Adam onward: "the desire of all nations" (חֶמְדַּת כָּל־הַגּוֹיִם, Haggai 2:7). At the time therefore appointed beforehand — that is, when the time destined for the fulfillment of the promises had arrived — the Son of God was made manifest in the flesh. The Jews themselves do not dare deny that the fullness of time had come, at which the Messiah was to be sent; but they obstinately deny that he was sent. Why so? Because, they say, God, angered at their sins, has thus far deferred his coming. We indeed confess that their crimes were very great and very grievous; but we utterly deny that that unbelief, which cast them out from the number of the people of God, could have made, or did make, the faithfulness of God itself void.

X. It is certain, then, that Christ came in the fullness of time. It remains, therefore, for us to see how he also came "in the end of days." For "the fullness of time" and "the end of days" scarcely seem to denote the same time, or the same days. Although so many ages have now elapsed since his coming, and it is quite uncertain how much longer this world is yet to endure in the patience of God, or what, as Tertullian puts it, "the delay of the age" may be, it is nevertheless most certain that Christ came "in the last days." This the apostle testifies, Hebrews 1:1–3: "in these last days" (ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν). Now some particular time may be called "the last days" either absolutely, or with some qualification. Why so great a succession of years — indeed of ages — as has elapsed from the incarnation of Christ to this present time, and still remains before the consummation of all things is accomplished, should be called "the last days" absolutely, no reason can be given. Some suppose these are called the last days with respect to the dispensation of the divine will, of which the final revelation has now indeed been made. On that view, the whole time of gospel preaching, from the incarnation or resurrection of Christ to the consummation of the age, must be called "the last days." But this opinion rests on no testimony, and, so far as I know, on no probable reasoning. That period is "a new world," "the world to come," not "a day," or "the last hour." The time of Christ's coming is therefore called "the last days" with respect to the Judaic church. That church was already near (ἐγγύς) to its vanishing away (ἀφανισμός). Now the end of the Judaic church fell within the fullness of time. Hence the apostle affirms, in the passage cited, that God addressed the Jewish people in the Son "in these last days" — that is, in those days which were then in the process of passing away, not yet finished, but soon to be finished. For throughout that whole Epistle to the Hebrews the apostle supposes that the Judaic church still existed at that time, and that its solemn worship was, in God's forbearance, so far pleasing to him that no one was made worse by observing it, nor less gracious or acceptable to God. The Gentiles, indeed, were declared free from the yoke of the Mosaic ceremonies (Acts 15); but we have shown above, from Acts 21:20–22, 26, that faithful Jews long afterward continued religiously to observe the whole solemn Mosaic worship. Some ancient manuscripts also read "at the last of these days" (ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτου τῶν ἡμερῶν τούτων) — that is, at the very extremity of those days — which quite plainly indicates that the condition of the Judaic church, now set as it were between the sacrifice and the knife, stood at its very last extremity.

XI. Furthermore, the passage in which Christ is said to have been sent "in the last days" has to do with his ministerial office, or apostolic function, which he discharged while he was on earth. This pertained solely "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 15:24). For which reason he is also called "a minister of the circumcision" (Romans 15:8). For the Son and heir was to be sent into that same vineyard from which the servants had been driven away (Matthew 21). And that he came to that church in its last days, when it was all but lost, everyone knows.

XII. Moreover, those words, "in the last days" (ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν), echo those prophecies of the Old Testament which expressly denote the last times of the Judaic church. When Jacob was about to set forth what would befall his descendants up to the coming of the Messiah, he began his prophecy thus, Genesis 49:1: "I will tell you what shall befall you" בְּאַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים ("in the last days") — words which the elders render ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτων τῶν ἡμερῶν. Similarly Numbers 24:14, where the Holy Spirit uses the same words concerning the same time, ἐπ᾽ ἐσχάτου τῶν ἡμερῶν ("in the last of the days"), just as many manuscripts also give the apostolic passage. Christ, then, the author of evangelical theology, came both "in the fullness of time" and "in the last days"; since the last days of the Judaic church fell within the fullness of the days.

Chapter 2

Christ, the author of evangelical theology, furnished most perfectly with the knowledge of the divine will — the foundation of the most perfect knowledge of Christ the Mediator, John 1:18 — its manner, fullness, and most absolute perfection — the revelation of the divine will conformable to that knowledge — evangelical theology — its principles.

I. "Holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling," says the apostle, "consider the apostle and high priest of our profession, Christ Jesus" (Ἀδελφοὶ ἅγιοι, κλήσεως ἐπουρανίου μέτοχοι, κατανοήσατε τὸν ἀπόστολον καὶ ἀρχιερέα τῆς ὁμολογίας ἡμῶν Χριστὸν Ἰησοῦν, Hebrews 3:1). This we have briefly treated in the preceding chapter. It remains for us to weigh accurately that very profession (ὁμολογία) of ours, that is, evangelical doctrine. That Christ, sent from the bosom of the Father, was furnished with the most perfect knowledge of the will of God — so that nothing whatsoever was left for those who should come after the King to draw anew from the fountain of truth (Ecclesiastes 2:12) — is a point on which almost all Christians agree. He himself, indeed, as the Word (λόγος), the eternal Word of God, has an infinite knowledge of all things and a most absolute understanding of the whole essence and will of God as innate to him — that is, communicated to him from eternity by the Father together with the divine subsistence (ὑπόστασις). But insofar as he came forth from the Father as the Head of the church, the Mediator, and the apostle of our profession, he knew only those things (in that nature, that is, in which he performed the whole mediatorial office) which were given and revealed to him by the Father. Hence he affirmed that he did not know certain things (Mark 13:32), and that he knew nothing except what the Father had revealed to him (John 5:30; 7:16–17). This same economy (οἰκονομία) continues even after his glorious exaltation to the right hand of the Father. Hence he testifies that he received from the Father that solemn Revelation which he delivered — not only by the inspiration of the Spirit, but with a living voice from heaven (Revelation 1:1). The Socinians invent the fable that he was caught up into heaven during the time of his fast in the wilderness, and there instructed in the counsel of God concerning the office committed to him. This is a monstrous fiction, drawn from the murky depths of the Muhammadan Koran, which we have exploded in our Vindiciae Evangelicae. The foundation of that knowledge of the divine will which was in Christ Jesus is set forth by the Baptist, John 1:18 (if indeed those words are the Baptist's, which Chrysostom denies, saying, Οὐ τοῦ προδρόμου ἐστὶ τὸ ῥῆμα, ἀλλὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ, "This saying is not the forerunner's, but God's"; but whosesoever they are, they stand thus): Θεόν οὐδεὶς ἑώρακε πώποτε ("No man hath seen God at any time") — not even Moses himself, by whom the law was given (verse 17) — ὁ μονογενὴς υἱὸς ὁ ὢν εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς, ἐκεῖνος ἐξηγήσατο ("the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him"). For since he is the only-begotten Son of God, and therefore of the same essence with the Father, he has an infinitely perfect knowledge and comprehension of the divine essence itself, and consequently of all the truth latent within it. He alone, therefore, is fit perfectly to expound God, since he alone has seen God. Moreover, since he was in the bosom of the Father, he was privy to all his counsels and secrets; and for the right discharge of the declaration of the divine will committed to him, he was endowed with the Holy Spirit "not by measure" (οὐκ ἐκ μέτρου, John 3:34) — for God measured out the Spirit to him in the fullest abundance, and with him a certain boundless sea of spiritual gifts, especially of wisdom and understanding, in the fear of the Lord (Isaiah 11:2–3) — so that in him were "all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hid" (πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως ἀπόκρυφοι, Colossians 2:3). Whatever lay hidden from eternity in the mind of God — whatever pertains to the illustration of God's glory, the erection of his kingdom, the institution of his worship, the gathering of the church, the calling, instructing, and consoling of the elect, and, in short, whatever pertains to the obedience owed to God by men — of all this he was furnished by God the Father with the most perfect knowledge, and stood forth as the go-between of God's will to men. In this opinion, then, all agree: that Christ, insofar as he is the apostle of our profession, had the most perfect knowledge of the entire counsel of God concerning his worship and our obedience — whereas all other expositors of the divine will, even the most celebrated lawgiver himself, were made partakers only of some particular portion of it, serving that dispensation to which they were bound. Nothing lay so deep in the eternal abysses of the mind that he did not perfectly search it out; nothing was so minute, of whatever was ever pleasing or acceptable to God in his worship, that it escaped or lay hidden from that most wise breast of his.

II. Furthermore, Holy Scripture testifies, and Christians agree, that this most holy author of our theology communicated that whole counsel of God, of which he had gained the most perfect knowledge, to his disciples — who were to propagate his doctrine to all nations — partly by his own living voice, and partly through the Spirit, whom he received as a gift from the Father after his ascension. For since he was faithful in all the house of God, appointed by the Father (Hebrews 3:2), and that not only as a faithful servant in the work of mediation (Isaiah 42:1), but also as the only-begotten Son (Hebrews 3:6), who was heir of all things, whose very house it was, and whom he loved uniquely (Ephesians 5:25–26) with a love to which nothing was ever equal or comparable (Romans 5:6–8) — it was plainly impossible that he should not fully set forth, for its benefit and salvation, what he had received from the Father to that very end. This revelation of the divine will, given by the Father to Christ, and communicated by him through the Holy Spirit to his apostles and others for the use of the whole church, is that very evangelical theology which, taken in the abstract, denotes the divine doctrine we are about to set forth.

III. These things being premised, we shall briefly review the principles of this theology — those that are properly its own (οἰκεῖα), or its governing causes (αἴτια κύρια).

1. The first of these is: "No one, relying on his own powers or his own native wit, however many external aids he may call to his assistance, can, with respect to the saving ends to which it directs the human mind, perceive or rightly understand this theology." And in this respect above all its nature is set apart from every other science. For as the apostle expressly declares, "the natural man is not able to receive the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). So the Lord Jesus himself teaches, "No man can come to me, except the Father draw him" (John 6:44). This theology everywhere shows likewise that men, apart from the knowledge of Christ, are dead in sins, blind, foolish, and stupid, so that they cannot grasp or savingly understand this heavenly doctrine — a matter we have treated more fully elsewhere.

2. Secondly, "this theology teaches that whoever wishes savingly or profitably to know the doctrine it sets forth — that is, unto the end for which its most holy author appointed it — must be born again, that is, spiritually regenerated." And here it differs immeasurably from all human wisdom. For let men be as thoroughly cultivated as possible in every branch of learning, let them strain every nerve and faculty of the mind to the highest capacity of the human intellect, let them leave nothing untried — unless they have been born again, it is impossible that they should be savingly imbued with this doctrine. "Except a man be born again," says our Lord, "he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). Now this theology sets forth the kingdom of God. Of this principle, however, we shall treat more fully hereafter.

3. Then, thirdly, "no one is born again except by the power of the Holy Spirit, by whose efficacious operation all who are born of God are brought over from spiritual death to life" (John 3:5–6; 1:13; Titus 3:5).

4. And accordingly, fourthly, "it is the Holy Spirit alone who can bring anyone into a saving perception of this theology, or bestow upon anyone that understanding by which evangelical doctrine may be savingly understood" (John 16:13; 1 John 2:20; 1 Corinthians 2:10–16; 2 Corinthians 4:6); and therefore "all who devote themselves to this theology, distrusting their own powers, ought to seek his help and assistance by constant prayer" (Luke 11:13; James 1:5; Ephesians 1:17–18).

5. Fifthly, "the worship of God instituted by virtue of this theology is spiritual, and its glory in no way falls under the eyes of men, nor is it exposed to any carnal understanding" (2 Corinthians 3:6–10; John 4:21–24).

6. Finally, "all who worship God in Christ, according to the rule of this theology, are by its power separated from the world, and are therefore, for that very reason — and because they have received the Holy Spirit, of whom the world is not capable — always hated by it, and always to be hated by it" (2 Corinthians 6:14–18; John 15:18–19; 14:16–17; Galatians 1:4, etc.). We shall see hereafter how this theology itself presses these governing tenets (κύριαι δόξαι) at greater length.

Chapter 3

What evangelical theology is — the various degrees and modes of its knowledge — the first mode — the relation of the merely natural intellect to supernatural doctrine — this is not theology properly so called — in what sense, and how far, spiritual truths may be perceived and understood without the special help of the Holy Spirit — propositions of heavenly truth, arranged into methods, produce a Christian philosophy — the use of the knowledge of languages and sciences in learning divine truth — of what sort is the knowledge of divine things acquired without the special help of the Holy Spirit — it is not evangelical theology — the proof of those who are imbued with it only.

I. We have shown that evangelical theology is the doctrine revealed in the gospel through Christ. The knowledge of this doctrine is theology, so far as it occupies the subject. This it has in common with other sciences: that, according to the difference of the subjects in which it resides, and the variety of the means by which it is communicated, it admits of various degrees. But beyond this it also has, by virtue of the principles set forth in the preceding chapter, various modes of perceiving the doctrine set before it — which is peculiar to it. The first of these consists in that relation which the merely natural intellect, that is, of man in the state of nature, can have to spiritual and supernatural doctrine; the other, in that relation obtained by one excited and elevated by the special help and power of the Holy Spirit, that is, by a regenerate man. Each of these, moreover, admits of various degrees. We shall first briefly set forth that mode of perceiving or understanding evangelical doctrine — the rule for obtaining all communion with God — which the human mind can attain without the special help or grace of the Holy Spirit, and which we deny constitutes theology properly so called.

II. The gospel is doctrine concerning God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and his worship, and the obedience owed to him by us. This doctrine, by its very nature, stirs men's consciences to render that obedience (Titus 1:1; 2:11–12); and besides this it rouses souls to the expectation of the enjoyment of God. Now the true meaning of all these things is contained in propositions whose sense is accessible — indeed, obvious — to human reason. Nor does this heavenly doctrine yield to any of the human sciences in clarity of its propositions; indeed, in this respect it stands out far above all other sciences. The doctrine is written "plainly, that he may run that readeth it" (Habakkuk 2:2). God has given his word, "precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little" (Isaiah 28:10; Hebrews 5:13–14). These propositions, therefore, which contain matters of the greatest moment, or the chief heads of this theology, are — partly from the excellence of the very words which it pleased the Holy Spirit to use, and their singular aptness for setting forth the matters in hand, and partly from the most frequent repetition of those very matters — so clear, and so set before the eyes of all, that scarcely anyone's genuine sense of them can be hidden, unless he is hindered by the greatest prejudices. We grant, therefore, that every man endowed with reason and understanding, and in possession of the use of them, can, according to the measure of his own ability, the degree of his diligence, and the efficacy of the external means he employs in learning the truth, without the saving help of the Holy Spirit, discover the true sense of those propositions, and perceive and retain their meaning. Most foolishly, therefore, do the sophists chatter, who clamor that our teaching concerning the spiritual nature of the things revealed in the gospel, and the native blindness of the human mind — whereby no one can spiritually perceive them except relying on the saving power of the Holy Spirit — contradicts this other teaching concerning the perspicuity and clarity of the propositions in which the true and saving doctrine is contained in the sacred Scriptures.

III. Furthermore, we grant that the chief heads of this theology, or of evangelical doctrine — those, namely, which pertain most closely to the worship of God and to promoting our obedience — can be arranged and reduced to order, sequence, and method, according to the rules of philosophical arts and sciences. For since among the very things delivered in the gospel there is a real and mutual dependence, there is nothing to prevent their relation to one another from being set forth in a certain order, and, as it were, in a technical (τεχνικῶς) manner. Creeds, confessions of faith, catechisms, commonplaces, and other methodical arrangements of that kind of evangelical truths, serve this purpose. But doctrine arranged and compiled in this way contains nothing at all that exceeds the grasp or understanding of the merely rational man. I do not speak of the things themselves, but of the propositions which are signs of those things. Now the merely natural knowledge or comprehension of evangelical doctrine, delivered and set forth in this manner, is a kind of Christian philosophy — one which surpasses all Greek, that is, merely human wisdom, by many parasangs. For since all knowledge is a certain intellectual perfection, that knowledge which is most certain, and is occupied with the greatest and highest object, stands above all others. And of this sort is this Christian philosophy, when compared with the whole wisdom or science of the heathen. For it proposes objects infinitely removed from all the objects of natural philosophy, and rests upon a rule distinguishing the true from the false that is utterly infallible — whereas the other kind of philosophy is tossed about by the wretched uncertainty of common conceptions.

IV. This whole matter can be set forth briefly, under a single view. All divine truth is revealed in the Scriptures through our Lord Jesus Christ. That doctrine, considered in the abstract, is evangelical theology. It is contained in propositions whose sense is laid open to human reason. These propositions, together with the conclusions legitimately drawn from them — or their sense, mixed with other words and philosophical terms — can be, and commonly are, compiled into a disciplinary system. The languages in which all this truth was delivered by the Holy Spirit are Hebrew and Greek. The knowledge of these languages, then, is useful to all, and, under God's providence, necessary to some. For the proper understanding of those matters, too, which the sacred Scriptures have in common with other books, it is useful that one approaching their study should be furnished with those sciences which serve the exposition of rational meanings by fitting words. These, however, are few, and of no great weight, nor do they contribute much to true spiritual wisdom. All the modes of true reasoning belong to logic — including the detection of sophistry. Now the Holy Spirit employs the highest reasoning in the sacred Scripture. Where it cannot be reduced to the rules of dialectic, this happens either through a defect of the art itself, as is commonly taught, or because human ingenuity fails in tracing out the ways and means of true reasoning. Scripture also speaks according to the customary forms of expression in those languages, which learned men have compiled into the art of grammar. The same holds for rhetoric. These things being thus laid out, we say that every man possessed of reason, without any special or saving help or assistance of the Holy Spirit — relying on natural sharpness of wit and such gifts of mind as God has in times past granted even to the heathen, and making use of the ordinary means (among which the knowledge of languages and the common arts stands out) — can acquire for himself a theological knowledge, that is, an intellectual habit by which he perceives the sense of the propositions in which theological doctrine is set forth, discourses subtly upon it, expounds it copiously, explains, confirms, and defends what are called the articles of faith, and can be affected toward divine truth in exactly the same manner as one learned in mathematics is affected toward the mathematical sciences.

V. But we deny that this knowledge is Christian theology properly so called; and those who are furnished with it alone, however high they may climb in subtlety and acuteness, we reckon to be Christian philosophers, not evangelical theologians. That we do not assert this rashly we shall show more fully hereafter, in our description of true theology. Let it suffice here, as it were in passing, to point out some heads of the arguments by which we prove that the knowledge we have described is not theology, and the arguments by which those who are furnished with it alone, but destitute of the sanctifying Spirit, show themselves not to be theologians.

VI. True theology is that knowledge of the divine mind and will which God himself requires. See Psalm 119:27; Jeremiah 22:15–16; John 17:3; 1 John 2:3–4; 4:7. Now that knowledge of himself and of his will which God requires is pleasing to God (1 Chronicles 28:9; Hosea 6:6); and whoever is furnished with it is likewise gracious and acceptable to him (Jeremiah 24:7). But such is not the knowledge we have described, when it stands alone. For it is neither pleasing to God in itself, nor does it render anyone acceptable to God. "They that are in the flesh cannot please God" (Romans 8:8; cf. 1 Corinthians 13:2). Moreover, that knowledge of himself which God requires, he himself promises (Jeremiah 31:33–34; John 6:45). But that knowledge of heavenly truth we have described is nowhere promised in the covenant of grace, nor is it communicated to men by its power. For true knowledge of God proceeds from the saving operation of the Holy Spirit (1 John 2:20, 27; Ephesians 1:17–18). Secondly, whoever is imbued with true theology "is light in the Lord" (Ephesians 5:8), being called "out of darkness into his marvelous light" (1 Peter 2:9; Ephesians 4:21–24). But notwithstanding that other knowledge, the one who possesses it only is blind (2 Peter 1:9), and "darkened in understanding" (ἐσκοτισμένος τῇ διανοίᾳ, Ephesians 4:18); and to him true divine wisdom is foolishness (1 Corinthians 2:14–15). Furthermore, that knowledge attains none of the ends of true evangelical theology. It renders no one conformed to God in Christ, no one fit and able to obey God; it procures for no one communion with God the Father or the Son; it will never bring anyone to the enjoyment of God. As for that knowledge which by no means dispels the vicious natural darkness of the understanding, which renders no one light in the Lord, or acceptable to God, or conformed to Christ, which directs or leads no one into communion and friendship with God, which neither is eternal life, nor has eternal life bound to it by an inseparable connection — I think no one who professes himself a Christian will dare affirm that this is that knowledge of God which he himself requires in the gospel.

VII. And is it not so, that very many who are furnished with this knowledge alone betray by their own evidence that they are not evangelical theologians? For to say nothing of internal and spiritual evangelical obedience, or the holiness of the truth (ὁσιότης τῆς ἀληθείας) — with which they have nothing whatsoever in common — it is exceedingly rare that they even diligently attend to the outward works of virtue and piety themselves. Indeed, where legal conviction is added to that knowledge — with which they are so often puffed up — impressed upon the heart by the power and efficacy of the Spirit, being reduced to a servile state of mind and struck with the dread of divine terror, they attempt to perform many of the duties of religion with some show of feeling. But that conviction has nothing to do with that knowledge, nor does it flow from it; since many are held fast by its bond and power who are only moderately furnished with the knowledge of divine things, while many who are most highly cultivated in that knowledge live lives entirely free from its efficacy. And once we set aside those considerations which arise from that knowledge but do not necessarily follow from it, no one can doubt that it contributes not the least bit toward holiness of life — the manners and conversation of very many who are furnished with it being utterly unworthy of the Christian name. Moreover, since they are natural men (ψυχικοί) and do not have the Spirit, that very Spirit himself, and his truly evangelical gifts, are objects of their contempt and mockery; indeed they wage perpetual war against the most holy Spirit of Christ in all those things which, according to the promise of the new covenant, he has graciously bestowed. For since it forms some part of that philosophy with which they are furnished, that all evangelical blessings are to be credited to the Holy Spirit alone, they are often too ashamed to despise him openly, directly, and in plain words; but it is their common practice to assail with impudent jests all his saving operations, and those heavenly privileges of which believers are made partakers through him. Indeed, they never seem more pleased with themselves — never more a Suffenus to their own eyes, or a darling among certain profane mockers — than when they think themselves cleverly and wittily baiting the Spirit of God who dwells in the godly. Furthermore, since they have received none of the gifts of the kingdom of Christ, whatever place they may occupy in the churches, they contribute either nothing at all, or certainly very little, to the building up of the body in love. For although, in those matters which Christian theology — that is, evangelical doctrine mixed with philosophy — has in common with other sciences, they may prove the keenest and most fiery disputants, subtle investigators, and are often the greatest devourers of books, yet when they come to instruct the people in the mysteries of the gospel, they grow altogether cold, and beyond some ornamented little speeches, thrust upon the Christian people in place of evangelical instruction and exhortation, there is nothing to them that shows wisdom or accomplishes anything — discharging their ministerial office in appearance only. Excellent are the words of Jerome to Paulinus, chapter 5: "I say nothing," he says, "of men like myself, who, if by chance they come to the sacred Scriptures after secular letters, and charm the ears of the people with polished speech, think that whatever they say is the law of God, and do not deign to know what the prophets or the apostles meant, but fit incongruous testimonies to their own sense — these are childish things, like the games of street performers, to teach what you do not know; nay, to speak with some indignation, not even to know that you do not know it."

