Though it burns, When it turns Towards the things which Thou dost hate; And the heat thereof abate. Lord, Thy fire is active, using To its native Heaven, or lend Gathers more, Never ceasing till it make All things like itself, and longing Lord, then let Thy fire inflame My cold heart so thoroughly, More and more, consuming sin, Kindling others, and attending Heaven upon earth begin. St. Jude was of our Lord's kindred, being brother to St. James the Less, and probably also to St. Simon. The Gospels give no account of his vocation to the Apostolate. In addition to the name by which he is commonly known, he was distinguished amongst the Apostles by the names of Lebbæus and Thaddeus, which served the twofold purpose of witnessing to his piety and wisdom, and of discriminating between him and the traitor Judas. After the Ascension of Christ, St. Jude laboured at first in Judæa and Galilee, from whence he extended his travels to Samaria and Idumæa. In the opinion of St. Jerome, St. Jude is to be identified with that Thaddeus whose name is so JOINT MARTYRDOM. 477 honourably distinguished in the conversion of Abgarus, the king or toparch of Edessa, and his people, to the Christian faith.* But a more critical opinion differences them, and makes the Thaddeus who converted Abgarus to have been one of the Seventy. 66 * * Having travelled as far as Mesopotamia, St. Jude there encountered St. Simon; and both together proceeded into Persia. In the latter country they were engaged in several contests with the Magi, and especially with two of extraordinary celebrity, who were named respectively Zoroe and Arphax. "But the Apostles," says Joachim Hildebrand, so discomfited their opponents, that the conversion of the king followed, and they themselves were recognised as little less than divinities. To their nod the demons who held possession of the idols were so perfectly subservient as to speak or to remain silent at command. * * At length, after having preached for a long time in Persia, the two Apostles were conducted to an image of the Sun, in order that they might sacrifice to it as to a god. But the demons of the idol, under the form of Æthiopians, submitted to the Apostles, and themselves broke the image of the Sun to pieces. The priests, enraged at such a portent, fell upon the Apostles and put them to death upon the spot, so that the Nativity of each of these martyrs-brothers in faith, in wonder-working, and in fortitude, if not in blood-which also is most probable-falls upon the same day, and is so commemorated by the Church. The circumstances of their passion have been transmitted in Hebrew by Abdias, Bishop of Babylon; by Eutropius in Greek; and in Latin by Julius Africanus."+ It is narrated by Eusebius that two of the posterity of St. Jude were summoned to appear before the Emperor Domitian, who, in his anxiety to secure stability to his own dominion, had conceived an inordinate jealousy of the de*Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History; lib. i., c. 13. + Hildebrand: De Diebus Festis Libellus. scendants of the royal line of David. The grandsons of the Apostle, after a strict interrogation on the part of Domitian as to the Kingdom of Christ, and after having satisfied him that the royal pretensions of the Saviour were of a spiritual kind only, and not concerned about earthly rule, were dismissed as unworthy of the tyrant's apprehensions. He could see no danger to his Empire from the lowly proprietors of a petty patrimony, the tillage of which, as the hardness of their hands and their stooping figures testified, they carried on themselves.* The purport of the Catholic Epistle for which we are indebted to St. Jude is to exhort and encourage Christians earnestly to contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints"; and to warn them against the heresies of false teachers-chiefly, the Gnostics, as it is fair to infer from the general tenor of the Epistle. It may add somewhat to the significance of the Epistle of St. Jude, if we devote a few concluding sentences to an exposition of the doctrines, and the results of these in manners and morals, against which it was conceived. Gnosticism was doubtless the Antichrist of St. John (1 John iv. 1, 2, 3; 2 John, 7), the spirit of which, so soon as the Apostolic times, had begun to work in many, and the brand of which was the denial that Jesus Christ had come ivoapri, in the flesh. In Gnosticism the intellect lorded it over the soul, and scorned the body to the extent of utter indifference. It was transcendental to all preceding or contemporaneous systems; superior to all rites and symbols, whether of Heathenism or of the Mosaic dispensation; and to the common notions and beliefs of Christianity. It is not necessary to concern ourselves about the minute differences of its sections, or even with its grander divisions as determined and characterized by Pantheism or Dualism. We have rather to do with the *Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History; lib. iii., c. 20. MORALS OF THE GNOSTICS. 479 idea, and the doctrines therefrom deducible, common to most of the Gnostics, of the irreclaimable evil of matter, and especially of the human body as hylic or material. The vileness of the body was a corollary from the oriental doctrines which Gnosticism assimilated; and it followed that Christ, the Son of God, could not have come in the fleshcould not have allied His Nature to what was inherently and irredeemably depraved. The Divine "Emanation" which was manifested under the form of Christ, was not clothed in a real, but only in an illusive phantom body. The effect of such a notion on ethical principles and on moral practices is not to seek. Sensuality was encouraged; the endeavour after Christian perfection in both kinds, of soul and body, was repudiated; guards and restraints were fitted only for the spiritual and soulical parts of humanity, and all checks were removed from the flesh, unrecognised as this last was as a possible vehicle of morality or immorality. The presentation of the body, upon which St. Paul insisted as a "holy, acceptable sacrifice, and reasonable service," was to the illuminated inadmissible and irrational. The letter of the law, whether positive or prohibitive, was only for the weak and the imperfect, who were unable to take in the prospect from the summit of the mount of vision. But the true Gnostic, who was in possession of the spiritual sense, rose to a virtue so sublime, that all distinction of good and evil, in external actions, disappeared to his eye. This distinction was as the phantom of virtue, a spectre without reality, which appeared in the night of the human mind, and which vanished when from the heights of science (gnosis) the soul saw the light of the Pleroma—prime source and ultimate receptacle-dawn, and the divine day begin. Finally, with the introduction of a phantasmal body of Christ, vital or important doctrines of Christianity receded altogether. For there could, on this hypothesis, have been no true atonement or redemption; no bonâ fide death; and no resurrection or ascension of our nature, glorified in the person of the Saviour, to the right hand of the Father. Thus it was the overthrow of all the hopes, the basis of which St. Paul had so exultingly and elaborately laid in his first Epistle to the Corinthians. It was the merciless upfolding of that glorious transfiguration pageant, in which the corruptible was seen putting on incorruption, and the mortal clothing itself with immortality. The verses which appear in the "Christian Year" for St. Jude's Day, owe their suggestion to the third verse of his Epistle:"That ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" Seest thou, how tearful and alone, Who is at hand that loves the Lord? Make haste, and take her home, and bring Thine household choir, in true accord Soft on her fluttering heart shall breathe The Spirit of the dying Son Is there, and fills the holy place Of pardoned foes, and cherished grace. And as of old by two and two His herald saints the Saviour sent To soften hearts like morning dew, So evermore He deems His name He sees His servants duly paired. |