polytus was a bishop of the Roman Church, and treated of matters chiefly interesting in the West, why did he write in Greek? A knowledge of the facts of the case deprives this difficulty of all its force. Christianity from the first was a Greek importation into Rome. It was first preached by Hellenistic Jews. Its earliest teachers and defenders, such as Justin and Tatian, had been Greek sophists. The nucleus of the primitive congregation must have been Greek, consisting chiefly, it may be presumed, of the numerous freedmen and even slaves, who were of provincial parentage, and had been collected in the great city from all parts of the Græco-Roman world. Converts from native Romans were probably the exception; for the Romans as a race were singularly tenacious of old beliefs and unwilling to forsake established institutions-affording in this respect a remarkable contrast to the excitable versatility of the Greeks. Heathenism lingered long and died hard among the old aristocratical families of Rome. The Anicii were the first of the Senate who embraced Christianity; and this was not till the beginning of the fourth century*. The native populace, còrrupted and pauperised as they were, would be little likely to trouble themselves with religious questions, so long as the baths, the theatres and the largesses of meat and wine, were preserved to them; or if they paid any heed to the subject, would probably follow the example of the nobles, and, notwithstanding their degradation still proud of their Roman blood, would spurn with contempt anything that was offered them by Jews and Græculi.-The personages of whom we catch a glimpse in the very amusing peep which the work of Hippolytus gives us into the private history of the Roman Christians, in the time of Commodus and his successors, were most of them-to judge by their designations-of Greek extraction. The names of the bishops of Rome from the earliest record down to the beginning of the third century, are with few exceptions Greek. The creed professed at baptism continued to a late period to be recited in Greek, even after it became necessary to translate it for the subject of the rite: and for a long time analogy would lead us to conclude, that in the public service the Scriptures must have been read, and the exhortation de

* Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. xxxi.

livered, and the hymns sung, in the same language. Indeed, generally, the cultivation of Latin as a vehicle of literature, appears at this time to have declined in Italy, and transplanted itself into the provinces. In the age immediately preceding Hippolytus, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations in Greek, and the scholars about court prided themselves on their skill and fluency in that tongue *. Greek therefore was the medium through which the deep thought of Hebrew prophets was first infused into the hard and carnal intellect of the West. Christianity spoke Latin earlier, there is reason to believe, in the provinces of Spain and Africa than in Rome itself. The mind in fact of the Western Church, and the peculiar Latinity so different from the classical, in which it learned to express itself, were formed by the example and cast in the mould of the African Fathers :-though it is confirmatory of our general view, that some of the earliest of Tertullian's works were still written in Greek †. Thus the circumstance which seems at first sight to militate against the supposition of the work on Heresies being the production of a Roman clergyman, serves upon inquiry to furnish a corroboration of that view, and tends to fix with great probability the period within which it must have been written.

We have solid ground then for believing, that in the work before us, we have a veritable production of the Roman Church at the commencement of the third century, written by one who had seen with his own eyes, and influenced by his own speech, the conflict of theological and ecclesiastical interests which were already fermenting strongly in its bosom t. The style where it is preserved

"Hæc Favorinum dicentem audivi Græca oratione: cujus sententias, communis utilitatis gratiâ, quantum meminisse potui, retuli. Amœnitates vero et copias ubertatesque verborum, Latina omnis facundia vix quidem indipisci potuerit.”—Aul. Gell. Noct. Atticæ, xii.

Of the two dates assigned to the Dialogue of Minucius Felix, it is an argument so far in favour of the later, that the work is written in Latin; and if it be supposed posterior to Tertullian, this will account for certain coincidences of thought and expression traceable between it and the Apologeticum of the African writer.

The Chevalier Bunsen proposes the following as the future title of the work: Τοῦ ἁγίου Ιππολύτου Επισκόπου καὶ Μάρτυρος Κατὰ πασῶν αἱρέσεων ἔλεγκος· τῶν δέκα βιβλίων τὰ σωζόμενα. The form is the same with that prefixed to the works of Justin Martyr.

to us in its original state, is clear, flowing and even elegant, and indicates a mind of considerable literary and philosophic culture: but the text is more or less corrupted in nearly every sentence of any length, and sometimes to such a degree, as to render all sense wholly inextricable. Only the attempt to read through a text left in this deplorable condition, can make us fully aware of our obligation to the laborious scholars who, by continually dispelling with the light of an exact grammatical, historical and diplomatic knowledge, the obscurity which the blunders of successive copyists have gradually accumulated on the meaning of ancient writings, give us an easy access to the best minds of past ages, and enable us to hold intelligent converse with them *.