Chapter 4

The proper subject of evangelical theology — The division of all men into two kinds: the regenerate and the unregenerate — Only the regenerate are Christian theologians — In what sense philosophers exclude the young from the hearing of moral philosophy — It is proved that only the regenerate are properly called evangelical theologians — The authority of the apostle, 1 Corinthians 2:14 — Of Christ himself, John 3:3, 8:47, 1:13, 5:37 — The spiritual ἀδυναμία (incapacity) of the unregenerate — On spiritual blindness and death — The Holy Spirit alone is the author of evangelical theology, and he alone teaches it — All the unregenerate, being destitute of him, cannot learn it — The first end of theology: conformity to God — No unregenerate person attains this end — Communion with God, the second end of true theology; the enjoyment of God, the third — The theology of the unregenerate attains none of these.

I. Here we treat of evangelical theology in the concrete — that is, as it occupies the subject, or the minds, of men. We shall therefore say first of all who, and of what sort, are those who are instructed in it.

II. All men who live their life here in the presence of God — the judge, ruler, and rewarder of all — are, insofar as this very fact (that they live in his presence) bears upon their present duty and final end, either regenerate or unregenerate. Sacred Scripture repeatedly makes mention of the state of spiritual regeneration. Of every single man, accordingly, it can be affirmed or denied that he is regenerate. Those who neither absolutely belong nor absolutely fail to belong to that state are simply nonexistent — no such persons are to be found. Some may seem, from one point of view or another, to incline this way or that; but, speaking absolutely, as they say, all who know and embrace the gospel confess that every man either is regenerate or is not regenerate. On this rests every other division of the human race found among the sacred writers — into the pious and the impious, the wise and the foolish, the faithful and the unfaithful, the holy and the impure, the just and the unjust. For although all the regenerate are liable to sins that do not exceed the compass of the grace of the new covenant, and although, with respect to this or that particular act, some of them at times sin most grievously, yet as regards the spiritual state in which they walk before God and live to him, they are pious, wise, faithful, holy, and just, and are so called by the Holy Spirit; whereas the impious — the foolish, unfaithful, impure, unjust — though they may discharge a number of duties both divine and human, are to a man unregenerate; for "they that are in the flesh cannot please God." And this designation follows upon their state, not upon this or that particular deed. We assert, however, that the regenerate alone are capable of, and partakers in, this evangelical theology; all others who make a show of applying themselves to it are relegated to the class of philosophico-theological pretenders. What we have said before bears out this truth, and the progress of the discourse will set the whole matter before the eyes of all; let it suffice here to confirm the thesis itself briefly.

III. Indeed, if Aristotle was permitted to remove and cast out the young, so far as they were subject to and enslaved by depraved passions, from the bounds of his moral philosophy — to the point of judging them unfit even to be his hearers — how much more will it be permitted to a Christian to pronounce those whom he knows to be not merely liable to vices and sins but dead in them, strangers to true evangelical theology? For I have known a great many young men — drunkards, madmen, intemperate, enfeebled and wasted by lust — who nevertheless had Aristotle's moral doctrine at their fingertips, and were accustomed daily to dispute subtly even over its more abstruse points. Not Aristotle alone, but the whole chorus of the ancient sages with one consent, would pronounce that such rascals, steeped in vice, possess not a whit more of philosophy than of goodness — that is, not so much as a crumb of either. Let us Christians at least claim the same right, and not suffer those whom we believe to be, before God, no better than such men, to be counted among Christian theologians and genuine disciples of the Lord Jesus merely on account of some acquired knowledge of a few evangelical doctrines. Indeed, some of the ancients go so far in refusing to regard such men as theologians that they pronounce them wholly unworthy even of the Christian name. So Justin, in his Apology to the Emperor: Οἱ δ᾽ ἂν μὴ εὑρίσκωνται βιοῦντες ὡς ἐδίδαξε (scilicet, Christus) γνωριζέσθωσαν μὴ ὄντες Χριστιανοί, κἂν λέγωσιν διὰ γλώττης τὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ διδάγματα· οὐ γὰρ τοὺς μόνον λέγοντας, ἀλλὰ τοὺς τὰ ἔργα πράττοντας, σωθήσεσθαι ἔφη· κολάζεσθαι δὲ τοὺς οὐκ ἀκολούθως τοῖς διδάγμασιν αὐτοῦ βιοῦντας, λεγομένους δὲ μόνον Χριστιανοὺς, καὶ ὑφ᾽ ὑμῶν ἀξιοῦμεν ("But whoever are not found living as he" — that is, Christ — "taught, let them be known not to be Christians, even though they profess the teachings of Christ with the tongue; for he said that not those who merely profess, but those who do the works, together with their profession, shall be saved. But as for those who live a life not conformable to his precepts, however much they may be called Christians, we ask that they be punished by you as well").

IV. Here the case does not stand as it does in other controversies, where the truth is drawn only with difficulty out of two or three passages; almost the entire gospel stands as witness in this cause, and the contrary opinion owes its origin to nothing but the detestable confusion which ignorance of this truth has brought into the church. I should be tedious, and wear out the reader, were I to heap up here all — or even most — of the weighty testimonies extant in sacred Scripture that support this truth. It will be enough to point out the sources of the argument. Thus the apostle says expressly, 1 Corinthians 2:14, Ψυχικὸς ἄνθρωπος οὐ δέχεται τὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος τοῦ Θεοῦ ("The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God"). The ψυχικὸς ἄνθρωπος ("natural man") is he who is not regenerate; τὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ("the things of the Spirit"), which he οὐ δέχεται ("does not receive"), are all those things that pertain to evangelical wisdom, and especially the doctrine of the cross — that is, the very theology of which we treat. The apostle explains the sense of οὐ δέχεται in the words immediately following: Οὐ δύναται γνῶναι — he says he is not able to know them; and no one has knowledge of what he cannot know. He then subjoins the reason for this incapacity: Μωρία αὐτῷ ἐστι ("they are foolishness to him"), and πνευματικῶς ἀνακρίνεται ("they are spiritually discerned") — that is, he judges nothing spiritually. He does not perceive the thing itself, since to him it is foolishness, nor does he attain the manner by which alone such things can rightly be perceived. Now it seems to me that one who neither understands nor can understand spiritual things, to whom they are foolishness, and of which he is not capable, is not an evangelical theologian. If there are any who think they judge otherwise, our page will not quarrel with them; for in truth they think otherwise than they suppose themselves to think, or else they do not believe the gospel.

V. In bearing this testimony, our common Master and Lord, Jesus Christ himself, went before his own disciple and apostle. John 3:3: ̓Εὰν μή τις γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν, οὐ δύναται ἰδεῖν τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ Θεοῦ ("Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God"). No one will deny that "to see" here is the same as "to know" or "to understand" — this is a very frequent sense of such words in sacred Scripture. The Lord Jesus shows on several occasions that by "the kingdom of God" he means the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, that is, the doctrine of the gospel — as in Matthew 13:11, Mark 4:11, Luke 8:10. By this arbiter, then, he who is not regenerate can in no way understand evangelical doctrine. Again, rebuking the unbelieving Pharisees, John 8:47: ̔Ο ὢν ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ τὰ ῥήματα τοῦ Θεοῦ ἀκούει· διὰ τοῦτο ὑμεῖς οὐκ ἀκούετε, ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐκ ἐστέ ("He that is of God heareth God's words; ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God"). To be "of God" is to be "born of God" (John 1:13). Whoever is not of God in this way "cannot hear the words of God" — he is no fit hearer of them, since he neither understands their spiritual wisdom nor is obedient to what they say. In the same way Christ affirms of these same Pharisees — who were puffed up with the opinion of their own consummate skill in hearing and expounding the word of God — that they had "neither heard the voice of God" nor ever "seen his shape" (John 5:37); for "hearing, they did not hear," nor "seeing, did they see," since they rightly understood nothing of what they had heard and seen. But those who suppose such men to be "scribes instructed unto the kingdom of heaven," "taught of God," or genuine disciples of Christ (such as all evangelical theologians are) will, I hope, bear with those of us who think otherwise, agreeing with Christ. There is no need to heap up further testimonies after these express words of our Lord.

VI. Moreover, the things said, on the one hand, of all the unregenerate, and, on the other, of the communication of this theology, are such as keep them utterly excluded from any share in it; indeed they cry aloud, "Far off, far off, whoever is unholy!" They are "blind" (2 Peter 1:9; Isaiah 42:7; Luke 4:18), and "darkness" (John 1:5; 1 Peter 2:9; Acts 26:18; Ephesians 5:8); "their minds are darkened" (Ephesians 4:18); they "walk in darkness" (1 John 1:6) and "love darkness" (John 3:19); they are "dead" (Ephesians 2:5), enemies of God (Romans 8:7), "who are not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." This evangelical doctrine, on the other hand, is "light" (Matthew 4:16; 1 Peter 2:9; Hosea 6:5; John 11:9; Psalm 43:3), and it gives light to all who receive it (Psalm 19:8-9; John 1:5; Psalm 36:9; 2 Peter 1:19; John 12:35-36). It is also "life" (John 6:33; Philippians 2:16), and it gives life to those who understand it (John 17:3, 25). This doctrine is communicated by "the opening of the eyes" (Isaiah 42:7; Acts 26:18), "the renewing of the mind" (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 4:23), "translation from darkness into light" (1 Peter 2:9; Ephesians 5:8), "raising from the dead" (Ephesians 5:14), and a most powerful "shining forth of spiritual light," by which God removes darkness with no less an exercise of his power than that with which he once acted in the very creation of all things, when he commanded light to shine out of darkness (2 Corinthians 4:6). To prove that the blind see, that darkness shines, that the dead live, calls for no common sophistry. And to declare that God has opened their eyes, has translated them into his marvelous light, has raised them from the dead, has shone into their minds to give them the knowledge of his glory — concerning which he himself expressly testifies that he has not dealt so with every man — is a task fit only for angelic doctors and seraphic sophists. But perhaps they will say that all this is spoken metaphorically; that in reality and properly speaking the unregenerate are not blind or dead, nor is the doctrine light, except metaphorically. Yet ever since foolish little men imagined that they could speak more properly of divine things than God himself does, scarcely anything sound or whole has been left in the Christian religion; rather, the pure, heavenly, spiritual, life-giving doctrine of the gospel, once turned into a secular and merely academic science, has all but overthrown every truth, piety, and faith. And in this very opinion were once the most learned Pharisees, who confessed that a poor wretch blind in his natural eyes was indeed blind, but who would not admit that they themselves were blind — though in reality they were blinder than any mole. Granted that some of these words are transferred from natural things to spiritual uses; yet if the relation between spiritual blindness and light, spiritual death and life, were not the same as that which holds between natural blindness and light, natural death and life, then the Holy Spirit, in using such words, would not be teaching us but deceiving and beguiling us — and yet he can no more deceive us than he can be deceived by us. But there is no room left here for disputes among those with whom the gospel has obtained belief — and I fear these are all too few: Τίς γὰρ μετοχὴ δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ ἀνομίᾳ; τίς δὲ κοινωνία φωτὶ πρὸς σκότος; τίς δὲ συμφώνησις Χριστῷ πρὸς Βελίαρ; ἢ τίς μερὶς πιστῷ μετὰ ἀπίστου; ("For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? and what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?" 2 Corinthians 6:14-16). Moreover, evangelical theology is taught by the Holy Spirit, and by him alone: Τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον, ἐκεῖνος ὑμᾶς διδάξει πάντα ("The Holy Spirit, he shall teach you all things," John 14:26). Hence all the children of the church are θεοδίδακτοι ("taught of God," Isaiah 54:13; John 6:45). It is the anointing that teaches all things: Ὑμεῖς χρίσμα ἔχετε ἀπὸ τοῦ ἁγίου, καὶ οἴδατε πάντα ("Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things," 1 John 2:20); Τὸ χρίσμα διδάσκει ὑμᾶς περὶ πάντων ("the anointing teacheth you of all things," 1 John 2:27) — nor can any man disturb it in this office. The apostle also teaches this most plainly, 1 Corinthians 2:6-13; we briefly expounded the apostle's words there when we treated of the general nature of theology at the beginning of this work, and the reader may consult that place. He teaches that evangelical doctrine is "the wisdom of God in a mystery," differing in its whole kind from every human science or wisdom, and he denies that it can be perceived without the special help of the Holy Spirit, while affirming that it is the Spirit himself who illumines the minds of believers with that wisdom. But those who are not regenerate do not have the Spirit: they are ψυχικοί, Πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες ("sensual, having not the Spirit," Jude 19). They are "the world," which does not receive the Spirit and cannot receive him: John 14:17, Τὸ Πνεῦμα τῆς ἀληθείας, ὃ ὁ κόσμος οὐ δύναται λαβεῖν, ὅτι οὐ θεωρεῖ αὐτὸ, οὐδὲ γινώσκει αὐτό ("the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him"). Nor are they partakers of the anointing. It is a wonder, then, how they could be imbued with this wisdom, since they neither have the Spirit who alone bestows it, nor wish to have anything in common with him. Justin speaks excellently to this in his Dialogue with Trypho: Εἰ οὖν τις μὴ μετὰ μεγάλης χάριτος τῆς παρὰ Θεοῦ λάβοι νοῆσαι τὰ εἰρημένα καὶ γεγενημένα ὑπὸ τῶν προφητῶν, οὐδὲν αὐτὸν ὀνήσει τὸ τὰς ῥήσεις δοκεῖν λέγειν, ἢ τὰ γεγενημένα ("Unless a man receives, by the abundant grace that comes from God, an understanding of what has been spoken and done by the prophets, it will profit him nothing that he seems able to recite the sayings, or the deeds themselves").

VII. Finally, this same truth becomes clear from a consideration of the end of all true theology. We have already shown at sufficient length that, by means of that original natural theology, or innate θεογνωσία ("knowledge of God"), man before the entrance of sin was made like and conformed to God, and fit and able rightly to render obedience to him. Now the end of true theology can be learned from that end which God himself gave it at the beginning, and joined to it inseparably. Evangelical theology has been added as a reinforcement to natural theology; and unless it is to be said to perform its own office amiss, it too renders its subject conformed to God and made ready to do his will. We shall show hereafter that no defect attaches to it on this score. We know, accordingly, that many of the unregenerate excel greatly in that knowledge of spiritual things which we described earlier; but we utterly deny that they are made conformed to God by its power, and therefore the knowledge with which they are furnished is not theology. For "without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews 11:6), and all that they render in the worship of God is plainly nothing (John 15:5). That their works are "splendid sins" is a celebrated saying of the ancients, drawn from many passages of sacred Scripture. Such knowledge does indeed goad the consciences of the unregenerate toward obeying God, in proportion to what knowledge they have of him and of his will. It also kindles the natural light of conscience, increases it, adds sparks of legal fervor to it, sharpens the sense of sin, and stirs up and nourishes many forebodings of the future judgment in the depths of the breast. But since it does not renew the mind, does not take away the hard heart, does not dispel the natural darkness, and does not compel the shadows of death to vanish, it does not render the soul itself conformed to God, nor does it bestow spiritual strength for rendering true obedience to God; and therefore it does not attain to the name of true theology. Epictetus would deny that anyone is a philosopher who is not free, not master of himself, who has not placed every good in those things that lie within our own power. Far be it from us as Christians to acknowledge as a theologian one who is not a disciple of Christ, or as a disciple of Christ one who neither does nor can do any of the things Christ commanded. All such men, to a man, are enemies to Christ, and are held by him in the place of enemies. And very many of them, the more learned they are, the more openly they hold the Spirit of Christ in mockery and contempt. Excellent evangelical theologians indeed! Let them pore over and devour the books of the ancients, dispute most keenly, turn the bloodless schoolmen into blood and marrow, devour every critic, scribble and preach — yet so far are they from deserving to be reckoned theologians that they do not even belong, properly and directly, to the church of Christ.

VIII. Next, the holiest and sweetest communion with God, to be cultivated — which is the initial blessedness of man — is another end of theology. In this communion, by the benefit of that original theology, the first man was engaged while in his state of integrity. This new theology was instituted by God himself so that sinners might again attain communion with the most holy God — a point we proved at length before. No man, therefore, is furnished with this theology except one who has attained spiritual κοινωνία ("fellowship") with God through Christ. Whether any of the unregenerate have spiritual communion with God is not, so far as I know, a matter of controversy among the regenerate.

IX. Finally, the ultimate end of true theology is the praise of the glory of God's grace, to be celebrated in the eternal salvation of theologians — that is, the very enjoyment of God to the praise of his grace through Jesus Christ. If that light which the unregenerate possess as their own could direct them savingly to this end, so that in the end they actually attained it by its benefit, no one would deny that they are theologians; but if not, they must be relegated to some other order of learned men. The perception of political precepts is not civil prudence, nor is a man straightway a good citizen for having diligently gone through the books of Plato's Republic and Laws, or of Cicero; no more is a man a Christian theologian who has nothing beyond a superficial notion and a knowledge of terms — nothing that a disciple of Christ or a true theologian has. Indeed, such wretched little men shamefully incur against themselves what the philosopher said: εἰ γὰρ μὴ ὁμολογήσει ὁ λόγος τῷ ἤθει, ἀλλοτρίᾳ γλώττῃ δόξομεν φθέγγεσθαι, ὥσπερ ὁ αὐλός ("for if the speech does not agree with the character, we shall seem to speak with an alien tongue, like a flute" — Philostratus, Life of Apollonius).

Chapter 5

Who are the regenerate — In what sense the baptized are regenerate — For what reasons they were so called by the ancients; the errors of the papists noted — The truly regenerate never finally fall away — Not all the baptized are truly regenerate — Not every reformation of life is regeneration — What the common work of the Holy Spirit is in the unregenerate — The office of the ministers of the word — A description of the regenerate — All men are dead in sins — The pride of some noted — The most miserable condition of the unregenerate — The general nature and names of regeneration — Its author is God himself, through the Spirit — Its degrees — The acknowledgment of one's most miserable state — Dreams divinely sent for the instruction of men, Job 33:15-16 — The works of providence, and the word preached, the means to the same end — Many recoil from this first effect of the word — The work of the law in the conversion of the sinner — And of the gospel — The nature and order of regeneration — The varied process of the Holy Spirit in regenerating sinners.

I. In the previous discussion we set a boundary around the privilege and possession of the regenerate, so that no stranger might intrude upon it. But as to who these regenerate actually are, opinion is not unanimous. Let us hasten out of the thicket. To some, all who are dipped in baptismal water are regenerate. Evangelical baptism is indeed a symbol of spiritual παλιγγενεσία ("regeneration"). In some sense, therefore, all the baptized may seem able to be called regenerate; it is plain that many are regenerated. From the ambiguous use of the word in the writings of many of the ancients no small confusion has arisen. They pronounce almost all the baptized everywhere to be regenerate. For since it was both their duty to be regenerated and, through the ἐξομολόγησις ("confession") of renewal, they had received its symbol, there was no reason why they should not be so called in common speech. For the state of these matters at that time, amid the continual advance and daily spread of the gospel, was very different from what it is in our own day. The greatest part of the men whose names were entered on the church's roll were admitted to baptism only after a public profession of true faith, a confession of sincere repentance, and a promise of παλιγγενεσία. Thus Justin Martyr, in his second Apology, expounds, among other things, the admission of believers to baptism: Ὅσοι ἂν πεισθῶσι καὶ πιστεύωσιν ἀληθῆ ταῦτα τὰ ὑφ᾽ ἡμῶν διδασκόμενα καὶ λεγόμενα εἶναι καὶ βιοῦν οὕτως δύνασθαι ὑπισχνῶνται, εὔχεσθαί τε καὶ αἰτεῖν νηστεύοντες παρὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῶν προημαρτημένων ἄφεσιν διδάσκονται, ἡμῶν συνευχομένων καὶ συννηστευόντων αὐτοῖς· ἔπειτα ἄγονται ὑφ᾽ ἡμῶν ἔνθα ὕδωρ ἐστὶ, καὶ τρόπον ἀναγεννήσεως, ὃν καὶ ἡμεῖς αὐτοὶ ἀνεγεννήθημεν, ἀναγεννῶνται ("Whoever are persuaded and believe that these things which are taught and said by us are true, and undertake to be able to live accordingly, are taught to pray and, fasting, to ask of God the forgiveness of their former sins, we praying and fasting together with them; then they are brought by us to where there is water, and are regenerated by the manner of regeneration by which we ourselves also were regenerated"), etc.

II. Now, however, almost everywhere on earth we baptize infants all alike. Accordingly, the case is not exactly the same for all who share in baptism. On account of that solemn profession of regeneration — which a manner of life, proven sincere and truly evangelical among the godly over some space of time, sometimes of several years, and consisting in the careful observance of the evangelical precepts, showed to have been made at the reception of baptism, and confirmed by that symbol according to the mind of Christ — most of the baptized were admitted into the number of the regenerate. Hence they were called faithful, holy, enlightened. The pernicious opinion that a man is necessarily born ἄνωθεν ("from above") by the power of the baptismal administration itself, or, as they say, ex opere operato, gained ground later on. This exceedingly dangerous error, though ancient, later apostates covered over so that it should not rain down upon one group or another. By their agency, matters proceeded from these beginnings to the absolute necessity of outward baptism, to midwives as its ministers, and on to the Limbo of infants. But while these men contend that the Spirit is bound to one thing alone, they have lost him altogether. Not so the ancients; yet in their writings that confusion occurs very frequently, by which what properly belongs only to those regenerate κατ᾽ ἀλήθειαν ("in truth") is assigned instead to those who were regenerate only κατὰ δόξαν ("in appearance"). Augustine removes this ambiguity in more than one place, and teaches that many are called by us sons of God on account of the sacrament of regeneration, who in truth are not born of God. But from this same source there arises no less an error concerning the apostasy of saints, or of the regenerate. This they admit almost everywhere, without any circumlocution — and how, indeed, could it be otherwise for men to whom it was customary to call all who were admitted to the baptismal water regenerate, holy, and faithful? But that the true sons of God, united to Christ, partakers of the Spirit of promise, can never finally fall away, or pass into Satan's possession, we have shown, in the preface to our book on the Perseverance of the Saints, that these same men teach.

III. Whether, then, the baptized — that is, those who have been rightly made partakers of the sacrament of initiation according to the mind of Christ — may, by that benefit alone, be said in some sense (namely, sacramentally) to be regenerate, I do not wish to make an issue of it. But that all who are baptized, simply because they are baptized, are actually and savingly regenerate — unless there is added to it that efficacious operation of the Holy Spirit upon their hearts which we shall shortly set forth — we utterly deny. Indeed, the notion that anyone is regenerated by the force of the outward administration itself — so that all who share in it, or God himself, are peremptorily bound to the communication of quickening grace through the dispensing of the sacrament — appears to be the opinion of those to whom the gospel is hidden. Nor could the father of lies himself easily devise a more pernicious doctrine, or one that would administer a more immediate poison to the souls of sinners. For while wretched men, dead in their sins, flatter themselves that they were regenerated in baptism, and sleep idly on both ears, holding cheap the absolute and indispensable necessity of the spiritual renewal of the whole man, they neglect to acknowledge their most miserable state and to flee to the quickening grace of Christ, and so, lulled by a most pernicious security, they perish forever. Here, as everywhere else, the papists waver wretchedly. They suppose all the baptized to be regenerate ex opere operato, as they say. But are they also holy? They will scarcely grant it — for what then would become of that canonization by which the pope enrolls whomsoever he pleases among the number of the saints? Yet in the evangelical sense all the regenerate are holy. Not at all, they say — why? Because they work no miracles. But that the working of miracles is a τεκμήριον ("proof") of regeneration or evangelical holiness, no one will ever affirm who is not utterly ignorant both of the one and of the other, and indeed of the whole gospel.

