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 incorporeal
essence, ascribed by the ancients to human souls, celestial beings, and
even the Deity himself, does not exclude the notion of extended space;
and their imagination was satisfied with a subtile nature of air, or
fire, or aether, incomparably more perfect than the grossness of the
material world. If we define the place, we must describe the figure, of
the Deity. Our experience, perhaps our vanity, represents the powers of
reason and virtue under a human form. The Anthropomorphites, who swarmed
among the monks of Egypt and the Catholics of Africa, could produce the
express declaration of Scripture, that man was made after the image of
his Creator. The venerable Serapion, one of the saints of the Nitrian
deserts, relinquished, with many a tear, his darling prejudice; and
bewailed, like an infant, his unlucky conversion, which had stolen
away his God, and left his mind without any visible object of faith or
devotion.

III. Such were the fleeting shadows of the Docetes. A more substantial,
though less simple, hypothesis, was contrived by Cerinthus of Asia, who
dared to oppose the last of the apostles. Placed on the confines of the
Jewish and Gentile world, he labored to reconcile the Gnostic with the
Ebionite, by confessing in the same Messiah the supernatural union of a
man and a God; and this mystic doctrine was adopted with many fanciful
improvements by Carpocrates, Basilides, and Valentine, the heretics of
the Egyptian school. In their eyes, Jesus of Nazareth was a mere mortal,
the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary: but he was the best and wisest of
the human race, selected as the worthy instrument to restore upon earth
the worship of the true and sup