1. Topography of Thyatira
Thyatira stood forty-eight miles east of Pergamos. It was a city of Lydia on the Lycus, a branch of the Hyllus, anciently called Pelopia, but now Akhissar by the Turks: that is, “the White Castle,” from the great quantity of white marble there abounding. Only one ancient edifice is left standing. The rest, including the clerical bazaars, or “churches,” are so destroyed that no vestiges of them are to be found. The principal inhabitants are Turks, who have eight mosques in Akhissar, p. 318 while the Greeks, calling themselves Christians, have no edifice indicative of the former pre-eminence of their mistress, “the woman Jezebel,” among Thyatirans. So effectively has “the Son of the Deity, whose eyes are as a flame of fire, and his feet like to incandescent brass,” fulfilled the threatening, saying, “Behold, I cast her into a bed, and them committing adultery with her into great tribulation; and I will slay her children with death.” The only vestige of Christianity there is a few ignorant and superstitious Greeks calling themselves by the name “Christian,” to which they are no more entitled than the Turks.
In the inscriptions of these apocalyptic epistles, none of the cities are addressed, as if each city were an ecclesia. In the English Version, that to the Ephesian saints is inscribed “to the Angel of the Church of Ephesus.” This style of address is in accordance with the notions which prevail in the synagogue of the Satan, where a city or a nation are regarded as synonymous with a church. Hence, in the nomenclature of “the Satan, as they speak,” we have the titles, “the Church of Rome,” “the Church of England,” “the Church of Scotland,” “the Church of Ireland,” and so forth; so that all born of the flesh, and of the will of man, in these places, not avowing themselves dissenters, are regarded and claimed as bona fide members of “the church by law established”—established by the law of flesh and blood, which is the Devil. But the scriptures recognize no such churches. They contain no epistles addressed to such. These are the several branches of the Synagogue of the Satan, whose angels are the men constituting the “Holy Orders” of the apostasy. The apocalyptic epistles are severally addressed “to the Angel of the Ephesian ecclesia,” “the ecclesia of Smyrneans,” “the ecclesia in Pergamos,” “the ecclesia among Thyatirans,” “in Sardis,” “in Philadelphia,” and “the ecclesia of Laodiceans;” but, whether saints of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, or Laodicea, they were all, who held fast the name and denied not the faith of the Spirit, the ecclesia, or invited ones, “in the Deity, the Father, and the Lord Jesus Anointed.” They boasted not in the ecclesiasticism of their native cities or countries, but in the Lord.
2. Origin of the Ecclesia in Thyatira
The Christian faith was, doubtless, introduced into Thyatira by Lydia, whom Paul ana his companions first became acquainted with at Philippi, a city of Macedonia. She was “a worshipper of God” belonging to Thyatira, but for the time being sojourning at Philippi as “a seller of purple.” Paul met her at the proseuche, by the river side, beyond the p. 319 city walls. She had gone there with other devout women to offer prayer to the living and true Deity. It was “on the day of the sabbaths,” or, as we say, on Saturday, by which we may infer, that Lydia was a devout Jewess, or Gentile proselyte, belonging to the synagogue in Thyatira. Luke, who was present, says, that “the Lord opened her heart to assent to the things being spoken by Paul;” and the result was, that she was baptized. Thus, Paul planted, but the Lord gave the increase; and the case shows under what conditions the increase was given. Certain things were being spoken by Paul. The things being spoken were “the truth,” or “Gospel of the Deity, which he had before promised by his prophets in the holy scriptures” (Rom. i. 1, 2); and that truth, “as it is in Jesus.” Paul could speak no other things, and none other would have opened Lydia’s heart, or understanding to an affectionate comprehension such as the Lord would have acknowledged. The truth spoken is the Lord’s instrumentality for the opening of men’s hearts; and where the truth is neither heard nor read, there the hearts of mankind remain unopened, and are found to be occupied by all “the depths of the Satan, as they speak.”
The reader will observe, that before the Lord opened the heart of Lydia, she was already “a worshipper of God.” This fact proves that a belief in, and sincere worship of, the true God is not sufficient for salvation; if it is, why did the Lord open the heart of his worshipper to receive Paul’s teaching? But it is not sufficient; for since the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, salvation is predicated on believing the things concerning the kingdom of the Deity, and the name of Jesus Anointed, and being baptized into that name. Any teaching in opposition to this, belongs to the departments of the synagogue of the Satan, apocalyptically designated as “Balaam,” and “the woman Jezebel.”