IV. The mere reception of an outward rite, therefore, makes no one regenerate. If there is added to it an orderly manner of life, a change of morals for the better, a renouncing of vices that give scandal, a profession of true faith or of orthodox doctrine, and an observance of the institutions of Christ among whatever party one follows, then a man in whom these things are found will, by the judgment of many, be reckoned regenerate. Where indeed these things are absent, there is no regeneration; for "he that is born of God doeth the works of God." But that all these things can be present where there is no regeneration will be granted by anyone who has been taught by God what it is to be "born again." For just as faith, if it is alone, without good works, will never justify anyone before God, so good works done without faith will never prove anyone to be justified. This sort of reformation of one's former life, and reclaiming to good conduct, was extremely common in the schools of the ancient philosophers. Thus Pythagoras, thus Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cleanthes, Epictetus, and Apollonius reclaimed to the path of virtue many who had been squalid with the filth of vice. Among those, too, who make use of the word of God in whatever fashion, such corrections of morals are of daily occurrence, where there is no creation of a new heart, or saving renewal of the mind. Of these changes also, with respect to the vices which sinners renounce, and the obedience which they embrace, there are various degrees, and various causes for them. To catalogue them all here would take too long. For there is granted an efficacious operation of the Spirit of Christ, through the word, upon the hearts of unregenerate men, which is not regeneration. It first irradiates their minds with evangelical light; hence they are said to be φωτισθέντες ("enlightened," Hebrews 6:4) — that is, by some special gift he sharpens their understanding and grants it a peculiar keenness for understanding the will of God revealed in the Scriptures,

V. Let us say, then, briefly, in the next place, according to the measure of the χάρισμα ("gift") we have received, and whatever little light God shall graciously deign to grant us from his own, who these regenerate are, whom alone we assert to be capable of this divine wisdom. The Holy Spirit openly testifies that all men are born in a state of sin — that is, destitute of natural righteousness, and infected with the vice of corrupted nature, and thereby liable to the punishment of sin, which is the everlasting wrath of God. Some, relying on the paint of the coldest little distinctions, resist his most evident testimonies to this — but thanklessly and foolishly. We have therefore judged that such men, held so far in the grip of a blind self-love — arising from the most profound ignorance of the state of their own heart toward God, of the nature of God's law, and of evangelical grace — that they deny themselves to be either defiled by the stain of natural vice, or held so fast by the snares of spiritual ἀδυναμία ("incapacity"), indeed of depravity itself, that they can understand, will, or perceive nothing good, are plainly to be passed over here. Yet I fear lest, "because they say, We see, their sin remaineth," and lest, on account of that sin, the most just wrath of God be revealed at the appointed time (John 3:36, 9:41). Upon this hypothesis, concerning the most miserable natural state of all men, the whole of evangelical theology rests; nor can it be understood or observed without the acknowledgment of it, and a most serious sense of it. For what need has the healthy of a physician, the just of repentance, the pure of sanctification, the living of the quickening Spirit, the innocent of satisfaction, the seeing of eye-salve, those already fit of themselves to render due obedience of God's saving grace that turns the heart, and of his efficacious power, or the friends of God of reconciliation, or the blessed of deliverance from the curse? I have lately read disputers of this sort, of whom I am simply sorry. Suffer me not, Lord Jesus, by thine infinite mercy, me, the chief and greatest of sinners, to spend so much as a moment's effort in proving that I am bound to thee by fewer titles than I truly am, or than it would be more desirable for me, in life and soul, to be! But what sort of persons all men are in their state of nature can be understood from those very arguments by which we proved above that the unregenerate are incapable of this theology. They are dead, blind, senseless, haters of God and stubborn enemies, void of all saving grace and light, slaves of Satan, prone to every vice, and utterly estranged from every spiritual good. And in this state, however much most of them are exceedingly pleased with themselves, and take delight in it, they are nevertheless unwilling, and unable, to please God. This is the kingdom of Satan, this the power of darkness, out of which, into the glorious and marvelous light of the kingdom of Christ, all whom God's grace is to regenerate must be translated. This translation is regeneration — which is variously designated, according as it looks either to God as the author of the work or to man as its subject, as a new creation, or a new creature; a renewal; a resurrection from the dead; an opening of the eyes; a circumcision of the heart; a quickening. The author of the work is God himself. Hence to be born again and to be begotten of God are the same thing. Now God accomplishes this his work through the Spirit and the word: ̓Αναγεγεννημένοι οὐκ ἐκ σπορᾶς φθαρτῆς, ἀλλὰ ἀφθάρτου, διὰ λόγου ζῶντος Θεοῦ ("Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth," 1 Peter 1:23); that is, Διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας, καὶ ἀνακαινώσεως Πνεύματος ἁγίου ("by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit," Titus 3:5); and thus sinners are regenerated οὐκ ἐξ αἱμάτων, οὐδὲ ἐκ θελήματος σαρκός, οὐδὲ ἐκ θελήματος ἀνδρός, ἀλλ᾽ ἐκ Θεοῦ ("not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," John 1:13).

VI. Now there are, as it were, two parts to that most miserable condition and state in which we are all born. There is in it misery on account of sin committed, and thus all communion with God lost; and there is a total ἀδυναμία ("incapacity") toward every spiritual good, born of the loss of that practical principle which fitted us to work well and spiritually the things of God — a loss accompanied, by an inseparable bond, by a habitual propensity toward every evil. From this the whole man is misery and sin, and nothing besides. Against this twofold evil God, appointing a twofold remedy, produces by a twofold efficacious operation a twofold effect, each opposed to one of those evils. We shall show what this is. Not to know one's natural misery is itself a part of that natural misery. From this ignorance arise pride and φιλαυτία ("self-love"). Every sinner, dreaming to himself, naturally persuades himself that he either already is, or can be, or will someday be, in the best state and condition — at least not the worst; or else he reckons all this of no account. Here, if by chance — as very often happens, even in those places where liberty has been granted to evangelical preaching, and it is of these alone that the present discussion treats — a man should meet with a teacher like himself, one puffed up with some acquired knowledge of theological matters, who passes himself off as a minister of the New Testament while in truth destitute of the Spirit of Christ and of all saving ἐπίγνωσις ("acknowledgment") of the will of God and of the evangelical mystery, such a teacher will so soothe the man's mind, and, by removing the hope of obtaining eternal salvation in the very state in which he is stuck, will lure him into deception, that, having cast off all care for saving renewal, he will not only sleep securely on both ears, but will not hesitate to rage against others who, offering him more wholesome counsels out of the word of God, would wish to bring him to better fruit. Hence, for some teachers and their disciples, even in this very light of the gospel, regeneration is almost a laughing-stock. Yet it is precisely here that God first sets the sinner who is to be regenerated. He provokes the sinning soul, by his word, to a serious sense of itself and of the state in which it lives before God, the ruler and most righteous judge of all. Hence there settles into the practical judgment a first knowledge of God, not without a horror of death and a fear of eternal punishment. But it is no small matter to rouse a man dead in sins, full of himself, enslaved to vices, and careless of eternity, to the point of undertaking a serious examination of himself with a view to the final judgment. In the ways and means which he employs in producing this effect, the most free will of God, and his infinite wisdom, display themselves. Before the word was set down in writing, it was his custom to fix the testimonies of his righteousness and of his terror by dreams divinely sent. This the holy man teaches us in Job 33:15-17: "In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man, that he may keep back his soul from the pit." Hence that Homeric line, Καὶ γὰρ τ᾽ ὄναρ ἐκ Διός ἐστιν ("For a dream too is from Zeus," Iliad 1.63). And there was a peculiar kind of dreams which the ancients called ὄνειροι διοπέμπτοι ("dreams sent from Zeus"). Of these Eustathius says, on Iliad A: Οἱ δὲ τοιοῦτοι κυρίως εἶχον τὴν τοῦ ὀνείρου κλῆσιν· ὡς τὸ ὄν, ἤτοι τὸ ἀληθές, εἴροντες καὶ λέγοντες· διὸ καὶ ὀμφὴ ὁ τοιοῦτος ὄνειρος ἐλέγετο, διὰ τὸ ὄναρ φαίνειν ("Such dreams properly bore the name of oneiros, as speaking and telling what is, that is, the true; whence such a dream was also called omphē, from its making plain what is dreamed").

VII. The same effect is produced by the outward works of providence, by which God executes either his kindness and mercy, or his judgments and wrath. So, in the passage cited above, the holy man says, verses 19-23: "He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, and the multitude of his bones with strong pain; so that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat. His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his bones that were not seen stick out. Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the destroyers. Then," etc. So too the psalmist, Psalm 78:33-34: "Their days did he consume in vanity, and their years in trouble. When he slew them, then they sought him." The prophet has like words, Isaiah 26:10-11. For dispensations of divine providence of this kind so often affect the souls of sinful men that, although they "have brass, and triple steel about their breast," they cannot restrain themselves from trembling seriously before God, and shuddering at the judgment to come. But it is usually the preaching of the word of God that produces this work and effect. So the apostle teaches us (1 Corinthians 14:24-25), and the prophet (Hosea 6:5). We shall see every day that the same force or energy accompanies the preaching of the word.

VIII. As the sinner turns these cares over in his breast, amid the innermost reasonings of his heart as to whether he has God for an enemy or not, a sharp suspicion arises. He begins at last to understand that it is "an evil and bitter thing" that he has sinned against God (Jeremiah 2:19). Reviving accordingly the memory of many sins, perhaps long buried in oblivion, he becomes entangled in the secret bitings of conscience and in troublesome thoughts. "What have I done," he says, "what am I doing, or what am I yet to do? I know not which way to turn. What if I should find God angry, and so fall into eternal punishments? What if those hopes with which I have hitherto lulled my sick mind should fade away, and be found deceitful? Beyond doubt I must enter upon some other course of life, unless I would rather perish." Such thoughts as these, I say, and others like them, sinners turn over in the depths of their breast, as if stunned by the power of the divine word. But of those who are thus variously touched by a sense of their own condition, many, overcome by their innate blindness — which still prevents spiritual things from being seen in their own proper light and splendor — by fleshly lust, by desire for earthly things, by the force of satanic temptations, and by the company of wicked men, recoil once more and fall back into their former ἀναισθησία ("insensibility"). Hence their recovery to good conduct is difficult, and the end is often worse than the beginning (Jeremiah 8:9).

IX. This, then, is as it were the Spirit of God's first skirmish against the power of darkness in the hearts of sinners — the first trial, so to speak, in the destroying of Satan's works, when the Stronger girds himself to bind the strong man armed. There follow upon these stronger and more effective sallies of his spiritual power. We have so far shown only the vague and unstable reasonings by which the thoughtful soul rouses itself to undertake some sort of self-examination. Such are usually the fruits of the first admonitions — uncertain movements, as it were, of those just waking. There are other "sharp arrows" of Christ (Psalm 45:5-6), which he fixes in the hearts of sinners so firmly that, however much they might wish, they cannot shake them out. With these he pierces, wounds, and terrifies the consciences and minds of men with a sense of sin, a fear of death, and a horrible forewarning of the coming judgment (see Acts 24:25). For, laying bare the nature, guilt, and foulness of sin in the inmost recesses of the soul, and even calling to the sinner's mind the multitude of sins of which he is himself conscious, together with the countless circumstances of sin that heap up guilt, he pronounces upon him the penalty of death, cuts off every hope of escape, and compels him to feel at once that he is on every side most wretched and about to perish. Now indeed, whatever is horrid, dreadful, and mournful that human nature can conceive is continually set before the sinner's eyes: Hebrews 2:15, Φόβῳ θανάτου διὰ παντὸς τοῦ ζῆν ἔνοχοι ἦσαν δουλείας ("through fear of death they were all their lifetime subject to bondage"). This is the special effect of the word, or of the doctrine of the law: Romans 7:7, Τὴν ἁμαρτίαν οὐκ ἔγνων, εἰ μὴ διὰ νόμου ("I had not known sin, but by the law"); for the knowledge of sin comes by the law — that knowledge, namely, from which arises conviction, or the practical sense of sin, by which God, casting his net over sinners, compels them to come down like birds of the air (Hosea 7:12). For after he has, as it were, forced the sinning soul, by the potent and efficacious power of his word, to weigh seriously the nature and guilt of its sin, and has given it understanding to contemplate, in the mirror of the law, the law's depravity and desert — a thing the apostle ascribes to "the coming of the commandment" (Romans 7:9) — and has roused the conscience diligently to perform its office, then, afflicting human nature with legal grief, fear, sadness, anxiety, and other feelings — often greater than there are names to express — he so affects the very inmost parts of the heart that it is never free from the greatest distress (Acts 2:37, Κατενύγησαν τῇ καρδίᾳ, "they were pricked in their heart"). "What shall I now do," says the sinner, "caught unexpectedly by himself in so wretched a state? I am tormented in mind; no counsel at all can settle in my breast. God, whom I had dreamed to be easy and propitious toward me, I now find to be my most bitter enemy; the law too, of which I formerly took no account, I find to be not only holy and pure, but fiery and powerful, whose every transgression must be expiated by nothing less than death, and that an eternal death; horror, darkness, and the pains of hell surround, torment, and tear me apart." So the apostle, Romans 7:9: ̓Εγὼ δὲ ἔζων χωρὶς νόμου ποτέ· ἐλθούσης δὲ τῆς ἐντολῆς, ἡ ἁμαρτία ἀνέζησεν, ἐγὼ δὲ ἀπέθανον ("For I was alive without the law once; but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died"). I had reckoned myself alive, sound, righteous, and pleasing to God; but at the coming of the law that hope perished and was cut off. From this arises a desire for deliverance, and an anxious expectation of the outcome — nearer to despair than to hope: Acts 2:37, Τί ποιήσομεν; ("What shall we do?"); 16:30, Τί με δεῖ ποιεῖν ἵνα σωθῶ; ("What must I do to be saved?"). Here again come prayers from the depths of the breast, tears and sighs, and duties both divine and human diligently performed — for such men resolve to obtain righteousness before God by some means or other (Romans 9:31). Yet even when matters have proceeded thus far, the work of conversion to God is not always brought home. For many, entangled once more in the enticements of pleasure, shake off from their breasts all of this, whatever it may have been as the beginning of a divine work, and return again to the mire of their vices, to perish eternally (2 Peter 2:20-21). Some are pleased with a righteousness "as it were by the works of the law" (Romans 9:32), and while they labor to establish this — a crime and folly of vitiated nature that has passed into settled church doctrine among many — they do not submit themselves to the righteousness of God (Romans 10:3). Such men, then, hasten down to hell by intermediate attempts to reach heaven — attempts often most bitter, and sometimes horrid and cruel (Micah 6:6-7). For though they run to escape the bites and piercing stings of conscience, those who run outside the ways of the Sun of righteousness must necessarily perish. But the case is different with those whom God wills to bring, effectually and graciously, to a saving knowledge of Christ. First, he causes them, by his Spirit working powerfully in their hearts, to acknowledge and confess that the sentence of the law pronounced against them is most just and equitable — not only with respect to their actual sins, but with respect to their whole condition and natural state (Romans 7:12-13); then also to justify God himself, the author of the law (Romans 3:20); and to have their mouths stopped by a sense of guilt (verse 19). Being thus taught to expect all things from God's most free grace and good pleasure, they labor to depend wholly upon his will, and not to seek, in agitation or impatience, the remedies for their ills which they long for (Habakkuk 2:2-4). Such consternation of mind, such dejection of spirit, such fear and trembling of heart, such confusion of countenance, such shame of face, such despair of themselves — by all of which they are all but overwhelmed — allow them nothing but a humble and submissive waiting upon the divine sentence concerning themselves (Luke 18:13; Psalm 130). This much alone they seem to hold fixed and settled: that, should it please God to slay them, they will nevertheless in no way forsake him. And now, day by day, more and more, the soul, laboring under the burden of its sins, groaning and fainting, longs for deliverance, for gracious mercy, for righteousness, for acceptance before God. The Holy Spirit, therefore, promised by Christ to bring to the sinner's remembrance, and to suggest to him, whatever pertains to spiritual consolation (John 14:26), now begins, again and again, secretly and effectually, to instill some evangelical word into the heart of the fainting sinner — such, for instance, as that of Psalm 130:4, "There is forgiveness with thee, O Lord, that thou mayest be feared." At once, indeed, the sinner's own conscience protests, and the law itself as well; both forbid him to hope for anything in the way of pardon or forgiveness; both cry out, forcefully and unceasingly, that no such sinner will find any such thing with God. "It cannot be," they say, "that so great a sinner should obtain pardon from the most holy and most just God; die, therefore, as the law commands: for the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). Here, indeed, when the sinner seems once more reduced to extremity, that same Spirit who has hitherto come to the aid of the law and of conscience against him, and made them efficacious and powerful for breaking his hard and stubborn heart and for shaking off every opinion of his own righteousness — lest he "be swallowed up" — now stands on the other side, and against the accusations and bitings of conscience, the sentence of the law, and the temptations of Satan, strengthens, sustains, and establishes him, now all but fainting, indeed often overcome and on the point of surrender, with various humble props of hope and patience. For when sinners, burdened with the sense of their sins and of the divine wrath, no sooner attempt to betake themselves to divine mercy than they feel themselves, not embraced with favor and grace, but rather sent far away by God as unworthy — then, lest by the craft of Satan (who most eagerly seizes upon that repulse, which they fear though without cause, and turns it to his own advantage) they be cast headlong into the pit of despair, the Holy Spirit administers general helps and supports, gradually and imperceptibly, through various means. Here proclamations have their place (Isaiah 55:1; John 7:37), declarations (John 3:16; Psalm 130:4), exhortations (Acts 2:38), invitations (Matthew 11:28-29; Revelation 22:17), and the promises of the gospel. In all these the Holy Spirit employs the sinner's translation "out of the power of darkness into the marvelous light" of Christ. At last that same Spirit causes Christ himself — perhaps long before preached, but, through blindness of mind, hardness of heart, love of sin, or love of one's own righteousness, neglected, or at least not held in that esteem, with that submission of soul, which is fitting — to be beheld by these sinners, set before their eyes in the promises of the gospel. And after they see him lifted on high — they themselves being wretched, lost, wearied, accursed, gathered "as it were from the ends of the earth" (Isaiah 45:22) — and that propitiation has been set forth in his blood, to declare the righteousness of God in the remission of sins (Romans 3:24-25); and that he was made a curse, that the blessing of faithful Abraham might come upon believers (Galatians 3:13-14); and see and acknowledge that God is in him reconciled, and reconciling the world to himself, they seek him alone, and flee to him properly, as those guilty of death once fled to the cities of refuge. They believe that he has abundantly satisfied the righteousness of God for all their greatest sins, and has, in his own blood, obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12); and that thus he has been made by God righteousness and redemption to all who believe in him (1 Corinthians 1:30). From this arise shame, love, displeasure with oneself, humiliation, a renouncing of one's own righteousness, and repentance; and, Christ being received solely by faith, they also receive him to be loved and worshipped, trust him, and give themselves wholly over to him, to be taught, ruled, sanctified, corrected, and saved by him.

X. Meanwhile, while these things are transacted between God and the sinning soul through his word, God himself, according to his infinite mercy in Jesus Christ, when and how he wills, in a manner wholly ineffable, yet powerful and effectual, through his most holy Spirit, bestows upon the soul — hitherto dead in sins — a new spiritual life, and, with a new heart, opens its blind eyes, and shines marvelously into it wholly, to give it the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Hence the whole man is made a new creature, fit and able rightly to obey God according to the rule of the new covenant (Jeremiah 32:39; Ezekiel 11:19, 36:26; Acts 26:18; Romans 8:2, 11; 2 Corinthians 4:6; Ephesians 2:2-5, 4:23-24; 2 Corinthians 5:17). The sinner, thus brought back to life and regenerated by the grace of God, furnished with spiritual strength, or an infused habit of grace, according to the will of him "who worketh all things in all," now united to Christ dwelling in him through the Spirit, gives and consecrates himself to evangelical obedience and to those good works for which he was created in Christ diligently to perform (John 14:16-17; Romans 6:2, 6; Ephesians 2:10; Titus 2:11-12; 1 John 3:3). "And so that which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). But these things do not proceed in the same manner in all who are regenerated. There is much, too, in this wondrous work of which we do not know the manner; and very much that we feel, but cannot express in words: "The wind bloweth where it listeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." This same Spirit frees one man sooner, another later, from the pangs of this new and spiritual birth. One he buffets, pricks, and presses with sharp sorrow; another he handles more gently, as seems good to him. But enough of these matters.

Chapter 6

Theology is a συμπλοκή ("interweaving") of spiritual gifts — Gifts extraordinary or ordinary — Ordinary gifts peculiar to the ministry, or common to all — Christ the bestower of all gifts, Psalm 68:19; Acts 2:33; Ephesians 4:8 — לָקַח means both to receive and to give — Christ the author of spiritual gifts through the Spirit, John 7:39; Acts 19:2; John 16:14; 1 Corinthians 12:11 — It is proved that theology is a spiritual gift, Matthew 13:11; James 1:5, 17; 1 John 5:20; 1 Corinthians 12:8; 1 Corinthians 1:5; Romans 6:17; Ephesians 1:17-20 — The nature and growth of spiritual χαρίσματα (gifts) — The foundation of evangelical theology, its saving light — Its progress through superadded gifts — The special nature of theology — What is to be taught us is what Holy Scripture teaches — The πολυωνυμία (many names) of theology; its opposites — Definition — It is wisdom, Deuteronomy 4:6; 1 Corinthians 2:7; 2 Timothy 3:15; Daniel 12:3; Psalm 19:8-9; Deuteronomy 4:6; Psalm 119:98-99; Proverbs 8, 9; Colossians 1:9, 3:16 — Its manner of being communicated — Its immediate object — Its primary effect — It renders the mind conformed to Christ; another effect — Knowledge of the will of God revealed in Holy Scripture — Of what kind that knowledge is — A new understanding — The practice of piety, Job 28:12-23, or John 7:17, 8:31-32; Colossians 1:9-10; 2 Peter 1:8-9 — A recapitulation of the whole discussion — Conclusion.

