utes of the Logos had not been
confirmed by the celestial pen of the last and most sublime of the
Evangelists. [20] The Christian Revelation, which was consummated under
the reign of Nerva, disclosed to the world the amazing secret, that the
Logos, who was with God from the beginning, and was God, who had made
all things, and for whom all things had been made, was incarnate in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth; who had been born of a virgin, and suffered
death on the cross. Besides the genera design of fixing on a perpetual
basis the divine honors of Christ, the most ancient and respectable of
the ecclesiastical writers have ascribed to the evangelic theologian a
particular intention to confute two opposite heresies, which disturbed
the peace of the primitive church. [21] I. The faith of the Ebionites,
[22] perhaps of the Nazarenes, [23] was gross and imperfect. They
revered Jesus as the greatest of the prophets, endowed with supernatural
virtue and power. They ascribed to his person and to his future reign
all the predictions of the Hebrew oracles which relate to the spiritual
and everlasting kingdom of the promised Messiah. [24] Some of them might
confess that he was born of a virgin; but they obstinately rejected the
preceding existence and divine perfections of the Logos, or Son of God,
which are so clearly defined in the Gospel of St. John. About fifty
years afterwards, the Ebionites, whose errors are mentioned by Justin
Martyr with less severity than they seem to deserve, [25] formed a very
inconsiderable portion of the Christian name. II. The Gnostics, who
were distinguished by the epithet of Docetes, deviated into the contrary
extreme; and betrayed the human, while they asserted the divine, nature
of Christ. Educated in the school of Plato, accustomed to the sublime
idea of the Logos, they readily conceived that the brightest Aeon,
or Emanation of the Deity, might assume the outward shape and visible
appearances of a mortal; [26] but they vainly pretended, that the
imperfections of matter are incompatible with the purity of a celestial
substance.

While the blood of Christ yet smoked on Mount Calvary, the Docetes
invented the impious and extravagant hypothesis, that, instead of
issuing from the womb of the Virgin, [27] he had descended on the banks
of the Jordan in the form of perfect manhood; that he had imposed on the
senses of his enemies, and of his disciples; and that the ministers of
Pilate had wasted their