Lydia’s heart, or understanding and affections, were opened. She desired that others should share with her in the benefit she had received. She therefore introduced Paul to “her household.” We are not informed whether these were worshippers of God as well as Lydia; or whether it was composed of men and women, or exclusively of the latter. The probability is, that as she had come with purple goods from Thyatira, she had a retinue of male and female attendants and friends. The men of her company would look after the goods in their transhipment, and exhibition for sale in the bazaar, while the females would assist in the sales, and render any personal service she might require. Hence, “her household” may have been quite numerous; for visiting cities for the sale of goods in those days was a more onerous affair, and required more personal service, than in these, when companies supply the place of private enterprize. Her household may have been Jewish, p. 320 or mixed; probably purely Jewish, as she was of that faith; be this as it may, she introduced Paul to them, that he might speak the same things for the opening of their hearts which he had for the opening of hers. “As his manner was,” he declared the testimony of God, and reasoned with them out of the prophets concerning the expected Son of David, and King of Israel, called the Christ. His testimonies and arguments commended themselves to their honest hearts, which opened through the force of conviction to the obedience which the faith enjoins. As the result of the whole, Luke tells us in Acts xvi. 15, that “her household was baptized.” Lydia and her household were thus, by faith and baptism, added to the name of Jesus Anointed, or “the Lord the Spirit;” and an ecclesia of Thyatirans was created, so that when they should return to that city, they would become the nucleus of the apocalyptic ecclesia to which the Spirit writes; and “the house of the Deity, which is the ecclesia of the living Deity, the pillar and the foundation of the truth”—1 Tim. iii. 15.
But after this Paul visited Anatolia, or Asia Minor, in which Thyatira was situated and flourished, and, although we have no account of his visiting that city, there is every reason to believe, that multitudes from Thyatira visited him. In Acts xix. 8-10, it is expressly said, that Paul while at Ephesus disputed and persuaded the things concerning the kingdom of God, first, for three months in the synagogue there, and afterwards daily in the school of one Tyrannus for two years, “so that all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks.” No doubt many of these were immersed by Paul or his companions, and on their return to Thyatira received into the ecclesia already there.
The creation of the ecclesia among the Thyatirans after this manner occurred about thirty-five years before the dictation of this epistle to their “angel,” or eldership, by the Spirit. Ample time had, therefore, been granted them for the development of Christian character. In the general, it appears to have been commendable, though in a certain particular, they were reprehensible. The spirit of the Lord in the gifts he had bestowed had dwelt among them, and in their eldership, during the period of their ecclesiastical existence. The Son might therefore well say, “I have known thy works.” Though the resurrected and anointed Jesus was invisible to them, the gifts of the spirit they possessed had been sent by him, and as long as they continued, were a perpetual memento of his existence at the right hand of power, and of his perception and cognizance of all that was transpiring in all the ecclesias of the Habitable. “The grace and the truth,” says John, “came by Jesus Anointed,” who, as David predicted, and Paul testified, p. 321 “ascended on high, and received gifts for men.” Hence, wherever those gifts were, there also were the presence and power of the personal, or individual, Son of the Deity, who speaks in these epistles as “the Spirit,” on the principle that “that which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” and therefore God, or DIVINE POWER.
The works of the Angel were conspicuous for “love, and service, and faith, and endurance.” Such an eldership must have been in the general in a spiritually healthy and efficient state; and which argued also a wholesome condition of the Spirit’s servants, called in the letter “my servants;” or, in the nomenclature of the synagogue of the Satan, “the laity.” It is “the leaders of the people cause them to err;” but where the leaders are faithful, this cause of error is wanting. The leaders corrupt the people, and when the people are corrupted, the seducers are enthroned and flourish; and the people come at length to delight in the corruption that destroys them.
