Very unlike to him was his well-known contemporary Celsus. If the one represents the scoffer, the other represents the philosopher. Not despising Christianity with scorn like Tacitus, nor jeering at it with humour like Lucian, Celsus had the wisdom to apprehend danger to heathenism, measuring Christianity in its mental and not its material relations; and about the reign of Marcus Aurelius wrote against it a work entitled Λόγος ἀληθής, which was considered of such importance, that Origen towards the close of his own life(145) wrote a large and elaborate reply to it. We know nothing of Celsus’s life.(146) There is even an uncertainty as to the school of philosophy to which he belonged. External evidence seems to testify that he was an Epicurean; but internal would lead us to classify him with the Platonic. Unscrupulous in argument, confounding canonical gospels with apocryphal, and Christians with heretical sects, delighting in searching for contradictions, incapable of understanding the deeper aspects of Christianity, he has united in his attack all known objections, making use of minute criticism, philosophical theory, piquant sarcasm, and eloquent invective, as the vehicle of his passionate assault. It is impossible to recover a continuous account of the work of Celsus from the treatise of his respondent; but a careful study of the fragments embedded in the text of Origen will perhaps restore the framework of the original sufficiently to enable us to perceive the points of his opposition to Christianity, and the manner in which his philosophy stood in the way of the reception of it. (14) Celsus commences by introducing a Jewish rabbi to attack Christianity from the monotheistic stand-point of the earlier faith.(147) The Jew is first made to direct his criticism against the documents of Christianity, and then the facts narrated.(148) He points out inconsistencies in the gospel narratives of the genealogy of Christ;(149) utters the most blasphemous calumnies concerning the incarnation;(150) turns the narrative of the infancy into ridicule;(151) imputes our Saviour’s miracles to magic;(152) attacks his divinity;(153) and concentrates the bitterest raillery on the affecting narrative of our blessed Lord’s most holy passion. Each fact of deepening sorrow in that divine tragedy, the betrayal,(154) the mental anguish, the sacred agony,(155) is made the subject of remarks characterized no less by coarseness of taste and unfairness, than to the Christian mind by irreverence. Instead of his heart being touched by the majesty of our Saviour’s sorrow, Celsus only finds an argument against the divine character of the adorable sufferer.(156) The wonders accompanying Christ’s death are treated as legends;(157) the resurrection regarded as an invention or an optical delusion.(158)