and
even the Gospel according to St. John, are levelled against the growing
error of the Docetes, who had obtained too much credit in the world,
(1 John, iv. 1--5.)]

[Footnote 11: About the year 200 of the Christian aera, Irenaeus
and Hippolytus efuted the thirty-two sects, which had multiplied to
fourscore in the time of Epiphanius, (Phot. Biblioth. cod. cxx. cxxi.
cxxii.) The five books of Irenaeus exist only in barbarous Latin; but
the original might perhaps be found in some monastery of Greece.]

One of the most subtile disputants of the Manichaean school has pressed
the danger and indecency of supposing, that the God of the Christians,
in the state of a human foetus, emerged at the end of nine months from
a female womb. The pious horror of his antagonists provoked them to
disclaim all sensual circumstances of conception and delivery; to
maintain that the divinity passed through Mary like a sunbeam through a
plate of glass; and to assert, that the seal of her virginity remained
unbroken even at the moment when she became the mother of Christ. But
the rashness of these concessions has encouraged a milder sentiment of
those of the Docetes, who taught, not that Christ was a phantom, but
that he was clothed with an impassible and incorruptible body.
Such, indeed, in the more orthodox system, he has acquired since his
resurrection, and such he must have always possessed, if it were capable
of pervading, without resistance or injury, the density of intermediate
matter. Devoid of its most essential properties, it might be exempt
from the attributes and infirmities of the flesh. A foetus that could
increase from an invisible point to its full maturity; a child that
could attain the stature of perfect manhood without deriving any
nourishment from the ordinary sources, might continue to exist without
repairing a daily waste by a daily supply of external matter. Jesus
might share the repasts of his disciples without being subject to the
calls of thirst or hunger; and his virgin purity was never sullied
by the involuntary stains of sensual concupiscence. Of a body thus
singularly constituted, a question would arise, by what means, and of
what materials, it was originally framed; and our sounder theology is
startled by an answer which was not peculiar to the Gnostics, that both
the form and the substance proceeded from the divine essence. The idea
of pure and absolute spirit is a refinement of modern philosophy: the
incorpore