The ecclesia among the Thyatirans became an arena upon which the two classes of leaders displayed themselves. The one class were characterized by a more abundant love, service, faith, and endurance in the days of John, than in the days when they were originally constituted the Star in Thyatira; while the other class was characterized by the idolatrous, meritricious, and murderous wife of Ahab, “the woman Jezebel,” who slew the prophets of Yahweh. The former were the Antipas in Thyatira whose devotedness sustained the truth against the machinations of all its enemies, heretical or pagan. Their “love” was not like that of the Satan’s—a love of “divine things” as far as agreeable to our animal instincts, and compatible with our worldly prosperity and peace. The love of the Antipas was the fulfilling of the law; the doing whatsoever Jesus had commanded, by which they evinced that they were his real friends. Many of the Satan’s synagogue who rejoiced in Jezebel, possessed spiritual gifts, and could speak with tongues, and prophesy, and understand mysteries, and had the knowledge, and the faith to remove mountains, and bestowed their goods to feed the poor; and not only in some cases gave their bodies to be burned; but in crowds rushed to martyrdom, till the pagan authorities refused to kill them; and told them to become their own executioners. Still, as Paul intimates, they were nothing; for they were destitute of “love.” So it is now. Though papists and protestants, Jezebel and her children, have not the gifts, yet they largely bestow of their goods to feed the poor, and in many instances have, and would again, sacrifice their lives for what they call “the gospel;” still like their predecessors in apostolic times, they are nothing but sounding brass, and a tinkling cymbal, because they are destitute of the love p. 322 commended in the Thyatirans. This was “long suffering and kind,” even to an excess rebuked by the Spirit in the letter before us; for they permitted Jezebel-teachers and seducers to speak, instead of putting them to silence at once. These were envious, boastful, puffed-up, of unseemly behaviour, seeking their own, easily provoked, evil thinkers, who rejoiced in the mystery of iniquity, which was finally established by their means. These were the characteristics of Jezebel and her children, John’s clerical contemporaries, and the official fathers of the professional soul-savers of modern christendom. Their co-apostolic predecessors like themselves were destitute of “love,” without which men cannot be saved. “Love,” says Paul, “rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” Paul’s clerical contemporaries did not rejoice in the truth; but relinquished their original hold upon the name and denied the faith of the Spirit. Our clerical contemporaries are in the same condemnation. They cannot, if their lives depend on it, inform the public what “the truth as it is in Jesus,” consists in. They are ignorant of its system in toto, and therefore cannot “believe all things and hope all things,” and consequently have not the love of which this faith and hope are constituent parts.
The service of the Star-Angel in Thyatira, like its love, had increased. Their last works were more than their first. They contended earnestly for the faith originally delivered to them; like the Antipas in Pergamos, they held it fast, and were therefore in a position to overcome; for the power of victory is our firm and hearty belief of the truth. They were the pillar and support of the truth in Thyatira, where it might have flourished to this day if their successors in office had been “faithful men able to teach others.” But this unfortunately was not the case, so that the fountain being poisoned at the head, the waters became bitter, and the people died. The evil had begun to work by A. D. 98, the epoch at which the Spirit addressed them through John. Forty years before that the Mystery of Iniquity was at work; but it had not yet triumphed in Thyatira. It was, however, hard at work there professedly opposed to Paganism, and at the same time doing its best to paganize christianity. The Mystery of Iniquity had its apologists in all the ecclesias. In Ephesus, they falsely styled themselves “apostles;” in Smyrna and Philadelphia “Jews;” and in Laodicea, they said, they were “rich, and increased in goods, and had need of nothing.” But the Spirit pronounced them “liars,” “vanquishers” and “wasters of the people,” the Satan, “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,” and, as in the letter under consideration, the Woman Jezebel.
p. 3233. The Woman Jezebel
As we have shown in our exposition of the apocalyptic “Balaam” and “Nikolaitans,” there existed a class of teachers calling themselves “christians,” contemporary with the apostles, who taught “another gospel,” and set forth a Jesus, which Paul styled “another Jesus;” both of which, that is, the Jesus and their gospel, were different from the real Jesus and the true gospel, proclaimed by the apostles; and subversive of the divine teaching concerning them. This class of teachers, styled by Peter “false teachers;” and by John, “false prophets” and “deceivers who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh;” which heresy, or falsehood, he says, “is the Deceiver and the Antichrist” wherever found—2 Pet. ii. 1; 1 Jno. iv. 1; 2 Epist. 7:—this class, I say, had become numerous and influential by the end of the first century; and were to be found sowing tares in all the field of the apostolic labors. They were the “reverend divines” and “D. D.’s” of the Nineteenth Century in embryo—the self-styled “apostles” to whom “the Clergy” of our day are the undoubted “successors.” They taught the same doctrine as our clergy, and therefore they are unquestionably the same class.
