No doubt: but the most probable solution of the apparent want of distinctness of explication on this article, in my humble judgment, is--that the so-called Apostles' Creed was at first the preparatory confession of the catechumens, the admission-ticket, as it were ('symbolum ad Baptismum'), at the gate of the Church, and gradually augmented as heresies started up. The latest of these seems to have consisted in the doubt respecting the entire death of Jesus on the Cross, as distinguished from suspended animation. Hence in the fifth or sixth century the clause--"and he descended into Hades," was inserted;--that is, the indissoluble principle of the man Jesus, was separated from, and left, the dissoluble, and subsisted apart in 'Scheol', or the abode of separated souls;--but really meaning no more than 'vere mortuus est'. Jesus was taken from the Cross dead in the very same sense in which the Baptist was dead after his beheading. Nevertheless, well adapted as this Creed was to its purposes, I cannot but regret the high place and precedence which by means of its title, and the fable to which that title gave rise, it has usurped. It has, as it appears to me, indirectly favoured Arianism and Socinianism. Ib. p. 250. That St. John wrote his Gospel with a view to confute Cerinthus, among other false teachers, is attested first by Irenæus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, and who flourished within less than a century of St. John's time. I have little trust and no faith in the gossip and hearsay-anecdotes of the early Fathers, Irenæus not excepted. "Within less than a century of St. John's time." Alas! a century in the paucity of writers and of men of education in the age succeeding the Apostolic, must be reckoned more than equal to five centuries since the use of printing. Suppose, however, the truth of the Irenæan tradition;--that the Creed of Cerinthus was what Irenæus states it to have been; and that John, at the instance of the Asiatic Bishops, wrote his Gospel as an antidote to the Cerinthian heresy;--does there not thence arise, in his utter silence, an almost overwhelming argument against the Apostolicity of the 'Christopædia', both that prefixed to Luke, and that concorporated with Matthew? Ib. p. 257. 'In him was life, and the life was the light of men'. The same Word was life, the [Greek: logos and zôáe], both one. There was no occasion therefore for subtilly distinguishing the Word and Life into two Sons, as some did. I will not deny the possibility of this interpretation. It may be,--nay, it is,--fairly deducible from the words of the great Evangelist: but I cannot help thinking that, taken as the primary intention, it degrades this most divine chapter, which unites in itself the three characters of sublime, profound, and pregnant, and alloys its universality by a mixture of time and accident. Ib.