_Conditions of the Church in the First Three Centuries:_ A certain Mr. Deacon attempted to refute the Mr. Brekel referred to by Dr. Lardner, and to maintain the purity of the Church of the first three centuries. On this Mr. Brekel observed that "If this point were thoroughly examined, it would appear that the Christian Church preserved her virgin purity no longer than the Apostolic age, at least if we may give credit to Hegesippus." Relying upon the support of the ecclesiastical history of Socrates, a writer of the first half of the fifth century, Mr. Brekel also says: "To mention the corruptions and innovations in religion of the four first centuries, is wholly superfluous; when it is so very notorious that, even before the reign of Constantine, there sprang up a kind of heathenish Christianity which mingled itself with the true Christian religion."[A] [Footnote A: Lardner, vol. viii, p. 345.] Of the impending departure from the Christian religion immediately succeeding the days of the Apostles, Dr. Neander says: "Already, in the latter part of the age of St. Paul, we shall see many things different from what they had been originally; and so it cannot appear strange if other changes came to be introduced into the constitution of the (Christian) communities, by the altered circumstances of the times immediately succeeding those of St. Paul or St. John. Then ensued those strongly marked oppositions and schisms, those dangers with which the corruptions engendered by manifold foreign elements threatened primitive Christianity."[A] [Footnote A: Neander's History of the Christian Religion and Church vol i p. 191.] Dr. Phillip Smith, the author of the "Students' Ecclesiastical History," in speaking of the early corruptions of the Christian religion, says: "The sad truth is that as soon as Christianity was generally diffused, it began to absorb corruptions from all the lands in which it was planted, and to reflect the complexion of all their systems of religion and philosophy."[A] [Footnote A: Eccles. Hist., vol. i, p. 49.] Dean Milman, in his preface to his annotated edition of Edward Gibbon's great work, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," and commenting upon that great author's attitude respecting the Christian religion, says: "If, after all, the view of the early progress of Christianity be melancholy and humiliating, we must beware lest we charge the whole of this on the infidelity of the historian. It is idle, it is disingenuous, to deny or dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity, still more from its spirit of universal love. It may be no unsalutary lesson to the Christian world, that this silent, this unavoidable perhaps, yet fatal change, shall have been drawn by an impartial, or even an hostile hand."[A] [Footnote A: Gibbon's Roman Empire, Preface by Dean Milman, p. 15.]