The vagueness of the expression-"certain of the Christians," is strange, and Origen suggests that he must have known there were some heresies which denied that Jesus was the Christ of prophecy. As to the statement that the Jews expected a God would descend on the earth, he observes that this was not what the Jews generally said. He had already remarked (Bk. i., p. 38), that Celsus was mistaken in putting a similar phrase into the mouth of a Jew, because "a Jew would not confess that a prophet had said that the Son of God would come. What they do say," he continues, “is, that the Christ of God will come; yes, and they often at once dispute with us about the Son of God, as if there were no such Son, and as if he had never been prophesied about." As to the process of the redemption of mankind by the descent of the Son of God, Celsus asked, quite in the tone of a modern sceptic-"Was it not possible for him to set things straight by divine power, without sending a Being created for the purpose?" To this Origen makes a reply so remarkable that I shall translate it in full :

It seems that Celsus would have mankind enlightened by God's removing evil bodily and implanting virtue, and that a remedy should take place so. But another will ask whether such a process is consequent, or by nature possible? But let us say " Be it so," and allow it to be possible. Where, then, is our freedom? and where is a disposition to the truth open to praise, and an aversion to the false open to approbation? But even were it granted that this was possible and fit, wherefore shall one not rather ask in the first instance à question analogous to that of Celsus-“Why it was not possible for God, by divine power, to have made men not even needing to be set right, but of themselves good and perfect, evil not having arisen at all?" But these ideas may carry away with them uncultivated and incapable minds, but not him who sees into the nature of things, because if you take away the voluntariness of virtue you take away also its existence.- Bk. iv., p. 163.

This argument was evidently in the mind of Butler, in more than one remarkable passage of the Analogy, and it appears perfectly unanswerable. A divine action upon man, of such a nature that he would be incapable of resisting it, would obviously either make him a mere machine, or else like the brute creation, a being to whom rewards and punishments were inapplicable. Nor could he possibly have that happiness which depends either on the self-approval of a free and intelligent being, or the approval of it which comes from those above it in the scale, or from the Highest. The universe shows that an inferior happiness is also abundantly imparted by God, but the higher orders cannot complain if, when their own peculiar happiness is offered them, upon conditions required by the law of their being, and the

absence of which involves absurdity, they cannot, upon rejection of it, fall back upon the lower happiness of irrational creatures.

Another objection of Celsus is one that has probably been often urged by sceptics. He asks "Why, after so long a struggle, God thought of justifying the human race, but previously neglected it?" He meant to say that there appears no reason why the great remedy of the Incarnation should have been applied, after thousands of years, during which the divine mercy interfered not with the misery of the world. Origen deals with this objection in a characteristic manner, denying, in the first place, that God did neglect the human race in the times antecedent to the Incarnation. In every generation the wisdom of God entered into holy souls, making them friends of God and prophets, who converted others as they could. He goes on

to say :

It is no marvel that in certain generations prophets arose excelling, in the reception of divinity, because of their stronger and more energetic life, other prophets of their time, or who came before or after them; and that some occasion came when something special and singular (aiperóv ti xpñμa) sojourned among the race of men, and surpassing in comparison those who preceded or followed it. But the reasoning hereupon is somewhat mystical and deep, and what the ears of the multitude are not altogether able to take in.-Bk. iv., p. 166.

There is in this passage, as elsewhere in Origen, a tone not quite in harmony with the faith of later times, which has gained in definiteness on the subject of the Incarnation. It sounds as if he might have thought that our Lord was a prophet immensely greater than other prophets, which indeed He was, and yet such language would call forth false impressions, as not necessarily conveying all that was intended by it. On the other hand, whilst the passage shows a yet imperfect development of theology, it witnesses strongly to the existence of a secret tradition, in which what appeared the guesses of popular teaching were stated with the boldness and emphasis of days when reserve was no longer necessary. This seeming hesitation and uncertainty of expression. may be illustrated by another passage, rather earlier in the book, where the first sentence might, as far as words go, be taken in a Nestorian sense :—

Whether the God of all descends with His own power, with Jesus, into human life, or whether the Word that was in the beginning with God, being also Himself God, cometh to us, He leaves not His habitation (oùxedpos yivera) nor abandons His seat, so as that any place is void of Him, and another full, which had Him not before.—p. 164.

I proceed to another of Celsus' objections, which again is very

much in the spirit of modern scepticism. It is founded on the supposed incompatibility of the divine immutability with the doctrine of the Incarnation. With his usual fairness, and disposition to meet his adversary without shirking anything, Origen quotes Celsus' words as follows:

I say nothing new, but matters long since approved. God is good, and beautiful, and happy, and in the most beautiful and excellent position. If, then, he descends among men he stands in need of change, and of change from good to bad, and from the beautiful to the ugly, and from happiness to unhappiness, and from what is most excellent to what is most vile. Who, then, would choose such a change as that? It is for the mortal to change and alter, but for the Immortal to abide in the same state and manner. God, then, could never admit this change. Either, then, God really changes, as these people say, into a mortal body--the impossibility of which has been stated above-or He Himself changes not, but makes the beholders imagine so, and misleads and is false. But deceit and falsehood are otherwise evil, and may only be used by way of medicine, either on friends who are sick or insane, or on enemies, when one is considering how to escape danger. But no one sick or insane is a friend to God, nor does God fear any one, that He should escape danger by using deceit.—Bk. iv., p. 169–171.