I. We have defined the subject of evangelical theology to be the mind of man regenerated through the Holy Spirit. Let us now approach theology itself. It is a χάρισμα πνευματικόν ("spiritual gift"), or rather a συμπλοκή ("interweaving") of spiritual gifts. And since these spiritual gifts are either extraordinary or ordinary, we must deal here with the latter alone. The former are certain spiritual δυνάμεις ("powers") of the mind, implanted in it by the Holy Spirit, by which it is made fit and able for the perception and comprehension of spiritual things, and for their application to spiritual uses and ends. As for the gifts of which mention is made in the sacred Scriptures, there is a varied classification of them owing to their various respects and various uses. Since this does not bear directly upon our purpose, we shall pass over it here. Let it suffice to note only that some of them look in a special way to the office of the evangelical ministry (of which they are the foundation, Ephesians 4:8, 11; 1 Corinthians 12:7), while others are common to all believers, each according to his own degree and measure. The power of conferring these gifts is the fruit and companion of the exaltation of our Lord Jesus Christ to the right hand of the Father; it is the most eminent part of his own royal inheritance. So the psalmist: "Thou hast ascended up on high, thou hast led captivity captive: לָקַחְתָּ מַתָּנוֹת בָּאָדָם" ("thou hast received gifts in man," Psalm 68:19). This passage Peter interprets, Acts 2:33: Τῇ δεξιᾷ οὖν τοῦ Θεοῦ ὑψωθεὶς, τήν τε ἐπαγγελίαν τοῦ ἁγίου Πνεύματος λαβὼν παρὰ τοῦ πατρός, ἐξέχεε τοῦτο ὃ νῦν ὑμεῖς βλέπετε καὶ ἀκούετε ("Being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear"). This "this" was that gift of tongues and of prophecy, at the sight and hearing of which the Jews were astonished. He does not indeed expressly mention the gifts themselves as received from Christ, but rather the promised Spirit, who works them all immediately in every case. Paul repeats the words, Ephesians 4:8: ̓Αναβὰς εἰς ὕψος ᾐχμαλώτευσεν αἰχμαλωσίαν, καὶ ἔδωκε δόματα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ("When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men"). He departs, however, from the most usual meaning of the word לָקַח in order to set forth the matter itself more plainly. I am amazed that this passage was passed over in the ancient Greek version ascribed to the seventy elders, by those who took it upon themselves to insert into it, in the very words used by the inspired writers, the testimonies from the Old Testament cited in the New; for it still reads δόματα ἔλαβε ("he received gifts"), not ἔδωκε δόματα ("he gave gifts"), as in the apostle. For the rest, לָקַח sometimes means "to give" — or at least "to receive with the intention and purpose of giving": Hosea 14, וְקַח־טוֹב, "Take away goodness" — that is, "Give us grace," or, as our own people render the sense, "Receive us graciously" — that is, "Bestow on us grace and favor." Exodus 25:2, "Speak unto the children of Israel, וְיִקְחוּ־לִי תְרוּמָה" — "that they take me an offering" — that is, "that they give." Hence, "the word for 'receiving' signifies 'giving' when they receive from one source in order to give," say the Hebrew teachers. Paul, accordingly, rendered the sense of the words with precision, and so translated the words themselves. Christ received all spiritual gifts from the Father, in order to give them to men; Christ is therefore the author of all spiritual gifts. He was conspicuously furnished with the authority to confer this gift after his ascension. Hence that saying of the evangelist: Οὔπω ἦν Πνεῦμα ἅγιον, ὅτι ὁ Ἰησοῦς οὐδέπω ἐδοξάσθη ("The Holy Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified," John 7:39) — that is, not yet given and poured out in the manner of which he speaks. And this was the ignorance of the disciples of John, recorded in Acts 19:2: ̓Αλλ᾽ οὐδὲ εἰ Πνεῦμα ἅγιόν ἐστιν, ἠκούσαμεν ("We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Spirit"). Do not suppose that these men, brought up in the bosom of the Jewish church and initiated by John's baptism, were ignorant of whether the Holy Spirit truly existed or not; they knew the Spirit, but had simply heard nothing at all of his extraordinary gifts. Now these ordinary gifts Christ, in his name and place (John 16:14) — for whom, as Tertullian puts it, the Spirit performs a vicarious office — distributes most freely to whomsoever he will, καθὼς βούλεται ("even as he will," 1 Corinthians 12:11); "but the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal" (verse 7).

II. Of these gifts, as we have said, theology is a certain συμπλοκή ("interweaving"), in which, as the virtues are contained in righteousness, all are present: Matthew 13:11, Ὑμῖν δέδοται γνῶναι τὰ μυστήρια τῆς βασιλείας τῶν οὐρανῶν ("Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven") — that is, it is given to you to be evangelical theologians. James 1:5, Εἰ δέ τις ὑμῶν λείπεται σοφίας, αἰτείτω παρὰ τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ ("If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth"). We have shown, and shall show further, that this wisdom is theology. Of it again, verse 17: Πᾶσα δόσις ἀγαθὴ, καὶ πᾶν δώρημα τέλειον ἄνωθέν ἐστι, καταβαῖνον ἀπὸ τοῦ Πατρὸς τῶν φώτων ("Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights"). 1 John 5:20: Οἴδαμεν, ὅτι ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἥκει, καὶ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν, ἵνα γινώσκωμεν τὸν ἀληθινόν ("We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true"). Now "to know him that is true" is theology — or I confess I do not know at all what theology is. 1 Corinthians 12:8: Ὧι μὲν διὰ τοῦ Πνεύματος δίδοται λόγος σοφίας ("To one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom"); see also 1 Corinthians 1:5; Romans 6:17. The apostle sets the whole matter before our eyes, Ephesians 1:17-20: "I pray," he says, "God, Ἵνα δῴη ὑμῖν Πνεῦμα σοφίας καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως ἐν ἐπιγνώσει αὐτοῦ· πεφωτισμένους τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς τῆς διανοίας ὑμῶν, εἰς τὸ εἰδέναι ὑμᾶς, τίς ἐστιν ἡ ἐλπὶς τῆς κλήσεως αὐτοῦ, καὶ τίς ὁ πλοῦτος τῆς κληρονομίας" ("that he may give unto you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; the eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what is the riches of the inheritance...").

αὐτοῦ ἐν τοῖς ἁγίοις, καὶ τί τὸ ὑπερβάλλον μέγεθος τῆς δυνάμεως αὐτοῦ εἰς ἡμᾶς, τοὺς πιστεύοντας ("...of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe"). Would that some of those who dwell in this darkness were willing, or able, to learn something from these words of the apostle.

III. This theology of ours, then, is a spiritual gift, χάρισμα πνευματικόν ("a spiritual gift"), 1 Corinthians 2:7-9. But since that almighty Spirit of God works all things in all, in order that we may establish the distinction between this gift and the many gifts which he distributes for various uses to men who are merely natural (ψυχικοῖς, "soulish," i.e., unregenerate), we have shown that it proceeds from, and is given by, Christ the Mediator. This anointing is from that Holy One, 1 John 2:20.

IV. Now the nature of these gifts is such that they are created immediately in the minds of men by the Holy Spirit himself, and therefore cannot be obtained by anyone through his own effort, however great his use of reason may be — as a learned man once aptly said of the rational soul, "They are created by infusion, and infused by creation." Yet they are capable of degrees and increase. With respect to these, the constant use of those means which God has appointed for their increase is not merely of the highest usefulness, but absolutely necessary. This theology of which we are treating is a case in point.

Let the principle, foundation, and root of this theology, then — in which its whole nature and fruitful power are contained — be that saving light by which the mind of the sinner is made fit and able to understand the things of the Spirit of God spiritually (πνευματικῶς). No mortal can acquire this light for himself by his own powers, or by the benefit of any common assistance whatsoever. God, who at the first creation of all things commanded light to shine out of darkness, irradiates our minds with this most holy light by no lesser exercise and effectual outgoing of his infinite power, 2 Corinthians 4:6. But once a man's mind has been furnished with this saving light, according to the measure and nature of the other gifts either superadded to it or communicated together with it, and according to the efficacy of other means, the light itself is increased daily, and the mind perceives and discerns spiritual objects ever more clearly. From this let us learn what the true use of diligence, of studies, and of the sciences is in learning theology: they are of use here only insofar as, and no further than, they serve to advance this spiritual light.

V. But let us now at last look more closely at the special nature of theology. Here it is resolved, so far as may be, to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and to use those very words which the wisdom from above (ἡ ἄνωθεν σοφία, "the wisdom from above") teaches. For since I hold it as most certain that Sacred Scripture expounds this spiritual habit of the renewed mind in a manner altogether different from all the rules of human wisdom (ἀνθρωπίνης σοφίας) or of commonly received philosophy; and that the sense of that exposition is far more open and plain to the understanding of believers than are the precise, thorny, and artificial definitions of philosophizers; and that no one will ever rightly, properly, and savingly attain to the mind of the Holy Spirit who drags his sayings to be hewn to the philosophers' pliant "Lesbian rule" of notions and testimonies (the proverbial rule of lead, bent to fit the stone rather than the stone cut to fit it) — I have resolved to keep to the footsteps of Scripture, to use its own words, without anxious concern for their philosophical sense.

VI. First, then, its manifold naming (πολυωνυμία, "having many names") must be considered. For theology is designated by the Holy Spirit under many names. It is called "wisdom," and "prudence," and "knowledge," and "a disposition for the discernment of good and evil," and "doctrine," and "light," and "understanding," and "an indwelling word," and "sense" or "perception," and "the acknowledgment of the truth," and "the fear of God." No one doubts that most of these terms mean different things among the philosophers; and it is also plain that some of them cannot properly be said of any science at all, strictly so called. But to these the Holy Spirit opposes not only ignorance of the knowable object, but also "blindness," "folly," "vanity," and "darkness of mind" — indeed, even "depravity of heart," "love of sin," and "friendship with this world." You may perhaps say that, although all these terms can be employed in a general description of theology, yet if we wish to speak accurately and properly, we find it comprehended under some single habit. I would not deny that some single designation, more general than the rest, might be used in setting forth its nature, so as to offer the understanding a greater light on the thing itself — provided this is done in no way to the rejection of the others, or so as to twist the thing itself to philosophical senses. For beyond all doubt, if it is knowledge (scientia), whether speculative or practical, properly so called, then it is not wisdom according to the dogmas of the philosophers. And if it is wisdom, it is not prudence; it is not a habit (ἔξις) for discerning good and evil; it is not understanding — and yet we know that it is all of these; for we shall labor in vain if we suppose ourselves able to philosophize more precisely on these matters than we have been taught by the Holy Spirit.

VII. Evangelical theology, then, is "a spiritual gift, implanted by the Holy Spirit in the name of Christ in the minds of faithful men, that is, of those born again by the grace of God, by which they are made wise, prudent, and understanding in the acknowledgment of the mystery of godliness, that is, of God and of his will revealed in Christ through the gospel; rendering the whole soul conformed to the truth acknowledged, and wise unto eternal life, and directing them to the obedience and worship owed to God in Christ, to be rendered according to the single rule of the word, through the Holy Spirit, that at length they may enjoy God forever."

VIII. That the mind of the regenerate man is the proper subject of this theology we have proved above. We have also shown that it is a gift of the Holy Spirit, acting in Christ's stead among men. It is peculiar to this gift that it makes believers wise in the mystery of the gospel, that is, of Christ, in whom all the treasures of knowledge and wisdom are hidden. We therefore say that theology is, in the first place, spiritual wisdom — for so Scripture calls it: Deuteronomy 4:6, הִוא חָכְמַתְכֶם וּבִינַתְכֶם ("this is your wisdom and your understanding," or prudence). 1 Corinthians 2:7, Σοφίαν λαλοῦμεν ἐν μυστηρίῳ ("we speak wisdom in a mystery"). And he who is furnished with it is called wise, 2 Timothy 3:15: "you have known ἱερὰ γράμματα, τὰ δυνάμενά σε σοφίσαι" ("the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise"); and also understanding — hence מַשְׂבִּילִים ("those who understand"), Daniel 12:3. And the word of God is called faithful, מַחְכִּימַת פְּתִי ("making the simple wise"), and מְאִירַת עֵינָיִם ("enlightening the eyes"), Psalm 19:8-9. For this reason the people of God are called עַם־חָכָם וְנָבוֹן ("a wise and understanding people"), Deuteronomy 4:6. Psalm 119:98, תְּחַכְּמֵנִי מִצְוֹתֶיךָ, says David — "You make me wiser than by your commandments." Verse 99, מִכָּל־מְלַפְּדַי הִשְׂכַּלְתִּי — "I have more understanding than all my teachers." For this reason, among others, Christ himself is called wisdom, because he alone instructs men in this wisdom, Proverbs 8-9. And this is what the apostle means in that solemn prayer which he offers for the Colossian saints: chapter 1:9, Οὐ παυόμεθα ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν προσευχόμενοι, καὶ αἰτούμενοι, ἵνα πληρωθῆτε τὴν ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ συνέσει πνευματικῇ ("we do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding"). And again, chapter 3:16, Ὁ λόγος τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐνοικείτω ἐν ὑμῖν πλουσίως, ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ ("let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom").

IX. Now the manner of the communication of this wisdom, being peculiar to it, proves that it differs very greatly from all secular wisdom and from systematic or disciplinary knowledge. "We have the mind of Christ," says the apostle, 1 Corinthians 2:16 — that is, we know, we understand. How so? Because, he says in verse 12, Οὐ τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ κόσμου ἐλάβομεν ("we have not received the spirit of the world," that is, the spirit that is the author of worldly wisdom), ἀλλὰ τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἵνα εἰδῶμεν τὰ ὑπὸ τοῦ Θεοῦ χαρισθέντα ἡμῖν ("but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God"). It is only through the Holy Spirit, graciously granted to us, that we attain this wisdom, John 16:13. And he produces this effect in us in a manner altogether admirable. So the same apostle teaches us: 2 Corinthians 4:6, Ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ὁ εἰπὼν ἐκ σκότους φῶς λάμψαι, ὃς ἔλαμψεν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν πρὸς φωτισμὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ("for God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ"), etc. There is no other account of the production of this saving light than there once was of the light that shone out of the midst of darkness at the first framing of all things. Now the knowledge that is produced is a knowledge "of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ." For it is the fruit of the effectual divine irradiation that illuminates our minds. And again the same apostle, Ephesians 1:17-18: "May God give you πνεῦμα σοφίας καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως ἐν ἐπιγνώσει αὐτοῦ (the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, that is, of Christ), πεφωτισμένους τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς τῆς διανοίας ὑμῶν (the eyes of your understanding being enlightened)." For this gift comes from the Father, through Christ. And what is given is the spirit of wisdom and revelation — which makes us wise through the revelation of the mystery of the gospel, not by bare knowledge (γνῶσις) alone, but by full knowledge (ἐπίγνωσις) also, that is, by the acknowledgment of Christ. There is nothing human here, nothing that in any way savors of human wisdom (ἀνθρωπίνη σοφία).

X. In this way, the regenerate are made wise, prudent, and understanding, through the communication of the spirit of wisdom and revelation, which the world cannot receive.

XI. Now the immediate object of this wisdom, although sufficiently plainly indicated above, let us also set forth briefly on its own. Sacred Scripture generally calls it "all things" (πάντα): 1 John 2:20, Ὑμεῖς χρίσμα ἔχετε ἀπὸ τοῦ ἁγίου, καὶ οἴδατε πάντα ("you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things"); and verse 27, Χρίσμα διδάσκει ὑμᾶς περὶ πάντων ("the anointing teaches you concerning all things") — that is, those things which are necessary for the worship of God, our obedience, consolation, and salvation. Also "all the truth" (πᾶσαν τὴν ἀλήθειαν), John 16:13 — namely, all that truth which pertains to the spiritual kingdom of Christ.

XII. Thus believers are initiated into the sacred mysteries of Christ. For it "is given" to them "to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven," Mark 4:11 — mysteries not revealed in ages past, Romans 16:25. "We speak," says the apostle, "wisdom in a mystery" (σοφίαν ἐν μυστηρίῳ), 1 Corinthians 2:7; Ephesians 3:9. And Colossians 2:2-3: "That you may be strengthened in love," καὶ εἰς πάντα πλοῦτον τῆς πληροφορίας τῆς συνέσεως, εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ μυστηρίου τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ Πατρὸς καὶ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἐν ᾧ εἰσὶ πάντες οἱ θησαυροὶ τῆς σοφίας καὶ τῆς γνώσεως ἀπόκρυφοι ("and unto all the riches of the full assurance of understanding, unto the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge"). The foundation is "understanding" (σύνεσις), that is, spiritual intelligence. This, through the grace of God, has joined to it "full assurance" (πληροφορία), and this in turn produces "acknowledgment" (ἐπίγνωσις), that is, the practical recognition of the truth; and this truth is indeed the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of the Son — that is, of God revealing himself to us as Father in the Son. For it is to this that we are brought through the knowledge of Christ, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden, as we have shown at length in our book on the Communion of the Saints with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This mysterious doctrine, I say, is the most distinctive object of evangelical theology — namely, those "depths of God" (τὰ βάθη τοῦ Θεοῦ) which the Spirit searches, that he may reveal them to us, 1 Corinthians 2:10.

XIII. Now through this wisdom, by which the regenerate mind is illumined by the knowledge of the evangelical mystery, the whole man is rendered conformed to heavenly truth. This is the first and most proper effect of this theology: through it, the image of God formerly lost through sin is renewed anew. We have shown in Book One that natural, or innate (ἔμφυτος), theology — materially considered, as they say — was that image of God unto which the first man was created. It consisted of the knowledge of God, together with a ready faculty for living according to the rule of that knowledge. We have treated at length above the obliteration of that image of God through sin. All confess that we cannot be renewed into the image of Christ except through Christ. He is the image of God, 2 Corinthians 4:4; "the image of God" (εἰκὼν τοῦ Θεοῦ), Colossians 1:15; "the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person" (ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης, καὶ χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ), Hebrews 1:3. Now the gospel is the "image" of Christ, or his "face," in which "the glory of the Father shines forth," 2 Corinthians 4:6; or a mirror, in which Christ himself (and consequently the glory of the Father) is set before the renewed mind to be beheld, 2 Corinthians 3:18. And by beholding this image, which we possess through this wisdom, the same image is introduced into our minds: "We are transformed into the same image, from glory to glory." And the new man is renewed "unto knowledge, after the image of him who created him" (εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν κατ᾽ εἰκόνα τοῦ κτίσαντος αὐτόν), Colossians 3:10. That is to say, that very image of God which consisted in natural theology, and which was lost, is renewed through this full knowledge (ἐπίγνωσις), which renders our minds conformed to Christ, who is the image of God.

Likewise the holiness of which we are made partakers in this renewal is called "the holiness of truth" (ὁσιότης τῆς ἀληθείας), Ephesians 4:24, because it proceeds from that truth which, exercising its power in our minds, brings in the image of Christ. For since it pleased God to express his image in Christ by the word of the gospel, that word, made as it were living in our hearts, becomes a living and effectual grace, and the whole soul is delivered over into its mold, Romans 6:17. From this arises "acknowledgment" (ἐπίγνωσις), that is, the recognition of the truth implanted; and "assurance" (ἀσφάλεια), from the real and most present efficacy of the truth; also "perception" (αἴσθησις), that is, a spiritual sense and taste of the evangelical things themselves. This, I say, is the primary effect of this supernatural theology; and had it been unequal to producing it, it could not rightly have been substituted in the place of that natural theology which we lost.

XIV. Further, by the help of this wisdom, we savingly understand the objective truth, that is, the mind of God as set forth in the Sacred Scriptures. Hence it is called "knowledge" (γνῶσις), science, acquaintance, cognition — מַדָּע and דַּעַת. For since believers have an understanding raised and disposed by the spiritual light to the saving perception of the evangelical mystery, it is necessary that they rightly understand the very doctrine in which that mystery is contained. This is that "knowledge of God" so often celebrated in Sacred Scripture. But whoever, from the use of this word, should contend that this theology of ours is a science according to the philosophical use of that term, and should thus force it, as it were, into the rank of the other sciences, would certainly err quite grossly. Something else altogether is at issue here, as we have abundantly proved. Also, what is called "knowledge" with respect to the act of the mind in perceiving its object is called "light" with respect to the principle of action and the manner in which it is borne toward its object. God has called us out of darkness "into his marvelous light" (εἰς τὸ θαυμαστὸν αὐτοῦ φῶς), 1 Peter 2:9. For just as that darkness out of which we were called was not merely objective — that is, a mere ignorance of divine truth not yet revealed — but chiefly internal, that is, the native blindness of our own minds; so that "marvelous light" into which we are called signifies not only evangelical doctrine, but also that spiritual light by which we are made fit rightly to perceive the glory of God. It is illumined by "the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ" (φωτισμὸς τοῦ εὐαγγελίου τῆς δόξης τοῦ Χριστοῦ), 2 Corinthians 4:4. It is in itself an illumination (φωτισμός), and it shines upon (αὐγάζει) our minds. The Holy Spirit sent Paul "to open the eyes" of the Gentiles, "to turn them from darkness to light" (τοῦ ἐπιστρέψαι ἀπὸ σκότους εἰς φῶς), Acts 26:18. The evangelical truth itself is light (φῶς); and light is also communicated to those who are to believe, namely, to open their eyes, that they may see that light, or "the light in God's light," Psalm 36:9. Now this spiritual light so affects the understanding itself that it is said to be another and a new one, Psalm 119:18, 130. And "the Son of God has come, and has given us an understanding, that we may know him who is true" (ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ ἥκει, καὶ δέδωκεν ἡμῖν διάνοιαν, ἵνα γινώσκωμεν τὸν ἀληθινόν), 1 John 5:20 — as though, that is, we had not been endowed with it before. At the very least he so changes the understanding that it becomes able rightly to perform its office: "He opened their mind, that they might understand the Scriptures" (Διήνοιξεν αὐτῶν τὸν νοῦν, τοῦ συνιέναι τὰς γραφάς), Luke 24:45; and "may the Lord give you understanding in all things" (δῴη σοὶ ὁ Κύριος σύνεσιν ἐν πᾶσι), Paul to Timothy, 2 Timothy 2:7; and the psalmist, הֲבִינֵנִי — "Make me understand, and I shall keep your law," Psalm 119:34, 104. On account of this light, then, perfecting the understanding in its act, that knowledge by which believers perceive spiritual things spiritually (πνευματικὰ πνευματικῶς), and not merely by reason of the objective truth, differs immensely from all human knowledge.

XV. Further, this wisdom draws with it, by an indissoluble bond, spiritual affections of heart conformed to the truth acknowledged — because it produces them; and it makes and directs prudent theologians in the whole soul's cultivation of communion with God through Christ, and in the diligent performance of obedience according to the covenant of grace. For he alone is truly wise in the mystery of the gospel who so understands the counsel, love, and grace of God, in and through Christ, according to their revelation made in the word, that, moved by a spiritual and ineffable taste of them, he gives himself wholly to God in the obedience of faith. In this practice of piety, or covenantal obedience — without which whatever is celebrated under the name of wisdom is a bare name, or rather a shadow and mask of wisdom — consists the whole living exercise of this theology. Hence it is called not only "the acknowledgment of the truth which is according to godliness" (ἐπίγνωσις ἀληθείας τῆς κατ᾽ εὐσέβειαν), Titus 1:1, but also piety, worship, and the fear of God, in which all its living acts consist.

There is a remarkable passage in Job, worthy to be held in perpetual memory: Job 28:12-23, "Sapientia unde inveniretur? et ubinam locus intelligentiæ? Non novit mortalis æstimationem ejus..." ("Where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding? No mortal knows its worth, nor is it found in the land of the living. The deep says, It is not in me; and the sea says, It is not with me. Gold, however carefully kept, cannot be given for it, nor can silver be weighed as its price. It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with precious onyx, or with sapphire. No one can value it with gold or with the most brilliant gem, nor can vessels of the purest gold be exchanged for it. Let there be no mention of coral or of pearls, for the acquisition of wisdom goes beyond rubies. No one can value it with the topaz of Ethiopia; it cannot be priced with the finest pure gold. Whence, then, does that wisdom come? and where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hidden from the eyes of every living thing, and concealed even from the birds of the air. Destruction and death say, We have heard the report of it with our ears. God alone understands its way, and he alone knows its place.") Verse 28: "Dixit vero homini, En timor Domini est sapientia; et recedere a malo intelligentia" ("And he said to man, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.")

