all ceremonies, and strict evangelical
discipline were to rule.[369] Completely carried away with the novelty,
uniqueness and grandeur of the Pauline Gospel of the grace of God in
Christ, Marcion felt that all other conceptions of the Gospel, and
especially its union with the Old Testament religion, was opposed to,
and a backsliding from the truth.[370] He accordingly supposed that it
was necessary to make the sharp antitheses of Paul, law and gospel,
wrath and grace, works and faith, flesh and spirit, sin and
righteousness, death and life, that is the Pauline criticism of the Old
Testament religion, the foundation of his religious views, and to refer
them to two principles, the righteous and wrathful god of the Old
Testament, who is at the same time identical with the creator of the
world, and the God of the Gospel, quite unknown before Christ, who is
only love and mercy.[371] This Paulinism in its religious strength, but
without dialectic, without the Jewish Christian view of history, and
detached from the soil of the Old Testament, was to him the true
Christianity. Marcion, like Paul, felt that the religious value of a
statutory law with commandments and ceremonies, was very different from
that of a uniform law of love.[372] Accordingly, he had a capacity for
appreciating the Pauline idea of faith; it is to him reliance on the
unmerited grace of God which is revealed in Christ. But Marcion shewed
himself to be a Greek, influenced by the religious spirit of the time,
by changing the ethical contrast of the good and legal into the contrast
between the infinitely exalted spiritual and the sensible which is
subject to the law of nature, by despairing of the triumph of good in
the world and, consequently, correcting the traditional faith that the
world and history belong to God, by an empirical view of the world and
the course of events in it,[373] a view to which he was no doubt also
led by the severity of the early Christian estimate of the world. Yet to
him systematic speculation about the final causes of the contrast
actually observed, was by no means the main thing. So far as he himself
ventured on such a speculation he seems to have been influenced by the
Syrian Cerdo. The numerous contradictions which arise as soon as one
attempts to reduce Marcion's propositions to a system, and the fact that
his disciples tried all possible conceptions of the doctrine of
principles, and defined the relation of the two Gods very di