Even the philosophizing Christians of the first century, against whom the Apostles wrote, went no further than to suppose the Christ to be a superior intelligence, inhabiting a mortal form, or assuming the appearance of one: Cerinthus maintaining that Jesus was a man born of Joseph and Mary, and that at his baptism the Christ descended upon him; while Marcion held that the Son of God took the exterior form of a man, and appeared as a man; and without being born, or gradually growing up to the full stature of a man, he showed himself at once in Galilee as a man grown. It was not till Justin Martyr, himself a philosopher, wrote an apology for Christianity to a philosophical Roman emperor (A. D. 140), that any distinct mention appears to have been made of the doctrine of the Divinity of Christ. It is not surprising that--feeling how great a reproach the death of the cross must be in the eyes of the potentate whom he wished to conciliate, and finding his mode of exposition prepared by the Gnostic Christians, and by the application made by the learned Philo of the Platonic doctrine of the Logos,--Justin Martyr should have been tempted to recommend his new theology by introducing an admixture of that philosophy which has proved, according to the warnings of the Apostle, a 'vain deceit.' Such we have no hesitation in calling it. A doctrine of this nature cannot be in part true, but liable to mistake: it must be absolutely true or absolutely false. We hold it to be the latter; because it was not made a subject of distinct revelation by Christ, a primary article of belief by the Apostles, or even a matter of distinct mention for a century and a half from the birth of Christ. All that, from the study of the records of Revelation, we hold to be the primary and essential doctrines of Christianity, stand forth conspicuously in the teachings, are confirmed by the deeds, and illustrated in the lives of the Saviour and his followers. We propose to bring them forward, with their evidence, in the following order. I. The strict Unity of God. II. The unlimited nature of the Redemption by Christ. III. The existence of a Future State. From these, various subordinate principles may be derived, some of the most important of which we shall afterwards specify; and then proceed to treat of the temporary sanctions and institutions of Christianity, in distinction from its permanent principles.