onsult the accurate note of
Tillemont, Memoires Ecclesiastiques, tom. ii. p. 511. * Note: Justin
Martyr makes an important distinction, which Gibbon has neglected to
notice. * * * There were some who were not content with observing the
Mosaic law themselves, but enforced the same observance, as necessary to
salvation, upon the heathen converts, and refused all social intercourse
with them if they did not conform to the law. Justin Martyr himself
freely admits those who kept the law themselves to Christian communion,
though he acknowledges that some, not the Church, thought otherwise; of
the other party, he himself thought less favorably. The former by some
are considered the Nazarenes the atter the Ebionites--G and M.]

[Footnote 25: Of all the systems of Christianity, that of Abyssinia is
the only one which still adheres to the Mosaic rites. (Geddes's Church
History of Aethiopia, and Dissertations de La Grand sur la Relation du
P. Lobo.) The eunuch of the queen Candace might suggest some suspicious;
but as we are assured (Socrates, i. 19. Sozomen, ii. 24. Ludolphus, p.
281) that the Aethiopians were not converted till the fourth century, it
is more reasonable to believe that they respected the sabbath, and
distinguished the forbidden meats, in imitation of the Jews, who, in a
very early period, were seated on both sides of the Red Sea.
Circumcision had been practised by the most ancient Aethiopians, from
motives of health and cleanliness, which seem to be explained in the
Recherches Philosophiques sur les Americains, tom. ii. p. 117.]

While the orthodox church preserved a just medium between excessive
veneration and improper contempt for the law of Moses, the various
heretics deviated into equal but opposite extremes of error and
extravagance. From the acknowledged truth of the Jewish religion, the
Ebionites had concluded that it could never be abolished. From its
supposed imperfections, the Gnostics as hastily inferred that it never
was instituted by the wisdom of the Deity. There are some objections
against the authority of Moses and the prophets, which too readily
present themselves to the sceptical mind; though they can only be
derived from our ignorance of remote antiquity, and from our incapacity
to form an adequate judgment of the divine economy. These objections
were eagerly embraced and as petulantly urged by the vain science of the
Gnostics. [26] As those heretics were, for the most part, averse to
the plea