The holy man conducts a quite anxious inquiry concerning the place, nature, origin, and operations of wisdom. That it is precious, and altogether beyond price, all the works of God confess with one voice; but when asked, they plainly testify that it is not to be found within themselves. For even if a man should become most skilled and most learned concerning their nature and workings, he would not thereby attain to that true wisdom. But lest wretched man should be forever tossed among the rough places in his inquiry after this wisdom, and, after having proved himself a "wild ass's colt" (Job 11:12), should perish eternally, God himself, graciously taking pity on him, showed him the place and nature of that true wisdom: "and he said to man, The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding" — that is, this wisdom consists in the very fear of God and true holiness; this is its proper work, this its life and soul. It is, I say, prudence, or an understanding that directs the whole man in the fear of God and the practice of piety: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," Psalm 111:10. And it also finds its increase there: Psalm 25:14, "The secret of the Lord is with those who fear him, and he will make known to them his covenant." And John 7:17: Ἐάν τις θέλῃ τὸ θέλημα αὐτοῦ ποιεῖν, γνώσεται περὶ τῆς διδαχῆς, πότερον ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστιν ("If anyone is willing to do his will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God"). These things therefore cohere with one another by an indissoluble bond, in such a way that this wisdom first directs us to do the will of God, that is, to obey him in spirit and in truth, and from that evangelical practice of piety it is itself daily advanced and increased. Hence, if anyone has not received that spiritual light of which we have spoken, or, having received it, has not stirred it up by the most diligent and constant use of the means which God has appointed, or, having stirred it up, has not exercised it in the daily practice of all evangelical duties and in departure from evil in all holiness — he will without any doubt labor in vain in expecting progress in the study of this theology, whether useful to himself or acceptable to God. Such is the force of the evangelical promise: John 8:31-32, Ἐὰν ὑμεῖς μείνητε ἐν τῷ λόγῳ τῷ ἐμῷ, ἀληθῶς μαθηταί μου ἐστέ· καὶ γνώσεσθε τὴν ἀλήθειαν, καὶ ἡ ἀλήθεια ἐλευθερώσει ὑμᾶς ("If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free").

The apostle Paul wonderfully displays this bond between wisdom and the practice of piety in every respect, and the power of theology to direct our souls to all evangelical obedience — which is our spiritual prudence — in his epistle to the Colossians, 1:9-10: "We do not cease," he says, ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν προσευχόμενοι, καὶ αἰτούμενοι ἵνα πληρωθῆτε, τὴν ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ θελήματος αὐτοῦ, ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ συνέσει πνευματικῇ· περιπατῆσαι ὑμᾶς ἀξίως τοῦ Κυρίου εἰς πᾶσαν ἀρέσκειαν, ἐν παντὶ ἔργῳ ἀγαθῷ καρποφοροῦντες καὶ αὐξανόμενοι εἰς τὴν ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ Θεοῦ ("praying for you, and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will, in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that you may walk worthy of the Lord unto all well-pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God"). The apostle prays that the Colossian saints may be filled with the acknowledgment of the will of God, that is, with evangelical theology. This is our wisdom, or spiritual understanding. And it puts itself forth in the practice of obedience in every respect. Accordingly the apostle asks that believers be filled with it, not for the sake of knowledge itself, or that they might delight themselves in the acquaintance with spiritual things, but that they might walk worthy before God, unto all that is well-pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work. For such is the nature, such the very genius of this wisdom, that it effectually works all these things in those who become partakers of it. And what, in turn, will come of this? By that very "knowledge of God" (ἐπίγνωσις τοῦ Θεοῦ), by whose power and benefit they prepared themselves to exercise piety, they will be increased and advanced. Thus wisdom and piety mutually foster, advance, increase, and strengthen one another. So blessed Peter, after having recounted in a long series the evangelical virtues by whose exercise the spiritual life puts forth its powers, adds: Ταῦτα ὑμῖν ὑπάρχοντα καὶ πλεονάζοντα, οὐκ ἀργοὺς οὐδὲ ἀκάρπους καθίστησιν εἰς τὴν τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐπίγνωσιν ("these things, being in you and abounding, make you neither idle nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ") — namely, because these are the genuine fruits of the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, to such a degree that where they are lacking, whatever is pretended, the knowledge of Christ is in reality none at all. So the apostle says: Ὧι γὰρ μὴ πάρεστι ταῦτα, τυφλός ἐστι, μυωπάζων ("for he in whom these things are not present is blind, and cannot see afar off"), 2 Peter 1:8-9.

XVI. Let a brief summary of the whole bring this discussion to a close. God takes care and brings it about that the regenerate perceive and understand the truth revealed in Sacred Scripture, unto his own glory and their own salvation. To this end he infuses into their minds, through the Holy Spirit, a saving light. By the benefit of this light they become able and fit to understand spiritual things spiritually (πνευματικὰ πνευματικῶς); without it all labor, and every study directed toward acquiring evangelical theology, will be in vain. Those furnished with this spiritual light he further crowns with the gift of wisdom, that is, he makes them wise through the spirit of revelation, in the knowledge of the mystery of God the Father and of Christ, and of all saving truth. And by the embrace of the truth, their hearts are spiritually enlarged, and a new breadth is added to their minds in their operations — that breadth in which not the least of the scholastic doctors say the liberty of the will consists. By various means, and by various degrees, the objective truth, or evangelical doctrine, is opened up to each one who is furnished with this wisdom, so far as is needed to promote his obedience and consolation. That perception of the truth is the knowledge of God and of his will proclaimed in Sacred Scripture. But this by no means constitutes the whole of theology, as some suppose; rather it is the operation, concerning its proper object, of a mind furnished with evangelical wisdom. Hence the whole soul is conformed to the truth known, so that the very thing which is truth in the word becomes grace in the heart. This wisdom continually spurs the soul on to evangelical obedience, and directs the mind in the exercise of it — this being its proximate end. Insofar as it does this, it is our prudence and understanding. Of the ultimate end there is no need for us to treat; what pertains to it is known from elsewhere. Now this wisdom is capable of degrees. These have respect partly to the spiritual light itself, which the Holy Spirit bestows variously according to his own will, and partly to the object revealed, that is, to evangelical doctrine. For since divine truth is delivered variously in the Sacred Scriptures, as it has pleased the infinite wisdom of God, so, according to each person's spiritual capacity and diligent use of the means suited to promoting the investigation of the various ways in which evangelical doctrine is revealed, its knowledge cannot but vary in degree; yet in such a way that whatever growth occurs in it, of whatever kind, ought to be ascribed to him who gives us to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Chapter 7

The founding of the new church according to the rule of evangelical theology — The first rule of its foundation: its members holy — The holiness of the Jewish church typical, that of the Christian church true — The preaching of John, requiring regeneration — Also that of Christ himself — And of the apostles — The holiness of the evangelical church proved — Second: it is constituted catholic — What its catholicity is — Third: the institution of particular churches for celebrating the appointed worship; their nature — Fourth: the worship of the new church spiritual — Fifth: the single written word the rule of faith, worship, and obedience — Sixth: the presence of Christ through the Spirit.

I. We have shown, in narrating the various degrees and modes of supernatural revelation, that theology divinely revealed has been, in every age, the rule and root by which the church was to be instituted for the solemn celebration of the worship of God. We have also seen how, "in the last days," through his only-begotten Son, who is ever in the bosom of the Father, he set forth all the mysteries of his counsel concerning the demonstration of his glory in the salvation of sinners, and the celebration of his worship. We have further indicated the general nature of that most perfect revelation, insofar as it is communicated to men through the Holy Spirit. It is according to this rule that our Lord Jesus Christ instituted and erected the new church, to endure to the consummation of the age. The plan of our undertaking requires that we relate briefly its state and condition, insofar as they appear to depend on what has already been set forth. I shall, however, speak more briefly than so great a matter deserves — partly because it is not now our purpose directly and expressly to weigh the nature of the evangelical church; partly because, from what has already been said, sufficient light will plainly be lent to what remains to be said; and partly because we are called, by God's gracious disposing, to other concerns.

II. First, then, this theology requires that the evangelical church consist only of the regenerate. Jesus Christ himself, its foundation, the "living stone," admits none to be laid upon himself and built into a spiritual house except "living stones," 1 Peter 2:4. No mortal will ever become his disciple on any other terms. And we have proved at length that the theology which he himself taught us requires the same thing. Let us add still other weighty considerations. God himself pronounced the Jewish people, called into an ecclesiastical estate, wholly holy and pure: עַם קָדוֹשׁ אַתָּה לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ ("you are a holy people to the Lord your God"), Deuteronomy 7:6; 14:2; 26:19. But just as all the institutions proper (οἰκεῖα) to that church were typical, and a shadow of the spiritual "good things to come" (μελλόντων ἀγαθῶν), so that holiness which God ascribes to the whole people was but a certain prefiguration of that "holiness of the truth" (ὁσιότης τῆς ἀληθείας) which the Lord Jesus was to bestow upon his whole church through the Holy Spirit. We have proved above that all their "carnal ordinances" (δικαιώματα σαρκός) were instituted only "until the time of reformation" (μέχρι καιροῦ διορθώσεως). Foreseeing, then, the end for which they were to be abolished, the Holy Spirit describes, in almost every part of the Old Testament, the perpetual state of the church to come. And nothing, among all the predictions concerning that state, occurs more frequently, or is more solemnly set forth, than this true and saving holiness of the members of that church. See Psalm 2:6; 24:3-4; 45:13; 68:13; Isaiah 11:8-10; 35:8; 54:11-14; 60:21; Ezekiel 47:9; Zechariah 14:20-21; Malachi 4:1-2.

III. Now when the kingdom of heaven had already drawn near, John, who was sent to prepare the way of the Lord, expressly declared that true repentance — that is, regeneration, or a true holiness of life — was altogether necessary in order to obtain entrance into the kingdom of God, or the evangelical estate of the church, Matthew 3:2. Moreover, since very many were puffing themselves up over the external privileges which they enjoyed in the Jewish church by virtue of their fleshly descent from the Abrahamic stock, he most plainly declares that these would profit them nothing toward obtaining any part in the kingdom of Christ, unless they should truly repent, verses 9-10. Hence the prophets of old proclaimed that this so greatly desired advent of the Messiah would prove exceedingly terrible to the Jewish church, because he would utterly root out from the borders of the church all who had not attained to true repentance, holiness, and piety, Malachi 3:1-5; 4:1-4. John teaches the same thing, Matthew 3:10. Christ indeed, by his ministry, laid the foundations of the new church, and invited all sinners to himself. But just as he taught that no one could come to him unless drawn by his Father, John 6:44, so he receives no one into his fold unless he has professed true repentance. Indeed, he not only denies that anyone belongs to his church whose righteousness has not exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees and scribes, Matthew 5:20 — that is, the most rigorous profession of true religion and the most exact form (μόρφωσις) of piety — or that anyone can be his disciple who has not denied himself, Matthew 10:38; 16:24; Luke 9:23, and done many other things of this kind; but he also plainly declares this, at the very outset of his preaching, as the foundation and firmest rule of his whole church: namely, that no one, unless he has been born again, can either enter or see that kingdom of God which he was then already erecting, John 3:3, 5.

IV. When the preparatory ministry had run its course, the work of visibly gathering the church, and separating it from the world, was committed by Christ himself, to the utmost of his ability, to each of the apostles, evangelists, and other disciples. Whomever, and of whatever sort, they gathered into the fold of Christ, they everywhere describe thus: they had been born again, called with a holy and effectual calling, godly, faithful, holy, washed, justified, separated from the world and from all evils, sons of God, furnished and anointed with the Holy Spirit, conformed to Christ, living stones, devoted to good works, and renewed after the image of God, Acts 2:41-42, 47; 4:32; 8:37; 10:47; 13:48; 16:14-15; 19:18-19; Romans 1:7; 12:1-2; 1 Corinthians 1:2, 9, 30; 16:1; 2 Corinthians 1:1; 8:5; Ephesians 1:1-2, 13; 2:5, 9-10; Philippians 1:1, 6-7; Colossians 1:2-5; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; 2 Timothy 3:5; Hebrews 3:6; 1 Peter 1:2-5; 2:4-5; 2 Peter 1:1-4; 1 John 2:20, 27; Jude 1. But the profane, unbelievers, the disobedient, those ignorant of the evangelical mystery, hypocrites, those conformed to the world, haters of what is good, and all others of that sort, they everywhere kept far from the borders of the church. I confess, indeed, that these things were done not in heaven, and by the judgment of God who "knows the heart" (καρδιογνώστης), but among men. And therefore, although the utmost care was taken that only the sheep of Christ, and those who were obedient to his word, should be admitted into his holy fold, yet many hypocrites crept in, who afterward either disturbed the state of the church by a foul apostasy, or defiled it by their vicious continuance within it.

V. Second, this theology requires that the church, as to its outward condition, be catholic. The church is no longer to be confined to a single region, land, people, family, or nation; but by the power of this theology its bounds were to be extended through all the quarters of the world, all tongues, tribes, families, nations, peoples, through every condition of men. No longer does any one city, mountain, place, seat, or temple enjoy any privilege, above all others, of worship, presence, or divine blessing. Now that the veil of the temple has been torn, the dividing wall broken down, the boundaries of the holy land removed and extended from its rising to its setting, all places and all nations are held by God with no distinction. Jerusalem is no more pleasing to him than Rome, Constantinople, London, or Oxford — no more than the meanest village in the remotest barbarism, wherever evangelical worship is rightly celebrated, and men depart from iniquity through the Spirit of Christ. There is not the slightest shadow of any such teaching in the whole Old Testament, nor the least trifling indication in the New, of the preference of any seat, place, or city above others. Wherever testimonies are found on this point, they exist to the contrary. When of old it indeed pleased God to prefer one place above all others, and to establish a peculiar seat for his worship, he not only everywhere impressed an honorable mention of it, but also commanded all his worshipers, under the penalty of being cut off from the number of his people, to celebrate his solemn worship there. After the gospel was revealed, there is a profound silence concerning any one or several places of this kind. Of Rome, nothing at all — except that in certain books its most foul apostasy from Christ is wonderfully foretold. Now "wherever two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, he himself is in the midst of them." No one can any longer cast the faithful out of the inheritance of Christ, since all the ends of the earth have been ceded to him for a possession. Though by the violence, fraud, and tyranny of the world and of Satan they should be driven into deserted places, into the vastest wildernesses, to the ends of the earth — though they should be exiled beyond the paths of the year and of the sun — wherever they are, the dust upon which they lie down to sleep is equally holy, and their gatherings equally holy, as any that might one day be at Rome, London, or Oxford. Sheepfolds, farmers' barns, the dens of wild beasts, mountain peaks, caves and hollows of the earth, in which two or three, or more, faithful servants of Christ find it necessary to gather to celebrate the worship prescribed to them by their Lord — these are no less pleasing to God than those buildings to which some, quite inappropriately, and against the whole genius of evangelical theology, would wish to bind the solemn worship of God.

VI. Third, in this theology the Lord Jesus commanded all his disciples, and all the subjects of his kingdom, that in order for evangelical worship to be visibly and solemnly carried on, everywhere on earth, to the glory of God, the edification of believers in mutual faith and love, and their consolation, they should, being separated from the world and united to one another by the bond of brotherly love, gather themselves into particular assemblies (for which they should designate and choose, in his name, those who were to preside over them). For he willed that his people should be, in the day of his power, wholly voluntary. And just as he established the bounds and limits of his catholic church by the wills of his elect people, made subject to his rule through the efficacy of grace — so that it extended only so far as a willing people were prepared to submit themselves to him — so also for these particular assemblies, in which alone the evangelical worship instituted by him can rightly be carried out, he established no other bounds than the wills of the faithful who gather themselves into them.

VII. That one family, one city, one town or village, one people, one nation, one kingdom, should be one church, Christ nowhere ever taught. Rather, the source of the constitution of a particular evangelical church is the voluntary obedience of Christ's faithful disciples; relying on his authority alone, they come together into the society established by him. For he himself, as we have said, ordained that all the faithful, in every part of the earth, should gather themselves into assemblies of this kind, in which they should devote themselves to evangelical worship according to his own prescription, exercise the discipline instituted by him, diligently see to the preservation and growth of the whole assembly and the multiplication of the faithful, be subject to those who, by his prescription, preside over the assemblies, according to the ecclesiastical canons laid down in the gospel, mutually help one another by counsel, prayers, alms, and spiritual communion, openly proclaim the truth, spread the sweet fragrance of the gospel, and finally convict and judge the world by holiness of life, by zeal for good works, and by the utmost observance of peace and love among themselves. Obedient to his word, the faithful of old established assemblies of this kind everywhere throughout the earth, and will go on establishing them to the consummation of the age.

VIII. Fourth, this theology teaches that the religious worship which the Lord Jesus willed to be celebrated in those assemblies is altogether spiritual. Christ did away with all external splendor, all fleshly ornament, however brilliant with visible glory, admitting into his worship only very few ceremonies, and those simple ones, newly instituted. See John 4:23; 2 Corinthians 3:6-11; Hebrews 9:1-12. Whereas, as long as it pleased God to make use, in his worship, of things glorious with visible and fleshly adornment, he himself expressly, at great length and with the utmost accuracy, prescribed everything down to the smallest point. The Lord Jesus, therefore, could not more expressly have cast out all worldly ornament, and all ceremonies except those which he himself expressly instituted, from occupying any place in his worship, than he did by his silence throughout this whole theology. To his worship he also added a discipline, spiritual and to be administered spiritually, for the preservation of evangelical obedience — of which we have treated elsewhere.

IX. Fifth, that all things in his churches might be rightly carried out according to the will of God, he willed that this evangelical theology, reduced to writing at his command — that is, his own word — should be the sole norm and rule of faith, obedience, and all worship; and thus he willed that neither he himself, nor his word, should be other than one and the same throughout the churches. Whatever is done in them beyond his prescription is done without his authority, Matthew 28:18-20.

X. Sixth, to these assemblies gathered in his name he graciously promised his own presence, through the Holy Spirit, even to the consummation of the age, Matthew 28:20; John 14:15-16; 16:7. He willed, therefore, that the same Spirit whom he commanded believers to ask of the Father with every prayer, Luke 11:13, should be all in all throughout the whole of evangelical worship. See Luke 12:10; John 3:5-6, 8; 4:24; Romans 7:6; 8:1-2, 9, 13, 26; 15:30; 1 Corinthians 2:4; 12:13; 2 Corinthians 3:8; Galatians 5:16, 25; Ephesians 2:18; 4:3; 5:18; 6:17-18; Philippians 1:19; 2:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:19. And thus the Lord Jesus sent forth his disciples, instructed in this theology, into the world, that they might glorify him and his Father through the Spirit.

Chapter 8

The apostasy of the Christian church — The causes of the perpetuity of the evangelical church — The defection of particular churches — Predictions of it — The objection concerning the Roman church — Defection from the first theological principle of the founding of the church.

I. That our Lord Jesus Christ instituted his church with the utmost wisdom, as befitted him who is the way, the life, and the truth, is admitted by all, and we have proved it in a few words. That this church will endure to the end of the age, he himself has promised, and the nature of the kingdom given him by the Father requires it. For since nothing was ever to be added to the faith once delivered by the Son of God to the saints, and since the whole state of the church depends on revealed theology, it is plainly impossible that any innovation should occur in it like those we have reviewed above; or that, since it is itself the visible kingdom of Christ, it should utterly vanish away. But since the evangelical church is catholic, and bound to no place, seat, family, or nation, it is not necessary that this or that particular assembly, gathered and called in this or that place, should continue forever. It is abundantly sufficient for the preservation of the catholic church on earth that worshipers of the true God in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, should always exist somewhere. But Scripture teaches that any particular assembly — which is called a particular church from the particular place where it is gathered — is capable of falling away in the course of time; and events have shown that some have indeed fallen away. For the Holy Spirit testifies that certain churches, within a few years after their first calling, so far departed from faith, love, and purity that, unless they most speedily repented, Christ declared he would utterly desert them, Revelation 2:1-4, 16-20. The same Spirit also foretold a certain general defection of those professing the name of Christ from his yoke and from the rule of evangelical theology — a defection which had already, while some of the apostles still lived, put forth certain roots — 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 7-8. John sets forth at length, in the Apocalypse, the rise, progress, most horrible effects, and outcome of that defection. And although most other churches, if not all of them, throughout the whole world, have been implicated in a share of this crime, yet that vast mass of hypocrites and idolaters, spread through various nations, which loves to be called the Roman church, has so far outstripped all others in wickedness, and has drawn all the predictions upon itself alone, that it alone at last deserves to be adduced as the example of a total defection from the rule of evangelical theology. And since very many learned men have devoted themselves to the task of investigating the rise, progress, and various degrees of that defection, the guilt and blame of which the Roman church has taken upon herself, and since scarcely anything can be added to their fidelity and diligence, it will suffice for me to uncover briefly the principles and sources of the whole execrable apostasy, from which all the particular monstrosities of errors and superstitions of which it consists gradually flowed. And I do this the more willingly because I seem to see that very many churches, freed by God's grace from the guilt and stain of that defection in which they were entangled for several ages, are not yet sufficiently cautious and watchful lest they fall again into the causes, occasions, and sources of the same most foul apostasy. The same path, therefore, which we traveled before must here be retraced. We have shown that the apostasy of the churches of every age has lain in the neglect and abandonment of those theological principles which were peculiar or proper to that enlargement of theology on which their institution rested. We have also set forth, in the preceding chapter, what those heads of evangelical theology were which our Lord Jesus Christ laid down for the building of his church. The oblivion, neglect, and contempt of these gave rise, in times past, to the rise and progress of the churches' defection — and would that they did not still do so. We shall show this in order.

II. The constitution of the church — namely, that it must consist of the regenerate, who blamelessly profess "righteousness and holiness of the truth" (δικαιοσύνην, καὶ ὁσιότητα τῆς ἀληθείας) — holds the place of the first foundation in this theology of ours. From the neglect of this principle there attached to the churches at least "the first stain of the evil" that carried with it the beginning of defection. For since, on the one hand, it seemed to be in the interest of those who presided over the churches in Christ's name that as many as possible should be admitted into them, and since, on the other hand, worldly enticements were not lacking to allure many who were touched by scarcely any sense of spiritual and heavenly things to take up the profession of the Christian name, this solemn institution of Christ was despised, and profane, superstitious, carnal, proud, covetous, and dissolute men rushed into the churches in droves. Let Augustine be a witness, in his book On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, chapter 2: "There are," he says, "those who wish to be Christians in order either to win favor with men from whom they expect temporal advantages, or because they are unwilling to offend those whom they fear; the church bears with them for a time."

III. From this, the church's doctrine concerning faith especially, and regeneration, was gradually corrupted; the splendor and glory of holiness was lost; separation from the world was neglected; the most superstitious observances were introduced for the use of the Christian populace; and discipline was gradually degraded into the semblance of a kind of secular jurisdiction. For after the crowd of hypocrites, and of others who had not been regenerated, had by their multitude, as it were, overwhelmed the church, it either pleased or suited the doctors of the church to change the spiritual doctrine of the gospel — so that it might be accommodated to the state and condition of those of whom the church was now composed — into a kind of philosophical wisdom. From this, faith came to be nothing but a correct opinion or persuasion about God; regeneration, the external rite of baptism; while the glory of holiness could, in those assemblies where the greater part were either hostile enemies of it, or at least of a mind sufficiently estranged from it, be preserved by no arts, by no coloring of pretexts. And since almost the whole world, drawn by various motives, had taken up the profession of the Christian religion, and had foully contaminated almost all the institutions of Christ, how could separation from it be established without incurring the suspicion of schism from the church itself? Further, we have shown that the discipline instituted by Christ was altogether spiritual. In order for it to obtain its force and efficacy over men, it is required that those upon whom it is to be exercised should themselves likewise be spiritual. Since, then, hypocrites and carnal men destitute of the Spirit had taken possession of the churches — among whom that most gentle and spiritual discipline of Jesus Christ could in no way attain its proposed end — it was despised and neglected, and only its shadow retained, while a secular regime of this sort crept into the churches, by which those hypocrites, or wicked and criminal men, might be coerced to some extent. Moreover, out of that impure crowd which, through the contempt of this principle, overwhelmed the churches, very many were most deeply steeped in Jewish and pagan superstitions, through whom at length almost the whole of Hellenism, interpolated with certain Jewish observances, was introduced into the church. From this source, indeed, sprang the worship of angels, of dead men, and of images; purgatory; nuns; priests; the very sacrifice of the mass; the consecration of temples; the observance of festivals (to omit, for instance, the little images offered to the gods, once given to the wealthy; the Saturnalian lighting of lamps on altars; the torches of the Februa, once carried in the sacred rites of the greater gods, then at the festival of the Virgin; the Hilaria celebrated for the Mother of the Gods at the beginning of spring; and countless other things) — these seeds of ancient superstition sprouted up in the Christian religion. Having reviewed some of these, Baronius adds, in his notes on the Roman Martyrology, February 2: "So too it happened in many other institutions of the Gentiles, that their superstitious usage, purified by sacred rites and rendered sacrosanct, was laudably introduced into the church of God." This most learned man thus openly confesses that pagan superstition was admitted into the church — although the Belgian censors, in their expurgatory index, order the deletion of those words of Polydore Vergil, from his On the Inventors of Things, Book 5, chapter 1: "A person modestly scrupulous in this matter might perhaps say that he simply does not know whether they are emulating the religion, or rather the superstition, of the ancients" — a judgment which agrees with that of Baronius himself.

