by the devil, and to fall from obedience of the Law into sin and death?(1) How came the devil, the origin of lying and deceit, to be made at all?(2) After the fall, God became a judge both severe and cruel; woman is at once condemned to bring forth in sorrow and to serve her husband, changed from a help into a slave; the earth is cursed which before was blessed, and man is doomed to labour and to death.(3) The law was one of retaliation and not of justice,--lex talionis--eye for eye, tooth for tooth, stripe for stripe.(4) And it was not consistent, for in contravention of the Decalogue, God is made to instigate the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians, and fraudulently rob them of their gold and silver;(5) to incite them to work on the Sabbath by ordering them to carry the ark for eight days round Jericho;(6) to break the second commandment by making and setting up the brazen serpent and the golden cherubim.(7) Then God is inconstant, electing men, as Saul and Solomon, whom he subsequently rejects;(8) repenting that he had set up Saul, and that he had doomed the Ninevites,(9) and so on. God calls out: Adam, where art thou? inquires whether he had eaten the forbidden fruit; asks of Cain where his brother was, as if he had not yet heard the blood of Abel crying from the ground, and did not already know all these things.(10) Anticipating the results of modem criticism, Marcion denies the applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies. The Emmanuel of {107} Isaiah (vii. 14, cf. viii. 4) is not Christ;(1) the "Virgin" his mother is simply a "young woman" according to Jewish phraseology;(2) and the sufferings of the Servant of God (Isaiah lii. 13--liii. 9) are not predictions of the death of Jesus.(3) There is a complete severance between the Law and the Gospel, and the God of the latter is the Antithesis of that of the former.(4) "The one was perfect, pure, beneficent, passionless; the other, though not unjust by nature, infected by matter,--subject to all the passions of man,--cruel, changeable; the New Testament, especially as remodelled by Marcion,(5) was holy, wise, amiable; the Old Testament, the Law, barbarous, inhuman, contradictory, and detestable."(6) Marcion ardently maintained the doctrine of the impurity of matter, and he carried it to its logical conclusion, both in speculation and practice. He, therefore, asserting the incredibility of an incarnate God, denied the corporeal reality of the flesh of Christ. His body was a mere semblance and not of human substance, was not born of a human mother, and the divine nature was not degraded by contact with the flesh.(7) Marcion finds in Paul the purest promulgator of the truth as he understands it, and emboldened by the Epistle to the Galatians, in which that Apostle rebukes even Apostles for "not walking uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel," he accuses the other Apostles of having depraved the pure form of the Gospel doctrines delivered to them by