Origen meets these difficulties by emphatically affirming the immutability of God, which is declared in well-known passages of Scripture, and he contrasts with it the changeableness of the Epicurean gods, composed of atoms, as was imagined, and therefore capable of dissolution, or of the supreme god of the Stoics, supposed corporeal, and co-extensive with universal being when their general conflagration (ixupworg) takes place, but only a part of it in the process of arrangement (diaxóouros). The reconciliation of the divine immutability with the Incarnation is proved by reasons, some of which would easily occur to every instructed Christian; for example, that there was no change from good to evil, because He did no sin; nor, again, from happiness to unhappiness, because in His humiliation He ever retained His blessedness; nor from the excellent to the vile, for goodness and love to man never could be vile. His contact with man is compared to that of the physician with wounds and disease, who might indeed be infected thereby, whilst the Divine Physician heals the wounds of our soul by the Word of God which is in Him, Himself being incapable of receiving any ill. The Word remains unchanged in its Being, suffering nothing of what is suffered by the body or the human soul. He proceeds to develope this in a singular manner :—

Condescending sometimes to him that is unable to gaze upon the splendours and brightness of Deity, He (the immortal God and Word)

becomes as it were, flesh, speaking corporeally, until he who receives Him in such wise, being gradually uplifted by the Word, may be able to discern also, so to call it, His preceding form. For there are, as it were, various forms of the Word, according as the Word appears to each of those that are led into science, proportionately to the habit of him that is being introduced, or is more or less advancing, or is now approaching near to virtue, or has even entered into virtue. Whence our God was not transformed, in the way Celsus and those like him will have it, and, ascending into the high mountain, He showed His own form, different from, and far excelling, that which those who remained below, and were unable to follow Him to the height, looked upon. For those below had not eyes that were able to gaze upon the transfiguration of the Word to that which was glorious and more divine; but they were scarcely able to receive Him in such a guise (as He appeared in), so that it would be said of Him by those who were unable to gaze upon His more excellent appearance: "We have seen Him, and there was no sightliness that we should be desirous of Him, despised and the most abject of men" (Isa. liii. 2).—Bk. iv., p. 170.

About all this there is a vagueness which might seem to show that Origen could not have distinctly apprehended the doctrine of the Incarnation, and his efforts to convey it to the minds of those without make him continually fall into expressions which writers, not long after his time, could not have used without the note of heresy. Thus, in the passage I have quoted, he seems to regard the Transfiguration as a quasi-corporeal manifestation of the Divinity, and our Blessed Lord's appearance in the flesh generally, as an accommodation for affording mankind the vision of God, proportionately to their several states. We can better go along with him when he proceeds to contrast the lofty ideas he suggests with the Greek fable of Dionysus being deceived by the Titans and expelled from the throne of Zeus, and being torn in pieces by them and then put together again, and, as it were, restored to life and ascending into Heaven; or when he demands why the Greeks should be allowed to refer their fables to the nature of the soul, and to render them figuratively, whilst against Christians the door of consistent interpretation was to be shut, harmonising throughout with the Scriptures of the Divine Spirit influencing pure souls? There was, in fact, at the time, a great effort made by Greek philosophy to build up the old mythology as a great mystical system antagonistic to Christianity. It tried to meet the evident necessities of the age, and yet to refuse accepting the divinely-appointed supply. Perhaps it was Origen's great fault that he complied too much with the temper of the times, and sought to recommend Christianity by dressing it in the garb peculiarly adapted to please philosophic imaginations. By so doing he narrowly missed, if he did miss, the shipwreck of his own faith. As to the objection of Celsus about deceit, the

apologist contends, referring to St. Paul's rules about the weak (Rom. xiv. 2), that the Word assuredly falsifies not His own nature in becoming nutritious to each, according to his capacity to receive Him, and He deceives not nor lies. He adds distinctions between the human soul of Jesus, united with the body and capable of suffering, and the Divine Word. But it is curiously in keeping with Origen's intellectual temper that, whilst guarding against the very notion that God can deceive, he is more than half-inclined to admit the principle of what may be called the medicinal use of falsehood in certain cases, and even goes so far as to add: "The race of men which was insane needed to be healed by methods which the Word saw was useful to the insane, that they might become sane." His mind seems to have been so full of reason that it made him disposed to favour anything that had a show of reason, or for which a plausible argument presented itself. This is the unfavourable side of Origen's intellect. I confess that, on the other side, this great writer reminds me not a little of the natural genius of St. Paul. There is an impetuosity, a richness, an ardour of the heart, a burning sympathy, which seems to set the reason itself on fire, in all of which the temperament of Origen resembles that of the Doctor of the Gentiles.

I now proceed to review a discussion which occupies a considerable space in the book before us. I mean that referring to an objection of Celsus founded on the supposed presumption of Jews and Christians, or of the human race, in imagining themselves the objects of the divine system. Celsus had scornfully compared the Jews and Christians

To a cluster of bats, or to ants coming out of their holes, or to frogs gathered about a marsh, or to worms holding a conventicle in a muddy corner, and disputing with each other which of them was the most sinful, and saying, "God foretells all things to us, and deserting the whole universe and the celestial system, and overlooking such a mass of earth, dwells among us alone, and sends embassies to us alone, and ceases not sending and seeking how we may be ever with Him. . . There is a God, and we were made after Him and by Him, in every way like God; and all things are subjected to us, earth, and water, and air, and the stars, and for our sakes are all things, and they have been stationed to do us service. But now since some

of us have been doing wrong, God will arrive, or will send His Son, that He may burn up the unjust, and we, the rest, may have eternal life with Him." Are these things more tolerable if said by frogs or worms than by Jews and Christians disputing with each other?— Bk. iv., p. 175.

An objection like this is to my mind a powerful argument in favour of Christianity. I do not know why, but we are perhaps