ty of Jesus Christ,
and consequently, the divine origin of the Gospel he brought.

This unity of the faith seems to have been first broken in upon by the
introduction of a fourth class of converts, who, by incorporating their
former philosophical doctrines with the new theology they had embraced,
originated the first heresy. There had been disputes, it is true, in the
church; but not concerning matters of faith. In these disputes the
Apostles themselves had been not only involved, but actually opposed to
each other. These questions related to the fancied necessity of the
adoption by the Gentiles of the forms of the Jewish law: questions of
great importance to the Jews, as affecting their views of the ultimate
design of Christianity; to the Gentiles, as involving their spiritual
liberties; and to us and the Christian world at large, as throwing light
on the transactions of the primitive times, and as having originated
some of the Epistles of Paul.

But they bore no relation to the essential doctrines, which were held
free from corruption, controversy, or even doubt, till some converts
from the philosophical sect of the Gnostics introduced, within twenty
years after the death of Christ, the first taint of that corruption from
which the true faith has never since been freed.

The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostic philosophy was, that all mind is
ultimately derived from the Supreme mind; that the souls of all men have
therefore pre-existed; that there is a higher order of spirits, more
immediately emanating from the Supreme; that these superior
intelligences descend occasionally to inhabit the bodies of men, or to
assume their apparent form. This doctrine, to which they were much
attached, the Gnostic converts easily contrived to connect with their
new theology, believing Jesus to be one of these superior intelligences
in a visible form, or that the man Jesus was animated by such a spirit,
who was in reality the Christ. Against this corruption of the simplicity
of the faith the Apostle John protested in his First and Second
Epistles, in which he followed the example of Peter, Paul, and Jude.
That the Gnostics were the persons he had in view, is evident from the
fact that no other schismatics at that period troubled the peace of the
church, and also from his own application of his censure to such as
'confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh.' (2 John 7.) The
'fables and endless genealogies' which Paul reprobate