But there is no part of truth which those worse than silly dreamers did not falsify, and in doing it made statements more absurd than the darkest pagan uttered. The Gnostics denied the divine authority of the New Testament, affirmed that the world was created by inferior beings, imperfect and evil in their nature, that Moses—whom some abhorred was actuated by the malignant author of this world whose object was his own glory and not the advantage of man. They denied resurrection, matter being so evil, the soul would never be reunited to it. They attributed all the calamities of the world to malevolent genii, and studied magic arts to counteract them. They manifested the superstition of idolatry with their boast of knowledge. They were infidels of the worst type. They dishonored the written word of God more than those who utterly deny it. For even in the New Testament which they professed to receive their culpable ignorance led them to take the word, the light, the life in John 1 as so many distinct aeons or emanations. Would any but the blinded dupes of Satan put forth or receive such follies?
Such the condition of the church before two centuries had passed since its formation. The word errors were taught under the profession of the name of Christ, but a denial of Himself. Not a vital point of truth but was assailed and, as far as man could, undermined. And in these early heresies is the evil root of every succeeding error since known, the pregnant source of blasphemous doctrine and evil practice which have ravaged the church from that time until now.
But we are looking not at mere errors, but marking those chiefly that denied the full truth of the Person of Christ, which are not errors, but infidelity. A man may hold wrong views concerning many things in the Bible. He may be singular in his views as to the mode and subjects of baptism, as to the doctrines of election and the Lord's coming; if he be sound and scriptural as to the Person of Christ, His perfect manhood, and His perfect deity he cannot be fatally wrong upon other and lesser points. But the heretic who denies the true humanity, or essential Godhead of Christ is an infidel.
Infidelity such as this appeared in the first century and sprang from Jewish sources. It was not infidelity in the sense here used, to insist upon circumcision, and the ceremonial law; but when Cerinthus and his followers maintained that the Lord Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary, that there was nothing divine about Him, or that His divinity was simply the communication of the Holy Ghost at His baptism, then appeared infidelity, fatal and the most horrible to a Christian. It is the reappearing of the old Jewish enmity which met the Lord on all sides when He was here. Though veiled under humanity, He declared Himself as God, and the Son of the Father, and that He and the Father are one. The Jew quite understood this, and took up stones to stone Him saying, “thou being a man makest thyself God.” The Jew in rejecting the Person of the Son is without excuse. How much greater the guilt of those who, after He had been declared the Son of God in power by resurrection of the dead, still denied His Godhead. The Gentile element however was not entirely absent during this first age. It then began to be taught that the body of Christ was not a real body. And in the second century the church was flooded with heresies arising from Eastern ideas, and containing the same blasphemy.
In the third century the Manicheans arose, a sect which held the eternity of matter, as well as denying Christ. In the beginning of this same age the Godhead was declared to be but One Person. The Son and the Holy Ghost wore but modifications of the revelation of the Father. About the middle of the century Sabellius openly taught that the Word and the Holy Spirit were only functions of the Deity; that God in heaven was the Father of all; that He condescended to be born of the Virgin, and thus was the Son, the Word; and that He diffused Himself under the appearance of tongues of fire on the apostles, and thus was called the Holy Ghost. Hence though not the originator, this heresy is called after his name, the Sabellian heresy. The distinction of the Persons in the Trinity was thus denied, and the real incarnation, suffering, and death of Christ go with it. And so intimate is the connection between the truth of God and Christ, and the salvation of man, that if part of it be lost or given up, the foundation is destroyed upon which the righteousness and the grace of God can together provide a ransom for man.