As time went on, not without a foul defilement of Christ's sacred institutions, the rulers of the churches admitted into them a whole medley of the nations. Let an example be the admission of the English, through the monk Augustine, to the baptismal water, which Camden relates in his account of Britain, from an ancient fragment of that period: "Augustine, on a single day of the Lord's Nativity — a day on which the whole glory of the English is perpetually celebrated — regenerated by life-giving baptism more than ten thousand men, besides an innumerable multitude of women and children. But what abundance of sacred rites, or of orders of priests, could have sufficed to wash so great a people? And so, the river called in English the Swale being blessed" (it is a river in the county of Yorkshire), "the chief pontiff commands them, through heralds and pairs of masters, to go boldly in, and, in the threefold name of the Deity, to baptize one another in turn. And thus all were reborn, by a miracle no less than that by which the people of Israel once crossed over to the other bank through the divided sea, and likewise through the Jordan turned back." Bede relates these things concerning Paulinus.

IV. Whoever this may have been, no one can doubt that he furnished a striking example of defection from the principles of evangelical theology. And it was from this impious intermixture — which was the fountain and origin of the first ecclesiastical defection after the entrance of sin, Genesis 6:1-2, 4, and which, even after God had most gravely warned the people of Israel in many places to guard themselves against it, Exodus 23:32; 34:12-14; Deuteronomy 7:2-5, likewise gave rise to their apostasy, Judges 2:1-3 — that the Christian church contracted almost its first stain and corruption.

V. Second, the second peculiar principle of evangelical theology, which regards the founding of the new church, establishes its catholicity. In the defection from the rule of this principle, the fatal apostasy took its own further step. For since very many of the ancient Christians either wrongly understood this principle, or foully neglected it, I know not what monstrous opinions were born from it. The fiction of the apostolic sees inflicted the first wound upon it. For after it had suited certain persons that this or that church, gathered in some famous city, should be preferred above other churches, little pretexts were straightway devised — concerning which Sacred Scripture maintains the deepest silence — assigning I know not what secular privileges to this or that place. And all those pieces of reasoning fought directly against the catholicity of the evangelical church. For whereas all the apostles had received a command from Christ that, so far as lay in their power, they should proclaim the gospel to all nations — which command they also diligently fulfilled to the utmost, never settling long in any one place, so that Paul alone, before his course was even finished, "preached the gospel from Jerusalem and the surrounding regions as far as Illyricum," Romans 15:19 — yet almost immediately after their deaths a rumor grew up that they had fixed their seats here and there. So it began to be said that Peter had his see in this place, John or James his throne in that. From that most false rumor, those places began to be held in esteem, and to be reckoned as furnished, above all others, with I know not what privileges. After various disputes, resting on these shameful lies, and contentions among the rulers of the churches, wickedly contending for primacy (ἀρχή) and preeminence among brothers, against the express command of the Lord Jesus — secular arrogance and Satanic ambition having been admitted into the church — there at length raised itself up that which utterly overthrew the catholicity of the church: the Roman papacy. For from that time, one city, indeed one man, arrogated to himself the name and every dignity of the church; and — the very height of madness — the flatterers of that one man sold off that particular church, over which the pope presides in an altogether secular manner, in place of the catholic church itself. This assertion denies and overturns the very nature of the catholic church. And this was the second cause of that monstrous apostasy, in whose guilt almost the whole Christian world has bound itself.

VI. Third, Christ established particular assemblies of the faithful, gathering themselves together of their own accord, as the seats for the visible and solemn exercise of his worship. But the apostates overturned the nature of the particular churches no less than that of the catholic church. For while the catholic church was confined within limits and bounds nowhere divinely prescribed to it, they expanded the particular churches to such a degree that they were altogether unfit for performing those offices for the discharge of which they were appointed by Christ. For since the profession of the Christian name had very often, and with excessive haste, taken possession of whole cities, regions, and nations, the church of that place or nation took the place of whatever form of political union and constitution each of them had previously possessed. One empire, one kingdom, one commonwealth migrated everywhere into one church. From this there necessarily followed also a disposition of the church of the same kind as that which had previously held in the political state. Let the Roman church serve as an example: being particular, yet wishing to be catholic, it exceeded the manner and nature of a particular church, yet did not attain to that of a catholic one, and so lost the whole nature of a church, being neither particular nor catholic. That church, I say, after it had leapt over the limits prescribed to it by Christ, and had determined that all the subjects of the Roman Empire everywhere, who had embraced the gospel, belonged to itself, its care, and its rule — since it was, of course, the church of Rome — was gradually transformed into the image of that very empire, and had nothing further in common with the institution of Christ. It is well known that the same thing happened among particular nations.

VII. Fourth, evangelical theology teaches, in the next place, that the glory of the religious worship to be celebrated in the churches is internal and spiritual. It is a presumption common to all men that in divine worship there is something of the divine (θεῶν τι), and some glory. Thus no one can be pleased with that observance of religious worship in which he can perceive no glory or splendor. But no one perceives the spiritual glory of spiritual worship unless he himself...

...should likewise be spiritual. After, therefore, a crowd of the unregenerate had everywhere crept into the church, which is the seat of evangelical worship — a crowd that could not perceive its spiritual glory, nor be steeped in its sweetness — it resolved to devise for itself showy ceremonies of this sort, which might render the worship it had taken up splendid and glorious.

VIII. For although the ordinances of the gospel possess an ineffable beauty, a surpassing glory, and a splendor far exceeding every external splendor, in the case of those who, in observing them, obtain the sweetest communion with God the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit; yet to all those who, being carnal, savor only of external things, they seem to have no glory or splendor whatsoever. Hence hypocrites, poured out into every kind of superstition — in order, namely, to supply the lack in worship which alone has a place in their minds — busied themselves, under the specious pretext of beauty, ornament, order, and glory, in devising new rites and new ceremonies without end or measure, until not only was the whole worship of the church turned into a vain, superstitious, theatrical hodge-podge of carnal rites, but it came to rest in abominable idolatry. Evangelical discipline owed its ruin to the same vice. For since hypocrites neither felt its spiritual power, nor cared for it, nor were able to perceive how it might exert any efficacy upon those like themselves, they resolved to introduce in its place a plainly secular power, exercised by carnal means. Hence exhortations, admonitions, and brotherly reproofs — private ones, and those applied by the whole church with the utmost gentleness, charity, and peace in the Holy Spirit — degenerated into I know not what jurisdictions, courts, citations, fines, lawsuits, tumults, and clamors, all crammed full of tyranny and ambition, until nothing sincere, holy, spiritual, brotherly, or evangelical was left in the whole discipline of the church.

IX. Fifth, there is no need to dwell on the defection from the fullness of the Scriptures — a fault in which the ancient churches entangled themselves — since the matter is sufficiently well known from the writings of many. I will treat it briefly. Since some placed great weight and importance upon things of which no mention at all is made in the sacred Scriptures, and of which, for that very reason, they might easily have been persuaded that they ought to occupy no place in the worship of God or in the churches of Christ, they betook themselves at once to traditions, or to things which they had heard, by the most uncertain rumors, that their predecessors had observed. And as the reverence for those things which were not instituted by Christ in the sacred Scriptures daily grew — since they served admirably the ambition of some, and secular advantage, and the outward splendor of religious worship — Scripture began daily to grow cheap, while traditions, and some sort of authority of the church, began to be held in higher and higher esteem. The ancient serpent never administered to the church a more present poison. For once the stable, fixed, infallible authority and rule of the word of God had been cast away, the professors of the Christian name had nowhere to betake themselves in safety, until they flung themselves headlong into the abyss of every error, heresy, and idolatry.

X. Sixth, to all these was added a monstrous contempt for the Most Holy Spirit, whom Christ promised to his churches. Christ undertook the care of perpetuating his church until the consummation of the age. To that end he employs the written word together with the presence and grace of the Holy Spirit. The word clearly reveals and sets forth whatever pertains to the faith, obedience, and the whole worship of the church. That the faithful might rightly use that word for the calling, edification, and consolation of the church, and indeed for the whole work of the ministry, the Spirit continually bestows and distributes his χαρίσματα ("gifts"). To that end, as we have shown, he was promised by Christ. But when the professors of the Christian name, grown weary of the word and of Christ's own institutions, had set their minds to embrace and follow, in the worship of God, either their own εὑρήματα ("inventions") or things πατροπαράδοτα ("handed down from the fathers"), they gradually came to reckon as nothing even the Spirit himself, and Christ's promise concerning his mission. For once other means of perpetuating the church had been devised — a church employing an ἀγράφῳ ("unwritten") worship, by means, namely, of a successive flow of ministerial power, and of secular learning and doctrine — at once all authority of, and expectation from, the Holy Spirit grew cheap. And once the word of God had been despised, the Spirit of Christ neglected, and an unwritten worship introduced, for the discharge of which there was no need at all of the gifts or grace of the Spirit, apostasy had nowhere further to go.

XI. To all these may be added the mixture of evangelical doctrine with secular philosophy — a matter which, since I fear we may still be caught in its thorns and brambles, I have judged should be examined in a separate digression.

Digression: On the Mixture of Philosophy with Theology

I. The apostle Paul, in the second chapter of his epistle to the Colossians, most solemnly warns the faithful to beware "lest anyone spoil them through philosophy" (Colossians 2:8). Nearly all interpreters hold that the apostle is there censuring not the use of philosophy but its abuse. But whether the mixing of philosophy with theology belongs to its use, or rather to its abuse, is not a question on which all agree. For it is most certain that in every age there have been pious and learned men who, led by reverence for this apostolic instruction, have absolutely rejected every use of it in divine matters. But neither Paul, nor anyone else following in his footsteps, ever condemned the arousing and furthering of the common natural notions that distinguish good from evil, honorable from base, together with a skillful, prudent, and assiduous contemplation and inquiry into the works of God — creation and providence — so that men's minds might thereby be kindled to render the obedience due to God in holiness. But since those notions are imperfect and for the most part corrupted, and the human mind stumbles wretchedly in its consideration of the works of God, whatever knowledge seems to arise from them must necessarily be tested against the touchstone of sacred Scripture.

II. Here we consider only the primary end of all knowledge, namely, living to God; we are little concerned with bare speculations, by which the innate curiosity of the human mind exercises itself, and which neither direct nor perfect the rational understanding in relation to God. We have shown besides that, unless these common notions (κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι, "common notions") of good and evil, and the contemplation of the works of nature and providence, occupy some other place in the knowledge of God than that which was assigned to them in the first state of man, all study spent in advancing them will be entirely in vain. But these are not the things we are dealing with here. The philosophy which now everywhere prevails, as it has for many ages been cultivated by men utterly ignorant of the true God and of his will, is quite another matter. What is called into question is its use in theology — that is, the mixing with the doctrine of the gospel of the principles, notions, and hypotheses which it teaches; and of the means, methods, and terms which it devised to serve the human understanding as it is occupied with natural objects — or rather, which certain men, sharp in their own opinion and θεωρητικοί ("theoretical, speculative"), employed at their own discretion in polishing it — when these are applied to the narration, declaration, exposition, and preaching of that doctrine.

What sense learned men formerly held on this question, and what some still hold, can be shown by a few testimonies. "There are," says Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, book 1, "those who think that philosophy came into life as a very great evil and for the ruin of mankind, as something set going by some malicious inventor." Tertullian, in his Prescription against Heretics, says: "Heresies are set going by philosophy; hence the Aeons, and the 'forms,' and I know not what threefold nature of man in Valentinus — he had been a Platonist; hence Marcion's 'better God,' from his idea of tranquility — that came from the Stoics; and where the soul is said to perish, that is observed from the Epicureans; and that the restoration of the flesh is denied is taken from one and the same school of all the philosophers. What then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What the Academy with the Church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our system comes from the porch of Solomon; we have no need of curiosity after Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry after the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing further to believe: for this we believe first, that there is nothing further which we ought to believe." And Justin Martyr, to the Greeks: Ἐπειδήπερ ἱκανῶς ἐκ τῶν προειρημένων τὰ τῶν φιλοσόφων ὑμῶν ἐλήλεγκται πράγματα πάσης ἀγνοίας καὶ ἀπάτης φανέντα πλήρη ("since it has now been sufficiently proven from what has been said that the doctrines of your philosophers have appeared full of all ignorance and deceit"). The same Tertullian calls the philosophers "the patriarchs of the heretics," and Jerome says almost the same, book 2, chapter 37.

III. But it is not our purpose to heap up testimonies. It will be enough to have indicated that there have not been lacking great and holy men who have registered their opposition to the opinion and practice both of this age and of several past ages. What I myself think on this matter I will state briefly — more briefly, perhaps, than so great a subject deserves, since for many reasons my discourse, panting toward the end of the work, rushes headlong.

IV. In the doctrine of the Scriptures two things come to be considered: first, the divine truth itself; and then, the manner of narrating or expounding that truth. What the nature of that truth itself is, and how it has nothing in common with common philosophy, we have shown before. What remains to be weighed is the manner in which that truth is delivered and expounded from the sanctuary of the divine mind. That this manner is varied and πολυποίκιλον ("manifold, richly diverse") is known to all who take care to know the will of God revealed in his word. It must be confessed that scarcely anywhere are those rules and methods observed in it which the whole art of logic prescribes for use in the systematic teaching of any doctrine or science. As, then, the doctrine itself, which concerns the faith and obedience of sinners, flowed from pure and simple revelation, having gone forth from the bosom of the Father through the only-begotten Jesus Christ, so the manner of relating or expounding it through the Holy Spirit, rejoicing in a certain singular divine loftiness, is of an altogether different kind, and is quite dissonant from that manner which is perhaps apt and suitable for the teaching of merely human matters and sciences — or at least so it appears to most. This the apostle teaches us: Καὶ ὁ λόγος μου καὶ τὸ κήρυγμά μου οὐκ ἐν πειθοῖς ἀνθρωπίνης σοφίας λόγοις, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν ἀποδείξει Πνεύματος καὶ δυνάμεως· ἵνα ἡ πίστις ὑμῶν μὴ ᾖ ἐν σοφίᾳ ἀνθρώπων, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν δυνάμει Θεοῦ. Σοφίαν δὲ λαλοῦμεν ἐν τοῖς τελείοις· σοφίαν δὲ οὐ τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, οὐδὲ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου, τῶν καταργουμένων· ἀλλὰ λαλοῦμεν σοφίαν Θεοῦ ἐν μυστηρίῳ, τὴν ἀποκεκρυμμένην ("And my speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Yet we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom" — 1 Corinthians 2:4-7). Let the reader find that passage expounded above. Let him consult also Ephesians 1:8-9, 17-19; Colossians 1:27-28, 2:2, 8-9.

V. Since, then, this has been the character of evangelical truth and of its exposition in the sacred Scriptures, there appear to be, among others, two things quite inconvenient to that truth itself which have crept into it out of common philosophy. From this, first, arose that arrangement or compaction of spiritual truth — variously and ποικίλως ἐν ἀποδείξει πνεύματος ("in manifold ways, by demonstration of the Spirit") revealed — into a systematic order and a technically (τεχνικῶς) methodical sequence, such as everywhere prevails in the schools and churches. It is, I say, from this ill-omened alliance of common philosophy with theology that almost all theological systems, commonplaces, and other such hodge-podges of credible propositions owe their origin. Then, under the pretext of a more accurate doctrine, the articles of divine truth — that is, credible propositions gathered and excerpted from the Scriptures and arranged into such formulas — are expounded mixed with philosophical terms and notions. Out of these two things arises a certain philosophical theology (which in the writings of some approaches nearer to theology, in others to philosophy), by which evangelical doctrine is cast down from its spiritual sublimity and loses its heavenly amplitude. Such is the theology which most learned men, in whatever sect of Christians, teach and profess. Hence it comes about that there is no article of evangelical truth — however plain, obvious, and open to the understanding of the faithful in itself, and whatever spiritual power and efficacy all the saints who cultivate communion with God in Christ experience in it — but that, if it is undertaken to be related accurately and ἀκριβῶς ("precisely") by some philosophically learned man, it is at once so hedged about with such terms, notions, and weighty considerations — or rather trifles — that even the apostle Paul himself, were he not trained in the Peripatetic school, would in vain strive to understand or grasp it.

VI. This subtlety in disputation among the ancient philosophers, on account of which no one was able to perceive the truth, Lucian deservedly mocked long ago in his Menippus (Νεκυομαντία, "Necromancy"); after he had wittily harried their most uncertain opinions, he adds — and this was the most absurd of all absurd things — Καὶ τὸ πάντων δεινῶν ἀτοπώτατον, ὅτι περὶ τῶν ἐναντιωτάτων ἕκαστος αὐτῶν λέγων, σφόδρα νικῶντας καὶ πιθανοὺς λόγους ἐπορίζετο, ὥστε μήτε τῷ θερμὸν τὸ αὐτὸ πρᾶγμα λέγοντι, μήτε τῷ ψυχρὸν, ἀντιλέγειν ἔχειν, καὶ ταῦτα, εἰδότα σαφῶς, ὡς οὐκ ἄν ποτε θερμόν τι εἴη καὶ ψυχρὸν ἐν ταὐτῷ χρόνῳ ("and the most absurd of all these absurd things was that, each of them speaking about the very same contrary matters, they supplied arguments so utterly convincing and persuasive that one could contradict neither the man who called the very same thing hot nor the man who called it cold — and this, although one clearly knew that the same thing could never be at once both hot and cold") — that is, each of them, speaking of contrary things, brought forward reasons so quite unanswerable and persuasive that he could say nothing in reply either to the one who contended that hot and cold were altogether the same thing, even though he clearly knew that it could never happen that the same thing should be at once both hot and cold. It pleases me, therefore, to trace the origin and progress of this evil a little further back.

VII. When the gospel was first preached in the world, its professors reckoned that their task was to proclaim, by faith and love, the virtues of him who had called them out of darkness and translated them into his marvelous light. The celebration of the riches of that divine grace by which they had been justified through the blood of Christ and delivered from the wrath to come; the admiration and contemplation of the ineffable love of Jesus the Mediator in the work of redemption; the assiduous imitation of his example in all holy obedience and holiness of life, by which, through the help of the Holy Spirit poured out πλουσίως ("richly"), they might daily be made more conformable to him; mutual love among themselves; zeal for good works useful among men; the worship of God in spirit and in truth according to the rule of the gospel, and the observance of the simplicity of the institutions of Jesus Christ — these made up their religion, and the whole business and rationale of their devotion to it. For those led by the Spirit of God and relying on the word, it was wisdom, life, and religion to do and suffer great things according to the will of Christ. Nor were they ever left destitute of the spiritual and ineffable joys and consolations necessary to the state and condition in which they stood. Not much time, however, had elapsed from the beginning of gospel preaching before wicked men, διεφθαρμένοι τὸν νοῦν ("corrupted in mind"), at the instigation of him who lords it over the minds of men beset by spiritual darkness, began variously to twist and pervert the heavenly truth. For since they themselves were carnal, and it could not but be that spiritual things were foolishness to them, they attempted to pervert the doctrine of the gospel into a kind of secular wisdom. Hence some dreamed that Christ himself was a shadow, a phantasm, an idea, a mere man, a spiritual man deified, even the sun itself; and that faith was nothing but a bare notion or knowledge of spiritual things, or even a vain opinion of fanatical perfection. And these things, indeed, they fabricated while "knowing neither the Father nor the Son." For it is customary with men of this sort — since they cannot understand spiritual things πνευματικῶς ("spiritually") — to indulge their own minds by fastening philosophical notions upon the sacred writings. That this poison began gradually to creep in while the apostles were still living — at least some of them — the sacred page itself testifies, and what remains of the history of those times bears it out. But Satan, unequal to their authority, at once succumbed in that first assault upon the truth. Yet once the sacred choir of apostles and evangelists had been taken away, he again took up the work of corrupting evangelical truth, not without success. For what he was never able to accomplish by open attack, he gradually obtained by the defense of the truth. For after the generation of men ὑπὸ Πνεύματος ἁγίου ("borne along by the Holy Spirit") infallibly had ceased to exist on the earth, the patronage of the truth passed into the hands of men most thoroughly furnished with every secular wisdom. Among these were Clement, Origen, Tertullian, and countless others. Since it did not suffice for these men to use, against the enemies of the truth, those weapons which are not carnal — namely, the word and the Spirit of Christ — they were pleased also to attack with arguments drawn from secular learning. And when they saw the heretics, as they called them (though these were plainly philosophers masquerading under the Christian name), dragging the express words of sacred Scripture in a direction other than they ought, they attempted, by devising new terms in the exposition of the truth, to drag them out of the hiding-places of their errors and fallacies.

VIII. But it happened, as time went on, that those philosophical arguments which learned men had employed in the defense of the truth, and the terms and words by which they had expressed this or that article of divine truth, came to be regarded as necessary parts of the religion of Jesus Christ. As yet, however, no methodical confession of faith had crept into the church, beyond that summary of what was to be believed which is commonly called the Apostles' Creed. The faithful had not yet admitted any system or body of theology, or catechism, methodically arranged and philosophically adorned. Sacred Scripture alone was the rule for settling controversies and teaching the people; only, they were too much led away, by a vain opinion of traditions, from the expectation of that instructing Spirit who was promised to believers, to that end, through Jesus Christ. But daily, among learned men, there grew an itch for mixing philosophical or secular wisdom with theological matters — and they especially rushed headlong into that ruin once, being destitute of spiritual gifts, or not sufficiently trusting them, they had nothing besides secular learning by which to distinguish themselves among their friends or overwhelm their adversaries. There was no age that did not give some notable increase to this evil, which was in truth the ruin and calamity of the church's very foundation. Thus, while some devised new words and turns of phrase, others employed subtleties and philosophical modes of argument, and there were those who invented dialectical knots and bonds by which to bind the adversaries of the truth, and very many twisted the words which the Holy Spirit uses in expounding supernatural truth into an ἐξωτικόν ("foreign, external") and philosophical sense — the most holy and spiritual doctrine of Jesus Christ was variously corrupted by secular wisdom, and very nearly lost.

