Gibbon has shown us that the first regular church government was instituted at Alexandria. This is in keeping with the other facts. The dogmas of an incarnate God, of the Trinity, and the sacred character of the Blessed Virgin were all introduced into the creed by the influence of the Alexandrians, and it would therefore seem to be legitimately their right to institute the government. We have noticed already that the Therapeutæ of that country had offices with similar titles and functions as those now possessed by officers of the Church, and as they and the Christians were closely allied, we have good reason for the belief that they had united with the new organization in such numbers as to outvote the original members. Certain it is, that thenceforth the names of Essenes and Therapeutæ occurred no more. But the sect which gave shape to the concept had thus, to a certain degree at least, resumed control over the whole matter. That such an individual as Jesus Christ ever lived is entirely without proof from history. We find Josephus making mention of one and another who acquired notoriety. He describes Judas of Galilee as the founder of a fourth philosophic sect, and tells of Jesus the son of Hanan who predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple years before it occurred. We observe similarity enough in his utterances to those of the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, and in his deportment when brought before the Roman governor to that described in the Gospels, to warrant some little surmise of identity with the Jesus of the Gospels. But of Jesus as the founder of the Christian religion, or more properly the Ebionite sect, we have no such delineation. Of him we have only an utterance which is a palpable forgery. This preaching of Jesus as a veritable individual of like passions with other men, having a will not always consonant with the divine will, and yet divine in qualities and attributes, has been very justly “to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness.” Intelligent men, however reverent and impartial, have been compelled to dissent. The fanatic Tertullian in declaring his own position gave utterance to what many felt to be the substance of the whole matter: “I reverence it because it is contemptible; I adore it because it is absurd; I believe it because it is impossible.” We are outgrowing a faith and veneration so utterly childlike as to be fatuity itself.