common character that runs through the whole body of the evidence of heretics is, that they, one and all, from first to last, deny the existence of Jesus Christ as a man, and, professing their faith in him as a God and Saviour, yet uniformly and consistently hold the whole story of his life and actions to be allegorical. The very earliest Christian writings that have come down to us are of a controversial character and written in attempted refutation of heresies. These heresies must therefore have been of so much earlier date and prior prevalence; they could not have been considered of sufficient consequence to have called (as they seem to have done) for the entire devotion and enthusiastic zeal of the orthodox party to extirpate or keep them under, if they had not acquired deep root and become of serious notoriety—an inference which leads directly to the conclusion that they were of anterior origination to any date that has hitherto been ascribed to the Gospel history. In accordance with the notion that Christ was a phantom, the writer of the Commentaries which are attributed to Clement of Alexandria, apparently quoting from the Gospel of Nicodemus, tells us that an apostle attempted to touch the body of Christ, but in so doing found no hardness of flesh and met with no resistance from it, although he thrust his hand into the inner part of it. A similar idea is conveyed by Luke where he says that Christ _vanished_ out of the sight of his disciples, but yet shortly after stood in the midst of them—a notion consistent only with that of an apparition (Luke 24: 31, 36). Similar remarks may be made on the words of Christ to Thomas and Mary; to the latter he says, “Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father that is, I am not to be felt;” and to the former he says, “Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side” (John 20:17, 27). Both these expressions, contradictory as they are with regard to Jesus, still show that the writer knew something of the notion entertained that Christ was a _phantom_. Luke (24: 37, 39) also has words proving the same point, where he says that the disciples, when they saw Christ after his resurrection, thought they had seen a spirit and that he told them to handle him. Marcion of Pontus, who flourished about A. D. 127, believed Christ not to have been born of a virgin and to have grown up gradually, but that he took the form of a man and _appeared_ as a man without being born, and at once showed himself in Galilee in full maturity. Manes also, according to the testimony of Socrates and others, “denied that Christ was ever really born or had real human flesh, but asserted that he was a mere phantom.” (See Lardner’s _Credibility_, vol. ii. p. 141.) For men who entertained this notion of “the person of Christ,” his sufferings, death, and resurrection were of course a delusion—were only in appearance. Thus, according to Father Apelles, who wrote about A. D.