To understand the value and interest of this work of Hippolytus, we must form to ourselves a distinct idea of the times in which he lived. He forms a kind of link between his instructor Irenæus who brought the theology of Asia Minor into Gaul, and Origen and Cyprian who in the course of the third century gave to Christianity a more definite shape and consistency-the former by cultivating its speculative elements at Alexandria, the latter by developing the principles of the hierarchy in the West. It was one of those critical periods of transition through which every human institution has to pass, when the discordant elements which it has taken up in its earliest process of popular evolution, work themselves off, and it

* The mistakes in the text are often so gross and obvious, that the correction of them lies patent to an ordinary scholar. M. Bunsen has occasionally restored the more difficult passages very happily. But the most striking specimens of felicitous emendation are furnished by the "Epistola Critica" of M. Bernays (appended to the last volume of M. Bunsen's work), in which he corrects the text of Hippolytus from itself. One is made to feel in reading this admirable essay, what a severe mental discipline a true philologist must have gone through; how many of the highest intellectual endowments, and how much rare and recondite knowledge converged from many points on a single object, are required for the successful reproduction and thorough comprehension of the thought of a remote age. We cannot but think, that philology in its nobler sense, as the art of exactly interpreting the monuments of the human mind, has fallen into unmerited neglect, in our exclusive devotion to physical science, and what are called the practical interests of the world; and that it must be again revived, and exercise more influence in our education and our literature, if we are to preserve among us a race of clear and vigorous intellects, and to make reading what it ought to be, not a passive impression, but a mental act. In estimating the intellectual culture of our time, we ought surely to take quality into account, as well as quantity.

settles down into a fixed and uniform character. In the second century the great ideas brought into the world by Christianity, mixed freely with the mythic dreams and theosophic theories of a slowly-dissolving heathenism, which encountered them in every direction.-Heathenism and Christianity had not yet ascertained their mutual limits, nor learned where they could unite and where they must separate. The immediate result was an extravagant license of speculation, a bold intermingling of views and an intense fermentation of spirits, which filled those who clung firmly to the simple practical convictions of the primitive faith, with astonishment and dismay, and threatened to destroy the very identity of Christianity.-Unfortunately we possess hardly any records of the earlier half of the second century, when the Gnostic movement which had sprung out of the first contact of Heathenism with Christianity, was in its greatest activity.-We know nothing of Gnosticism, but from the representations of those who were most bitterly opposed to it, and from the fragments of its writers, often there is too much ground to believe, inaccurately and unfairly cited-which they have introduced into their works. A more interesting and valuable discovery could hardly be made, or one that would throw more light on the obscure and mysterious interval between the age of the apostles and that of the earliest extant apologists, than an entire production of Valentinus or Basilides or some other of the great Gnostic leaders. But the unsparing animosity of the Catholics has not left us a single specimen of these writings, except such as could answer a controversial purpose by their insertion in treatises expressly intended for their confutation. Of the fierceness of the struggle we can form some idea from the traces which it has left in the extant works of the writers who appear towards the close of this century -Irenæus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and we may now add, Hippolytus of Rome. To the deep conservative feeling engendered by this controversy in the · Ennλnoiaσtinol throughout the world, who looked on themselves as the depositories of the pure apostolic tradition, we owe the first decisive reduction of the church to the form in which its doctrinal and sacerdotal development commenced; and under the same influence, there is little

doubt in our minds, that the creed was first developed into ampler proportions from the simple formula of Christ, and the Scriptural canon at length definitively fixed. According to our reading of those times, the speculative outburst of Gnosticism and the reactionary conservatism which followed it, were alike inevitable-necessary and closely connected phases of spiritual life in the historical growth of Christianity.

In his review of heresies Hippolytus has followed in the steps of Irenæus, and sometimes merely abbreviated the language of his master, leaving out the declamation and giving the facts. M. Bunsen regards it as a great merit in Hippolytus above other writers against the Gnostics, that he does not content himself with representing their opinions in his own words, but gives direct citations from their works. As compared with Irenæus and others, he may indeed deserve this praise: but his own account is often very confused; he makes his quotations in the loose way so common with ecclesiastical writers; we do not always see to whom he is referring, by the vague noì, or where he is quitting the extract and taking up again the statement of his own views. It is the leading idea of his book, that the Gnostic theories have sprung out of an assimilation of the truths of Christianity with the doctrines of some heathen school; that Basilides, for example, has borrowed his principles from Aristotle, Marcion from Empedocles, and Noetus from Heraclitus. For the illustration of this last very obscure writer (ò xoтEvós) whose remains have been collected and interpreted by Schleiermacher— we may observe in passing, that this work of Hippolytus has preserved many fragments before unknown, on which Bernays has exercised his critical skill in the essay already alluded to. Hippolytus considers the heretics as nothing better than plagiarists of the heathen philosophers, and compares them to cobblers who patch up old articles after their own fancy to pass them off as new *. Throughout indeed he treats the heathens with far more respect than the heretics. His usual mode of tracing the connexion between the heretical and the philosophical doctrine, is ex

* Τούτων-μαθητάς, μᾶλλον δὲ κλεψιλόγους, iv. p. 92. Δίκην παλαιορράφων συγκαττύσαντες πρὸς τὸν ἴδιον νοῦν τὰ τῶν παλαιῶν σφάλματα ὡς καινὰ παρέθεσαν, y. p. 94. CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 59.

K