IX. In no other way did that most learned man Apollinarius lapse into schism, and incur a rather severe censure from the church, than by indulging too much — although he was the sharpest of disputants — in philosophical subtleties in the defense of the truth; as Acacius, bishop of Beroea, relates in his letter to Cyril of Alexandria, which is inserted in the acts of the Council of Ephesus: Τί γὰρ ὤνησεν Ἀπολλινάριος ὁ Λαοδικεύς, εἷς ὢν ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν ὁ μέγας ἀγωνιστὴς ὁ ὑπὲρ τῆς ὀρθῆς πίστεως κραταιῶς πρὸς τοὺς ἐχθροὺς μαχεσάμενος, θαρσήσας ἑαυτοῦ τῇ σοφίᾳ, ἐθελήσας παρεισαγάγειν ἐξ ἀπορίων πόρους τινὰς τῇ καθαρᾷ καὶ ἀδόλῳ τοῦ Χριστοῦ πίστει, οὐ παρεσκεύασεν ἐν τοῖς σχισματικοῖς ἑαυτὸν παρὰ τῇ καθόλου ἐκκλησίᾳ λογισθῆναι ("For what benefit did Apollinarius of Laodicea confer upon the church — he who had formerly been one of the foremost champions, fighting mightily against the enemies on behalf of the orthodox faith? Did he not, by trusting too much in his own wisdom, and by attempting to introduce, out of trackless and wholly impassable regions, certain paths and, as it were, ways, into the pure and guileless faith of Christ, achieve by his effort only this — that he himself came to be reckoned among the schismatics by the whole catholic church?"): that is, "What benefit, indeed, did that celebrated disputant, Apollinarius of Laodicea, bring to the church, while he fought, as one of its leaders, for the true faith against its enemies? Did he not, by trusting too much in his own wisdom, and by striving to introduce, through pathless and wholly impassable regions, certain channels and, as it were, ways, into the uncontaminated and simple faith of Christ, achieve by that very attempt only this — that he himself came to be reckoned among the schismatics by the whole catholic church?" If the same religious εὐλάβεια ("reverent caution") toward heavenly truth, which held the church in the days of Apollinarius, that most acute disputant for the true faith, had continued in force in the following ages, it would never have admitted, in place of evangelical theology, so deformed, gaping, mixed, and impure a doctrine as it afterward embraced; but I would venture to say that this defection in the profession of the Christian religion, which all the faithful mourn and lament with groaning, owes its origin and progress to the mixture of the philosophy of the Gentiles with theology. For after that philosophy had taken hold in the Christian schools, the good knowledge of God in Christ, as it is taught by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of the gospel, largely ceased among the greater part of men. And this fatal evil will especially be found to have infected all sacred things with its poison after the Peripatetic philosophy — which had lain neglected for several ages — began to please those devoted to good letters. That philosophy, revived and cultivated by the Arab Muhammadans, invaded the Christian world sooner than one could say. For that philosophy, especially as it was cultivated by the Arabs, is most apt and suited to the generating of subtle disputations, and to perpetuating quarrels, wrangles, and controversies about anything whatsoever. Relying on it, the Schoolmen, almost openly abrogating all faith in evangelical theology, introduced in its place a philosophical and barbarous art or science. "For indeed, who, judging soundly, could doubt that most of the notions that are genuinely scholastic are nothing but pure abstractions, refined distillations of Aristotelian metaphysics, seeing that they treat of supernatural matters?" says Cornelius Jansenius of Ypres, in his Augustinus, volume 2, column 19. "These men," therefore — as Verulam rightly says in the Novum Organum — "besides having reduced theology" (so far as lay in their power) "to order and shaped it into the form of an art, brought it about besides that the combative and thorny philosophy of Aristotle was mixed into the body of religion more than was fitting." And in all this the name of Aristotle is put forward as a pretense, though in fact they rather follow corrupt interpreters and commentators. For, to say nothing of the fact that his works first came by inheritance to a certain sceptic named Neleus, a man ignorant of letters, and then passed to Apellicon, who sold the worm-eaten manuscripts to the dictator Sulla, so that they have come down to us in the most corrupt state; the Arabs, from whom the Schoolmen drew these subtleties of theirs, being utterly ignorant of both Greek and Latin, used translations made — by unlearned and rude hands — from Latin into the Arabic tongue, which, on account of the compressed and narrow style of that manner of speaking, conveyed no sound sense at all in a great many places. Of all this Erasmus says: "I could wish," he says, "that those cold subtleties were cut away altogether, and that Christ, simple and pure, were restored, and thoroughly implanted in the minds of men."

X. It is true, indeed, that they made use of the books of sacred Scripture, and confessed that everything contained in them was true. Nevertheless, being thoroughly steeped in that Peripatetic philosophy, and carried away by an itch for disputing, or as if struck with a kind of dizziness, they put together that so-called body of theology which by no means presents the most holy religion of Jesus Christ. The whole difference between these men and the ancient philosophers lies in this: that among the books which they used in polishing their science they also admitted the sacred Scriptures, which the old Peripatetics did not know. Hence many think the Schoolmen ought rather to be called philosophers than theologians, says Beatus Rhenanus, in his preface to Tertullian. "Since," as the same Jansenius rightly says, volume 2, column 184, "besides a few trifles or ineptitudes of Aristotelian philosophy mixed into theology out of the classes of dialectic, they have produced nothing at all new." Erasmus complains gravely of these things in his preface to Hilary: "The symbol of the faith," he says, "began to exist in writings rather than in souls, and there were almost as many faiths as men; articles multiplied, but sincerity decreased; contention boiled over, charity grew cold. The doctrine of Christ, which previously knew no λογομαχία ("war of words"), began to depend on the defenses of philosophy. This was the first step of the church sliding toward worse things. At length the matter was brought down to sophistic contentions, and myriads of articles burst forth." And Trithemius confesses that from the time when the disputations — or rather the doubts — of the Schoolmen began to reign, sacred theology began to be defiled and contaminated by secular philosophy.

XI. But when it pleased God, at the beginning of the reformation of several European churches attempted in the past century, to send forth his light and his truth in the preaching of evangelical simplicity, there was almost nothing in the whole apostate church which was equally an object of hatred and abomination to pious and good men as that theological science which at that time dominated in the schools and academies. Whether, in the very schools of the reformed churches themselves, and among learned men of every sort, that same philosophical theology has since recovered its place or not, let the judgment be left to others. I will add what the most learned John Drusius has, on 2 Peter 2:22, on the words "The dog is turned to his own vomit again": "The dog returns to its vomit," he says, "who returns to that which the first Reformers vomited up. That is scholastic theology, and those who pursue it neglect the true theology, that is, the word of God; whence all Christian truth — even that which they call 'scholastic' — is mixed with human leaven, so that it is not as pure and sincere as it ought to be. When at last will these things be reformed? For until then there will be no peace in the church. Would that those who are nourished on divine things would order their studies otherwise, and, spurning these trifles, would give themselves earnestly to the study of the principal languages and to the reading of the sacred text. If this were done, we would have theologians of a kind we ought rather to wish for than to hope for — so much has the word of God grown cheap in the eyes of the common people. Many do not understand what they explain to the people from the pulpit; they are wise only out of a commentary, than which nothing is more wretched or more to be shunned by one who seeks the true food of the soul." And, on "the sow that was washed": "This can be said of one who, having been washed (for reformation is, as it were, a kind of washing), wallows again in sophistic mire, to the great harm of the young and of the church. For whence, I ask, do these dissensions come, if not from that mire? He returns to his vomit who now again recalls and introduces scholastic theology into the academies, mixing that bread which proceeds from the mouth of God alone with the leaven of the philosophers. These men turn the simplicity of believing into curiosity and subtlety in disputing, devising new questions every day, most of which are useless, unknown formerly to the prophets and apostles, yet which increase the number of disputants who today fill the Christian world." So far Drusius. Let the author of the book entitled The Burden of the Church also be heard: "The pagans," he says, "seek to destroy the evangelical rule; therefore the devil instigates the doctrine of Christians to be propped up by pagan authorities, and the dogmas of the Gentiles to be mixed with the principles of the faith, so that at last the evangelical truth may be blown away out of the midst by sophistical tricks." With which agrees that saying of Erasmus: "Everything promises that the matter will turn out most happily. Yet one scruple troubles my soul — lest, under the pretext of ancient literature, paganism should attempt to raise its head again." But ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς οὐ γέγονεν οὕτω ("from the beginning it was not so" — cf. Matthew 19:8). This philosophical manner of teaching spiritual things is foreign to the gospel. The first Christians, even after the times of the apostles, were entirely ignorant of it. Let the writings of the most ancient Christians be consulted, and it will be found that they did not treat their θεολογούμενα ("matters of theology") in the manner that more recent writers do. But in every kind of thing, that is best which is most ancient.

XII. Furthermore, there is in spiritual truth, shining with its native and heavenly light, a certain θεῖόν τι ("something divine") which seizes and compels the minds of men to admiration of itself. It insinuates itself into the hearts of men with a certain ineffable glory and splendor, and penetrates their consciences. It possesses a fullness, an amplitude, or a liberty attended by an unerring efficacy. In these things consists the life and soul of true theology. But almost all who would wish to use it as the sole rule for cultivating holy communion in Christ with God complain that the sense, force, and energy of all these things are marvelously obscured, undermined, and diminished when theology is compelled to walk laden with chains of philosophical notions and terms, and entangled in snares. All would easily perceive — and would confess — that in this way that spiritual efficacy, or supreme authority, over the consciences of men, and that heavenly and spiritual amplitude, which are wont to be the inseparable companions of evangelical truth delivered purely and without adulteration, are lost, were not the minds of most men occupied by insurmountable prejudices. Hence, in place of spiritual wisdom, some barren and arid notion or other is substituted, with the knowledge and highest skill of which impious, unbelieving, carnal, worldly men, strangers to all saving knowledge of God in Christ, are very often imbued. We see this also happening every day: the spiritual nature of evangelical things is most grievously obscured while learned and sharp little men spend much labor in teaching them accurately, methodically, and philosophically.

XIII. Furthermore, we have shown from Tertullian and others that many errors of old burst into the church out of this philosophy as if out of a Trojan horse. Indeed, whatever the sophists still prattle about many articles of the faith has proceeded from Peripatetic philosophy.

XIV. That common philosophy abundantly supplies material for endless quarrels and useless disputations, the matter itself proclaims aloud. Relying on it, sharp and quick-tongued men are the very ones of whom Prudentius once sang, treating of the ancient philosophers, in his Apotheosis, the Hymn against the Unbeliever. And indeed they mix in everywhere many things which even those who use them scarcely understand themselves. "I should be ashamed to say I do not understand it, if those who handled the matter had themselves understood it," says Melchior Cano, Loci Communes, book 2, chapter 7. Also most worthy of note is the objection (ἔνστασις) of the most learned Vives, and the complaint he grounds on it, in Augustine's City of God, book 18, chapter 18: "Theologians," he says, "teach with great agreement that it belongs to God alone to create something out of nothing. On this matter Thomas says much, whose arguments Scotus weakens in order to confirm his own, which Ockham tries to undermine in order to establish his, and these too Peter of Ailly dislodges — and it is not merely that they are toying with a serious matter, but that by their passions and factions they compel a heavenly matter to serve their turn. How can morals be amended, how can wicked passions be calmed and removed, and what, in the end, can come of a doctrine that is agitated and dragged about in dissensions, turned up and down at the pleasure of human passions, and shaken by the engines of men contending so obstinately?"

XV. From this source theological quarrels take their rise and are rendered endless — quarrels which could all without doubt easily be settled, if men who are Christians, at least in profession (it shames me to say it), would submit themselves in faith and direction to the one divine word, and to the Holy Spirit powerfully speaking in it. But while almost all the wisdom of all men who concern themselves with, and agitate, matters of religion is thoroughly infected with this philosophy — if it is not this very philosophy itself — controversies are perpetuated, and the reconciliation of those who disagree, even in matters of the smallest moment, is rendered impossible. Hence the theological libraries are full of enormous books and disputations concerning matters, assertions, and terms of which the Christian world had never heard anything at all, unless perhaps they happened by chance to come into Aristotle's mind. But what an Iliad of evils and troubles has sprung from this is not for this place to set forth.

XVI. Most truly and gravely to this effect Dr. Hoornbeeck, treating not long ago of the doctrine of the Trinity, wrote, in his Confutation of Socinianism, book 2, chapter 4, section 3: "By what terms, I ask, or notions — ἐμβατεύοντες ("entering, trespassing upon") a matter whose depth is ἀπρόσιτον ("inaccessible") to us — should we attempt to explain the matter fully and plainly, by phrases or distinctions newly born in the schools? Especially since all the logical or metaphysical terms which we are accustomed to use in this matter are formed from lower things, and from the consideration and comparison of them by the work of our understanding; whereas of this mystery there is no example among such things. Nor do the customary terms seem sufficiently proportioned or apt to explain it; from which we abstain the more scrupulously on this account, that as day by day other and other terms are newly discovered, in place of ever-new inventions, or new kinds of distinctions being made, we may not unreasonably doubt whether some more convenient notion of distinguishing could also be constructed here. At least it seems safest to suspend judgment. Nor do we readily believe that the ancients were any less wise in this matter, though they were ignorant of our recent formulas of distinction. Besides, we also observe that, once some kind of distinction has been given, it is soon disputed about sharply, the main point of the matter often being let go, and — to the prejudice of the truth — often more boldly and emptily than certainly." So it is: quarrel begets quarrel, distinction begets distinction; and he who seems to himself to hold them all is, in the end, no wiser than he who holds none. Jansenius of Ypres most gravely warns that it has come about from this "that for most Christians the knowledge of more recent theology serves for almost nothing except that, by knowing and following things suited in various senses to their various desires, having laid aside Christian simplicity, they become more cunning and less upright," Augustinus, volume 2, column 22.

XVII. But I do not wish to dwell any longer on these matters. Perhaps, by God's forbearance, an opportunity will be given me to treat at greater length of the true use and restoration of philosophy; I will therefore conclude briefly here.

XVIII. Those who have investigated, apart from hatred but also apart from love and partisan zeal, the origins, occasions, and causes of the contentions and quarrels which are everywhere agitated among the professors of the Christian religion with such uproar, such commotions of spirit, hatreds, exacerbations, and such reproach to the most holy name of Jesus and scandal to the gospel, have been exceedingly few — "scarcely so many in number as the gates of Thebes, or the mouths of the wealthy Nile" (Juvenal, Satires 13:26-27). Inveterate prejudices, which the reasonings of the age have bred, turn men's minds elsewhere. As for those who have attempted to settle dissensions and quarrels between parties, through mutual relaxation and concession of rigid opinions, it has long been possible for them to understand that they have wasted their labor and their oil. Some ascribe this most deadly evil to the most just judgment of God, delivering men, full of themselves, over to the vanity of these contentions, because they were unwilling to submit themselves to the simplicity and purity of the gospel — yet in such a way that they assert the immediate and culpable cause of all of it to be the darkness, prejudices, passions, and wicked lusts of the men themselves. But, supposing the just judgment of God, their sins deserving it, they affirm that the chief means of bringing those most foul errors, which swarm everywhere, into the church of Christ, and of perpetuating quarrels about them and other things, has been that mixture, of which we are treating, of philosophy — both Platonic and Peripatetic — with the doctrine of the gospel. In the judgment of these men, until, having shaken off this dust of Babylonian confusion, Christians return to evangelical simplicity, and strive to become wise solely "through the Spirit of revelation in the mystery of the gospel," it will be in vain to hope for, or expect, any deliverance from that vanity of fighting and quarreling in which men everywhere exercise themselves. This, they say, is that which the worshippers of Jesus have so wickedly committed against one another, and which is the fountain of all separations and schisms. Hence they say that theology has been changed into a certain thorny and perplexed art, or science, which wicked men learn, following it just as they follow other arts, without any help of the Holy Spirit or communication of spiritual light. And they complain that, by the study of that theology, the minds of students are turned away from true wisdom — the wisdom that is divinely instituted through faith, prayer, assiduous meditation on the word of God, and the holy practice of evangelical obedience. Therefore they hold that evangelical theology ought to be absolutely separated from every mixture of philosophy. And they affirm that to free men's minds from the inveterate prejudices by whose bonds they are held, and to root out utterly that ψευδώνυμος ("falsely so-called") wisdom, which constitutes a great part of that learning by whose vain opinion of itself the crowd of the learned so greatly exalts itself, is the work of the Holy Spirit alone, who alone, they affirm, will at last accomplish it by the effectual exertion of his power.

Chapter 9

On the study of theology, or of the Scriptures.

I. We have set forth, according to the plan of our undertaking, the nature, origin, progress, and varied expansion of theology, or the doctrine concerning God, his will, and the obedience owed to him by us. We have also explained — openly, and, as we hope, according to the mind of the Holy Spirit — the habit of mind or understanding by which we rightly perceive that doctrine, directing the whole man in its saving use. Concerning the study of theology, and how one may become an evangelical theologian, we have determined, in this last place, to inquire briefly. We have shown at greater length before, to the glory of God and the praise of the grace of Christ, that he alone is properly called a theologian who, while savingly wise in the mystery of the gospel, is furthermore so furnished with spiritual gifts that he is able to instruct others in the knowledge of that same mystery.

II. With this end proposed, we see very many fall short of it, since a badly ordered method can find no way out. I do not wish here to attack or assail the commonly followed way and method of studies. Those who persist in them have fit authors to answer for what they have done. We judge that a professorship in the schools and theological academies, teaching that philosophical manner of expounding spiritual truth which we have described above, is of great use — and could be of greater use than it commonly is. To examine the directions, ways, and methods of studying and treating theology which many men celebrated for learning have published — though they very often conflict with and oppose one another — does not belong to our purpose. Not all of us are equally wise about all things. In a course of study by which some would suffer loss, others profess to receive rich profit. But whatever, in any of these, gives occasion or fuel to darkness, quarrels, disputations, vain opinions, and prejudices, in which almost every one of us, to a man, who have devoted our names to the study of theology, becomes entangled, ought, I hope, to be judged by all as something to be rejected.

III. We have elsewhere rejected the practice of hewing and dressing spiritual truth, or theology, to the Lesbian and arbitrary rules of other arts and sciences. This doctrine contains a certain θεῖόν τι ("something divine") which refuses to be confined within such barriers. Theology demands in its votaries a liberty and a light of the understanding, other principles and purposes of mind, other ends, and other affections of the heart, than those which secular or philosophical arts and sciences know or care for. Those who would be imbued with this spiritual wisdom must, of necessity, cultivate the most holy communion with God in the mystery of the gospel through Jesus Christ, and must exercise their souls to the experiencing of the spiritual power and efficacy of saving truths — truths which are neither implanted in the mind by nature, nor presented to it by the things which fall under its rational consideration and examination. The illumination of the heart, the communication of the spirit of wisdom, the revelation and φανέρωσις ("manifestation") of the mysteries of the kingdom of Christ through that Spirit, the translation out of darkness into the marvelous light of Christ, the participation in the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ — all of which philosophy shudders at, and which to its votaries have always been foolishness, bare words and nothing more — these are what give birth to, and constitute, our theology.

IV. Do not expect, therefore, reader, that I should here draw up a catalogue of books, or prescribe a method of reading them; others have long ago accomplished both these things, with much judgment and no small reputation for wide reading (πολυαναγνωσία) — Gisbertus Voetius especially, in his theological library, a man most learned in many fields (πολυμαθέστατος), never to be praised enough for his rare erudition, singular piety, and love of the truth.

V. But what I am undertaking does not tend that way. I in no wise hold the office of a professor of theology, nor does it fall to my care to prescribe for others the manner or method of ordering their studies. I hate the clamor and sophistry of the schools. By God's gracious disposing, I live at home, and to myself. What I aim at is to be of some service, in whatever way I can, to the household of the faithful. Few, then, are the things I have to add concerning the study of theology that might help the minds of pious students in their inquiry into that heavenly truth whose nature we have set forth. But, that we may arrive where we are heading, certain things must first be premised.

VI. Let the reader, then, first observe that I do not here understand these words, "theology" and "theologians," otherwise than according to the principles laid down and confirmed above, by which I have shown they ought to be taken. They do not, in this our discussion, denote some particular science, or a certain class of men instructed in it. All faithful Christians are theologians, since to all of them the saving light of the gospel has been granted. The difference found among them is one of degree. For the distribution of spiritual gifts among believers through the Holy Spirit is entirely a matter of his own will: "he works in all καθὼς βούλεται ("as he wills")" (1 Corinthians 12:11). On this depends the whole difference among theologians. The same saving light is present in all of them; and into it they are daily "transformed from glory to glory by the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18). But the χαρίσματα ("gifts") variously communicated to them along with that light, through the same Spirit, produce an immense difference among these theologians. Theology, then, so far as it denotes a saving intellectual habit — that is, a spiritual light renewing the mind and transforming it into the image of Christ, who is light — is proper to all believers, and to them alone. But the things pertaining to the increase of that light, the confirmation of that habit, and hence to the spiritual elevation of the understanding, to a clear perception of the saving object in due measure, and to a spiritually effectual narration or declaration of the truth known — these are the things in which the whole difference among theologians consists, and it is these that we are chiefly concerned to advance in the study of theology.

VII. Those free gifts of the Spirit which, added over and above the saving light, variously distinguish evangelical theologians from one another, produce a twofold effect in the minds of the men furnished with them. For first, since all adult believers, by the power of the saving light infused into them in their conversion to God (for each one of them "is made light in the Lord"), possess a radical and fundamental knowledge of the whole counsel of God concerning the demonstration of his glory in their obedience and salvation — being capable of all spiritual things, and able savingly to perceive them — these gifts render that knowledge, in the apprehension of the truth as revealed by God and set forth in the sacred Scriptures, more certain, clearer, fuller, and more distinct.

VIII. A distinct, express, fixed, and solid knowledge of the spiritual things set forth in the Scriptures depends upon these gifts. Their effect, too, is a sound and solid judgment, able to distinguish the true from the false, and to arrange the articles of truth in that order which the natural relation they bear to one another requires.

IX. Secondly, these gifts alone render men διδακτικούς ("apt to teach"); for by their power we are made ἱκανοί ("sufficient, able") to instruct others in that good knowledge of Christ with which we ourselves have been imbued. He, then, in whom these things are found — that is, the saving light elevating and disposing the mind to the saving perception of evangelical truth, together with those gifts of the Holy Spirit which excite, increase, and kindle that light, and distinctly implant in the mind the truth set forth in the sacred Scriptures, and moreover render him fit to impart to others that knowledge of God in Christ which he has himself graciously obtained — he is the theologian of whom we are speaking. The study of theology, therefore, is nothing other than the effort of the theologian's mind, instituted according to the rule of the divine word, to advance the saving light and the spiritual gifts in which this heavenly wisdom consists. This the Scripture itself everywhere teaches us: 1 Corinthians 14:12; 2 Corinthians 3:5-6, 18, 4:6; Ephesians 1:17-19, 3:7, 16-19, 4:15-16; Colossians 1:26-27, 2:2-3, 7; 1 Timothy 4:12-16; 2 Timothy 3:14-17; 1 Peter 4:10-11; 2 Peter 3:18.

X. Thirdly, we propose to consider especially the use of theology in the ministry of the gospel. Knowledge of it, indeed, does not of itself alone constitute anyone a minister of the gospel, properly (κυρίως) so called. There is further required in any theologian, for the due undertaking of that office, a solemn calling through ecclesiastical election and separation. But that anyone is apt and fit to discharge that office comes from theology. Although, therefore, it is of such a nature that everyone who cares either for the glory of God or for his own salvation ought to give himself to it, yet the office of advancing and cultivating it falls in a peculiar manner upon those who are bound by zeal to instruct others in the knowledge of the divine will. For if those who direct their minds toward the sacred office of the ministry would seriously weigh with themselves what light, and what spiritual gifts, it has pleased the Lord Jesus graciously to bestow, in these last days, upon the Christian people, or upon the greater part of ordinary believers, they would without doubt judge it to be in their own interest to take diligent care, with all their strength and with the utmost effort of soul, for the increase of the "spiritual gifts" which they themselves have in their possession. That they have learned arts and sciences, that they are furnished with a knowledge of philosophy and languages, that they can spend whole days in wrangling and disputing, will scarcely suffice to bring their ministry out of contempt, or even to have it held in any esteem — for these are not the things with which the churches are immediately concerned. If someone, hired to do the work of sowing and reaping, should boast that he was skilled in the art of sailing or of war, he could hardly escape being ridiculous and an object of contempt to the one who hired him. No better will it go, ever, for the man who, puffed up with confidence in secular learning and scholastic trifles, empty of spiritual χαρίσματα ("gifts"), a stranger to the mystery of the gospel, thrusts himself upon the Christian people in the office of teaching. Every day there go out into the Lord's vineyard (a thing to be lamented) "new orators, foolish striplings," who, though they have scarcely greeted good letters from the threshold, nevertheless, relying on a vain opinion of a cold and worthless learning, believe they can overwhelm simple country folk with a din of foot-and-a-half-long words, and easily keep them in their place. But when it comes to actually discharging the work of the ministry, being destitute of all true theology — that is, of the saving light and the spiritual gifts — they grow so wretchedly cold and behave so inaptly, that to all those in whose hearts are the ways of the Lord, and who know what that eternal life is which consists in the knowledge of God and of Christ, they at once become worthless and contemptible. Hence arise angers, quarrels, dissensions, and schisms — which it is both our duty and the demand of the times to meet, not with force and arms, but with the study of true theology and the practice of piety on the part of the ministers of the gospel.

XI. These things having been premised according to the plan of our work, it remains that we briefly review those things which seem necessary for making useful progress in the study of theology.

XII. First, I hesitated for some time in my mind whether it was necessary to make mention of the common arts and sciences, which all learned men agree students ought to have been trained in before approaching the study of theology, or not. For why should I bring in here matters about which no one is in doubt, and which are known to everyone? Yet reasons are not lacking why I should do so, often as it has been done already; I will do it, then. These arts are grammar — to which I refer skill in the original languages — logic, and rhetoric. For although, without knowledge of these — that is, as they are taught τεχνικῶς ("technically") — one may become wise in the mystery of the gospel, nevertheless, since the manner of delivering and expounding heavenly doctrine which is observed in the Scriptures has much in common with the other sciences which these arts serve, we judge them to be at least useful for advancing that wisdom, and for making progress in it in that particular manner which we have proposed. We do not, however, pass over in silence the other parts and ornaments of secular learning, as though banishing them entirely from theological study into some other sphere. Let each apply himself to them according to his own bent and talent, especially to history of every kind. Now writing and spoken speech are the modes and means of communicating all rational concepts. Whatever is said, whatever is written, by which any concepts of the rational mind are expressed, rests upon the fundamental rules and principles of these common arts. Every utterance that falls short of them either falls short of reason itself, or casts darkness and obscurity over reason. Indeed, these arts themselves are nothing other than certain delineations of general rules which the nature of things teaches are to be observed in the communication, by words, of rational concepts. The things themselves, then — that is, the concepts of the rational mind expressed in words, by which men relate their thoughts, dispute about doubtful matters, and persuade one another of what seems true — are prior to these arts. But since no mortal is any more able to comprehend all the ways and manners in which men make use of the expression of their mind's sense, than he is able to conceive all the rational concepts of all men, whose diversity gives rise to differences of expression, those observations of very many wise men, gathered over so many ages and contained in these arts, cannot but be very useful. Furthermore, skill in these common sciences, or the exercise of the mind in them, aids it in forming its own concepts, strengthens all its faculties, confirms the judgment of the understanding, frees the very things about which the mind and reason are occupied from ambiguity and deception, and sets before contemplation their bare, clear, and distinct natures.

XIII. It would certainly be desirable that those to whom the task of instructing studious youth falls should employ greater care, diligence, and prudence than is commonly done in schools and academies, so that students might attain a solid doctrine and a useful skill in these arts. For it is most certain that a superficial and undigested knowledge of them — one that nevertheless suffices for the shadowy exercise-ground of the schools — is very often of the greatest prejudice to good minds, and of no advantage or usefulness at all. In truth, those among students who attain any useful skill in these common arts "appear as rare swimmers in the vast gulf" (cf. Virgil, Aeneid 1.118). Laziness forestalls all praiseworthy efforts in not a few. They are unwilling to endure the difficulties and hardships of study. For some stubbornly shun all labor of mind and talent, who nevertheless, led by some sort of folly, are not ashamed to enroll their names among the candidates for learning. At length, however, they themselves, and those whose interest it was that better things should be pursued, learn — though by all too late an experience — how much harm it has done to have occupied places set apart for study with such a disposition. Then again, very many, while they ought to devote themselves diligently to learning these arts, having no fixed limit of labor set before themselves, wander here and there in their studies through varied reading, and so in the end achieve no useful progress in any kind of learning. Others, lacking the benefit of skilled instructors, wasting their time in feeble efforts, are always beginning to do something, but never finish anything.

XIV. For since the things that are truly useful appear hedged about with excessive difficulty and darkness, men grow weary of the work begun and, defeated, let their spirits sink to those trivial and worthless matters which the vast supply of futile books provides. But that which renders the serious and praiseworthy efforts of very many fruitless — an impediment and a hindrance — is ignorance of the true nature and end of all the arts and sciences. The first inventors of these had proposed to themselves to contend against the curse which, because of the first sin, weighs upon the human race, and to free themselves, one and all, from that penalty of ignorance of the truth and of darkness under which we naturally lie oppressed. For since the human soul feels itself weighed down by blindness and ignorance of all things, it strives by every means to extricate itself from their snares. But we all know that the encyclopedia of the sciences is by no means sufficient to attain this end. Those who are ignorant of the saving light of the gospel cannot have set before themselves any other general end in the study of the arts and sciences; by their help they would wish to emerge from natural darkness. Hence the minds of very many, wretchedly subject to the power and dominion of innate vanity, fluctuate here and there in their inquiry after truth. For all Christians confess that no one can attain the end they intend except through the saving grace of Christ. Until, therefore, all the sciences and arts are restored — as we have wished above — to the rule and use of infallible truth, it cannot but be that the study of them turns out very unhappily for most.

XV. Secondly, once a plan of study has been devised, let students attentively weigh what that is, or what the goal is, on which they fix their minds and eyes. For since the end is the rule of the whole work, it must always be attended to accurately in the inquiry into, and the use of, the means — unless we wish continually to stray from the path. What that end is, or ought to be, is sufficiently clear from what has been said before. There are some who are content to have turned over, night and day, the theological systems by which evangelical doctrine is reduced to certain fixed heads, until, having been cast into their mold (εἰς τύπον), they seem to themselves to have conceived in their minds some sort of index of theology. To read, know, and keep in memory what the ancient fathers, what the Schoolmen, what more recent theologians have thought or written, in matters of faith and the business of religion — this is what fulfills the aim of others. Very many aim, with all their might, to attain a philosophical proficiency in some sort of theological science. But all these ends we have already banished far from the true ends of theology.

XVI. That we may become "wise and understanding" in the mystery of the gospel, in the knowledge of God in Christ, in the secrets of the divine counsel and covenant, in the hidden things of spiritual worship, and in the obedience of faith — this is the something toward which we aim in this study. Let this remain fixed and settled, the point on which the eye of the mind is trained in the choice and use of means. If "wisdom is that which comes down from above, from the Father of lights" (James 1:17; 3:17), if the understanding in the mystery with which we are to be endowed comes through the Holy Spirit, then it would without doubt be the greatest folly, in that theology into which we would wish to be initiated, to use any means for obtaining knowledge of it other than those alone which, prescribed by God himself, are further increased by the communication of the Holy Spirit. Whoever sets this goal before himself with due reverence for God, with abnegation of himself and of his own natural powers, relying by faith on the help and benefit of the Spirit of Christ, and uses no means except in order to that end, and in that manner in which it is fitting to use such means for obtaining such an end — that is, piously and religiously — his studies, God favoring them, will arrive at that outcome which was intended. But while students waver here and there in the use of the most uncertain means, pursuing at random I know not what ends they have set for themselves, then, although "they cast gold into the fire," most often what comes out is "a calf" (cf. Exodus 32:24). Let this, therefore, be the fixed purpose of those who would not waste their labor and their oil in the study of theology: that the something toward which they aim, and which they seek with every effort, is spiritual and saving wisdom in the mystery of the gospel.

XVII. Third, we have shown above that every supernatural truth revealed by God is contained in the sacred Scripture in didactic propositions. Our wisdom consists in the spiritual and saving knowledge of that truth. All will therefore readily grant that diligent reading of the Scriptures, together with assiduous meditation upon them, is absolutely necessary for every candidate of theology; but as the outcome plainly shows, though men grant this in words, very few indeed will be found who apply themselves to the matter with the thought and care that are due. The neglect of this in this study brings not merely loss but ruin upon very many. Nor can it be otherwise, where men profess to aim at some end while openly neglecting the means to it. In the reading of the Scriptures — desultory, and joined to a pernicious slackness of mind — they spend little effort; in hearing the word and in solemn preaching, less still; in meditation, none at all; and yet none of them doubt that they will become the most accomplished theologians. This is the most foolish sort of men, and one that deserves to be despised. Pursuing that noble and heavenly wisdom to which nothing in human life is equal or comparable, they hold cheap — or rather hold last of all — that almost unique means appointed to that end. They are "wise," if indeed it is wisdom to wish for what cannot come to pass. But perhaps they are wholly absorbed in reading the writings of the ancient and more recent theologians, who take pains to expound the sense of the Scriptures? Granted: and we commend that diligence. But this is not the study of the Scriptures. It is one thing, with ardent vows poured out through faith in Christ, having implored the help of the Holy Spirit, to read the Scriptures themselves and meditate upon them, so that we may drink in the Spirit who lives in them; it is another thing to peruse the writings of other men, however learned and redolent of heavenly truth. Let them hear Acosta the Jesuit: "He," he says, "who reads the Scriptures with purity of soul will profit more than if he tried to untangle their mysteries by many commentaries." He adds something that will seem almost fanatical to some, namely, that he has seen many unlearned men, who scarcely understood Latin, draw so much light from the sacred Scriptures that he himself was astonished, since professors, for all their diligence in study, could not teach anything comparable. It is well that this was said by a Jesuit, and a learned man. So too Erasmus, in his Preface to the New Testament: "These things, I say, and the like" (that is, faith, charity, holiness, contempt of the world according to God's word) "— if anyone, breathed upon by the Spirit of Christ, preaches them, inculcates them, exhorts to them, invites and encourages men to them, he is truly a theologian, even if he be a ditch-digger or a weaver; and if anyone displays these very things in his own character, he is, in the end, a great doctor."

XVIII. Since, however, there are certain things that deter the minds of very many from the study of the Scriptures themselves, and thereby bring upon them the most immediate ruin, it will not be beside the purpose to review them briefly here.

XIX. First, then, the secret unbelief of the human mind persuades very many that the sacred Scriptures, being obscure and perplexed with difficulties, or because they contain ἄῤῥητα ("ineffable") mysteries with which the human intellect is loath to have any dealings, can scarcely be rightly and clearly understood. They do not consider it their duty to inquire more diligently into that for which they feel themselves unequal to understanding. Therefore, apart from certain historical narratives, and those matters which that revelation of the mind of God has in common with the other sciences, they scarcely advance, in their study of it, beyond the sound of the words and the bark of the letters. The profound mysteries, and the rays of heavenly wisdom that flash within it, terrify slothful and earthbound souls. Perhaps they also consult certain texts from which they think commonplaces can be compiled, and which serve to bolster the opinions of this or that sect. But as for attaining spiritual wisdom by any pure, bare, immediate search of the mind and sense of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures, they are strangers to it altogether.

XX. Indeed, for reasons I cannot say, a great part of students, if they do not despise the reading of the Scriptures, at least neglect it. Some are averse to its style, others to its very matter. Well known is what Jerome relates of himself, in his Letter to Eustochium, On the Guarding of Virginity: "After frequent night-watches," he says, "after the tears which the remembrance of my past sins drew up from the depths of my bowels, Plautus would be taken up in my hands; if ever, coming back to myself, I began to read the prophets, their uncultivated speech made me shudder; and because I could not see the light with my blind eyes, I thought the fault lay not in my eyes but in the sun." In the same way it is on everyone's lips that the impious Politian professed himself to shrink from the Scriptures on account of what he called the barbarity of their style. Still more impious is what Caspar Peucerus relates of him in his letter to Christopher Carlowitz. When Politian was asked, he says, what he thought of the Psalms of David, he answered: "I see that those ancient poems are full of wisdom. In them are precepts of every virtue, reminders of providence, threats of punishment for the wicked, and promises of reward and protection for the righteous. There are also inserted the ancient histories of that nation, both that the memory of antiquity might be handed down to posterity, and that examples of punishment and of defense might be kept in view. I hold this wisdom in high regard, useful for life and morals, and I judge its figures, in its own tongue, to be elegant; and of old, melodies were added to it, fitted to stir the movements of the soul. But in Pindar the same matters are related more sweetly, and illustrated more splendidly by examples." So said Politian. Thus this impious little man, as though set up as arbiter between the Holy Spirit and the godless pagan (ἄθεον, "godless, atheist" — meaning Pindar), crowns David with garlands only so that he might fall as the more illustrious victim to Pindar's praise. Would that there were truly none who hoped they could better seek the doctrine of virtue — if not from Pindar, then at least from Plato, Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus, Arrian, Plotinus, and the like — than from the books of the Old and New Testament; an atheism which we see God daily avenging with dreadful blindness.

XXI. Second, they scarcely believe that those pieces of knowledge with which they would eagerly wish to be imbued, and which the most learned writings of learned men supply in abundance, are contained in the Scriptures. The most profound notions, the subtle arguments, the sharp distinctions by which men are made learned and delighted, they can learn — so they suppose — from other books; the contemplation of Scripture itself is, to their mind, humble, dry, and barren. This is indeed the foolishness of frivolous little men. For the sacred Scripture is not only the rule and norm of all spiritual truth of which we treat — to such a degree that nothing is true in that kind, or ought to be admitted in place of truth, unless it be contained in Scripture — but it is also its sole fountain and origin, so that no notion or mental conception concerning the things of religion has any sublimity, nor any argument any subtlety, except as it is drawn from Scripture; as we have shown elsewhere.

XXII. Third, since Christ has promised his Spirit to lead all believers into truth through the word of God, those who, contrary to that promise, do not look to him alone, nor take refuge in his help, are in truth destitute of that aid and support without which no one has ever engaged rightly, eagerly, and fruitfully in the study of the Scriptures. Other studies, indeed, can be undertaken and accomplished by one's own effort. But in the sacred writings there is a hidden something for the salutary perceiving of which the human intellect, whatever external helps it employs, is unequal. Therefore the Holy Spirit is promised as a helper in the work. He is received only through faith. It should surprise no one, then, if those who do not know the Spirit, nor are able to receive him, since they lack faith, find it wearisome — and nearly hateful — to search these Scriptures freely and honestly. Those who do not know how to trust the promised Spirit, to implore his help and aid with assiduous prayers, and to devote themselves to the guidance of that anointing which teaches all things, will bend the edge of their mind and the point of their intellect upon this study in vain.

XXIII. Fourth, an aversion to cultivating any immediate communion with God clings deeply to the minds of many. This is the fruit of indwelling sin. Where it reigns — which is the condition of the unregenerate — a universal enmity against God holds sway; and it retains some measure of its power even in the regenerate. Now, in the writings of all men, native human vanity has something in which to delight itself: although theological matters are treated there, still the mind, in dealing with them, moves among things common also to other sciences. In the sacred Scripture, the soul's business is with God himself. Since the mind, subject to its native vanity, cannot bear this, it flees the study of the word itself with a certain secret aversion.

XXIV. Until these and other things of this kind, which not only greatly hinder those who approach the study of theology but also drive them into strange frustrations, are removed, it should not seem strange if, after much time spent in the study of theology, more men come forth as philosophers — or as men who know only how to envy the praise of others — than as theologians, or as men wise in the mystery of Christ.

XXV. Let us return to the work in hand, so that we may add what we further require in that study of the Scriptures which we are commending.

First, whoever intends to labor in the sacred writings ought to hold it fixed firmly in his mind that the most holy God is present in a peculiar manner to one who reads and meditates upon them; and that, affected with the reverence due to the divine majesty and authority, as befits the most abject sinner, he should conduct himself in that study with the utmost submission of mind. For in the sacred Scriptures God himself addresses the reader no less immediately than if he used a voice sounding from heaven. He himself is despised where fear and εὐλάβεια ("godly reverence, awe") do not take possession of the hearts of readers. He is pleased to dwell with those alone who tremble at his word. A light and desultory reading of the Scriptures is a plague to souls, and opens a window to atheism. As though fixed in the memory with what they call a nail driven through a beam, that most weighty apostolic caution found in Hebrews 12:28-29 ought to be kept by whoever approaches the reading of the Scriptures: Ἔχωμεν χάριν, δι' ἧς λατρεύωμεν εὐαρέστως τῷ Θεῷ, μετὰ αἰδοῦς καὶ εὐλαβείας. Καὶ γὰρ ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν πῦρ καταναλίσκον ("Let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear; for our God is a consuming fire"). "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of this wisdom"; and unless this fear is present in the study of the word, it will be present nowhere.

XXVI. Second, the student should seriously weigh, in every truth to be drawn out from the mystery of the divine word, what concerns himself, and by what he may be advanced in the knowledge and worship of God. Let this always be the primary and chief end of all study and meditation in the sacred Scriptures: that from them we may learn our duty, that in them we may cultivate the most holy communion with God, that we may experience in the inmost feelings of our souls the power and efficacy of the Spirit as he powerfully puts forth his grace and light in them, and that we may know how our consciences stand in relation to the authority of God himself and of Christ our Lord, which is eminent in them. One must always come to the study of the Scriptures with this end in view. He will look in vain for progress that is salutary to himself or useful to the church, who, having spurned this end of sacred meditation, has nothing else in mind than to furnish his intellect with a bare knowledge of the truth. The word is the food of the soul. There are two things nourished and fostered by it: saving light, and the spiritual gifts superadded to it. The first is graciously granted to us that it may be salutary to ourselves; the other, that we ourselves may be bearers of salvation to others. But whoever, in the study of the sacred writings, does not aim in the first place at the increase of the former, either will not attain any growth of the latter, or will himself gather no fruit from whatever growth of them he does attain.

XXVII. Third, a practical recognition of the plainly divine authority of the sacred Scripture, and a religious subjection of the conscience to it in all things, ought always to be present in its reader. For the word of God — and it alone, immediately — performs its office among us in the name of God himself. It therefore holds supreme dominion over us, to which we are bound to bring our minds and understandings into captivity. For we ought to present our consciences before it as though we were about to receive, from its verdict, judgment concerning ourselves and all things that regard eternity.

XXVIII. Fourth, the study of the Scriptures in those languages in which they were composed by the Holy Spirit himself will be of great help in the investigation of truth. For besides the fact that it is only from those fountains that we can draw the genuine force and meaning of the words and phrases of the text, those languages — the Hebrew especially — have a peculiar emphasis, an ἐνέργεια ("energy, active force"), by which the force and sense of the words is effectually instilled into the mind, and which cannot be communicated through any other language.

XXIX. Fifth, let all these things, and whatever else of this kind there may be, be led, concluded, and accompanied by assiduous and fervent prayers. This is the greatest thing: that he who is the author of all true wisdom has also appointed the very means, ordained by God, for obtaining that wisdom which we are investigating. We have shown above that the Holy Spirit is the author of this wisdom. He alone is the one who searches out and discloses those deep things of God, which he learns and teaches. He is the one through whom the Son of God gives us understanding, that we may know him who is true, and who shows us the things that are Christ's, and so leads us into all truth. The Lord Jesus teaches us that he is received by faith, but obtained by prayer. God bestows on us that Spirit of supplication, so that, instructed by his grace and aided by his power, we may ask for the very Spirit of direction and consolation. This wisdom of ours, too, is a gift of God. Εἴ τις ὑμῶν λείπεται σοφίας, αἰτείτω παρὰ τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ ("If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives..."), says James, in chapter 1:5. From this, then, all hope of progress in theological study hangs upon God. Justin rightly says, to Trypho: Εὔχου δέ σοι πρὸ πάντων φωτὸς ἀνοιχθῆναι πύλας· οὐ γὰρ σύνοπτα οὐδὲ συννόησα πᾶσίν ἐστιν εἰ μὴ τῷ Θεὸς δῷ συνιέναι καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς αὐτοῦ ("But pray, above all, that the gates of light may be opened to you; for these things are not seen or understood by all, except by him to whom God and his Christ have granted understanding") — "Do you," he says, "first of all pray, by vows and prayers, that the gates of light be opened to you. For they are perceived and understood by none, save one to whom God and his Christ have granted understanding." And that saying of Plato in the Epinomis, appended to his work On Laws, is almost divinely spoken, where he is about to expound the nature of God and of theology. For, bidden by Clinias, the Athenian Stranger, relying on the goodness of God and having prayed to him, as he is about to set forth what befits God's nature, adds: Ἔσται ταῦτα, ἂν αὐτὸς ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῖν ὑφηγῆται· ξυνεύχου μόνον ("This will come to pass, if God himself guides us in the way; only join your prayers with mine") — "Thus these things will come to pass, if God himself, as guide and auspex, has shown us the way. Do you only join your prayers to mine."

XXX. Why do we marvel that so many elegant minds grow weary in the study and investigation of heavenly truth? They do not know how to pray. They have never received the Spirit of supplication; nay, alas, they very often spurn him; nay, wittily and jestingly — but wickedly, but blasphemously — they harass him; and nowhere do they more delight themselves and others than when they insult him with sharp tongues, and assail him with impudent jests. They are earthly, and savor nothing but earthly things; and while they despise all others and carry themselves most grandly, as though they alone were wise, they in truth sink beneath the lowest of the Christian common people in the knowledge of the gospel.

XXXI. Furthermore, the faithful soul, by the assiduous pouring out of those prayers which that Spirit — whom God graciously bestows on us for the relieving of our weaknesses — suggests, obtains communion with God himself in the greatest mysteries of the gospel, and by that exercise grows daily in the knowledge of them. For while the soul experiences in itself, by faith, the power and efficacy of saving doctrine so far as it has advanced in it, it is gradually admitted into all the secrets of the covenant made with God in Christ, and "grows up into him who is the head, the fullness of him who fills all in all" (cf. Ephesians 4:15; 1:23).

XXXII. To these studies let there be added a constant and religious bond with those who devoutly cultivate the practice of piety according to the standard of evangelical theology. The antiquity of the Gentiles relates everywhere that the greatest philosophers traveled over almost the whole world in order to enjoy the counsel and company of those who had been initiated into the mysteries of the wisdom they were investigating. We, for the most part, despise the helps of this kind of true wisdom which can be had at home. Some think that no account whatsoever should be taken of those in whom the force, the ἐνέργεια ("energy, active power"), and the life of that wisdom which they seek, effectually display themselves. Nay — and this is madness — they differ, with a hostile hatred or envy, from none more than from those who strive to express that wisdom through true piety, unfeigned faith, sincere evangelical obedience, assiduous and spiritual worship of God, and holiness of life. If anyone were to contend with all his might that that article contained in what is called the Apostles' Creed, concerning the communion of saints, should be struck from the list of things to be believed, a crowd of students would instantly fly at his eyes; while all the time they themselves either are utterly ignorant of what that communion of saints is, or wickedly despise it.

XXXIII. This bond, once formed with the saints and the faithful, will in turn produce the assiduous exercise of those spiritual gifts in which this wisdom consists; for by the very nature of the thing, and by the power of Christ's institution, they are themselves increased by that exercise.