Now false teachers, prophets, and deceivers are aggregately represented in the scriptures of the Old and New Testament, by a woman of vicious and profligate character. Thus, the Spirit in Ezekiel xxii. 25, in speaking of the leaders of the people in Jerusalem, says, “there is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst thereof; like a roaring lion ravening the prey, they have devoured souls; they have taken the treasure and precious things. Her priests have violated my holy law, and have profaned my holy things. Her prophets have daubed souls with untempered mortar, seeing vanity, and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith Yahweh Elohim, when Yahweh hath not spoken.” These priests and prophets, who were princes in Jerusalem and Samaria, are represented in the next chapter by two lewd women, “the Daughters of One Mother,” Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister. “Thus were their names,” says the Spirit; “Samaria is Aholah, and Jerusalem, Aholibah.” Then follows the indictment against them, in which their apostacy from the Mosaic Law in its simplicity, in their blending it with the abominable customs and principles of heathenism, is likened to the intercourse of harlotry and adultery. The priests and prophets of Samaria were Aholah the harlot daughter of the comely and delicate woman, Zion under the law (Jer. vi. 2); and the same class in Jerusalem were Aholibah, the younger harlot of the same mother, “more corrupt in her inordinate love than Aholah.”
p. 324 In the New Testament, the disciples of Jesus Anointed, who, though not all “elders,” “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers,” are all “living stones built up a spiritual house, a holy and royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people”—Eph. iv. 11; 1 Pet. ii. 5, 9; Rev. v. 9, 10. And so long as they held fast the name, and did not deny the faith, of Jesus Anointed, they are styled apocalyptically “the Woman,” and “the Woman of the Lamb”—Heb. iii. 6, 14; Rev. xii. 6, 14, 16, 17; xix. 7, 8. But when a schism of this one body was elaborated by false teaching, the teachers and those who followed the teaching, ceased to be of “the Woman of the Lamb;” but became “a woman,” or an adulteress.
Such had become the situation of affairs by the close of the first century. There were two women in the Roman Habitable claiming to be the Spouse of Christ; the one, “a Chaste Virgin, begotten and espoused to one husband, the Christ, by the word”—2 Cor. xi. 2; 1 Cor. iv. 15; Eph. v. 26: the other, a woman, drunken and adulterous, and the Mother of a progeny of Harlots, and of the Abominations of the earth—Rev. xvii. 1-6; xiv. 4—all of them, mother and daughters, begotten of the traditions and commandments of men, making void the word of God. Between these two women there was rivalry and indignation. The adulteress proclaimed, that she was rich, and increased in goods, and had need of nothing; and invited the world, in all its filthy garments, to her embrace. This is what is proverbially styled “the World and his Woman,” called by his friends and boon companions, “THE CHURCH.” Scripturally, they are Ahab and Jezebel, the adversaries and destroyers of the saints; and wherever any of their prophets are found ministering before the people, there the principles of the flesh, and the gospel-nullifying traditions of men, are glorified and prevail; because, “being of the world, therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them”—1 Jno. iv. 5. This is an unmistakable criterion. The world will not listen to the counsel, and support any women, but Jezebel and her daughters. Whatever “preacher” will present himself in the name of Jezebel, him will the world listen to with open mouth and ears; for the principles he inculcates are what the flesh approves.
The apocalyptic woman that had been manifested in John’s day was styled “Jezebel,” because the character of the class of false teachers was analogous to that of the wife of Ahab, known in Jewish history by that name. Hence, the literal Jezebel was made the type, or pattern, of the class, which became the figurative Jezebel. There was no literal woman named Jezebel in Thyatira claiming to be a christian, any more than there was a literal Antipas and Balaam in Pergamos of these p. 325 names; at least history gives no account of any. Therefore the typical Jezebel must be that Jezebel of the Old Testament. The study of her history and circumstances must be virtually the study of her antitype, and that antitype is the adulteress, or pseudo church, of false teachers, in which the abettors of Balaam’s teaching were embodied; and who differs from Balaam in this that she is the adulterous exhibition of what Balaam taught. Her name in Hebrew is איזבל Izabel, which is compounded of אי not זבל she dwells. As if the Spirit had said, she dwells not with me; that is, the teachers and their disciples who teach and seduce to commit prostitution, and to eat idol sacrifices, are not my spouse. Thus by conferring this name upon them, the real spouse of Christ in those days was vindicated by the Spirit. No wonder the Apocalypse was unpopular with those who held the doctrine of Balaam in those days, as it hath also been to this day with the same class. They know they do not teach the word, and that they can define neither the name nor the faith of the Spirit; and they know that they teach for the hire paid them by the house of Ahab, or the world; and that they love the wages of unrighteousness. How then can a book be popular with such which proclaims them to be not the spouse of the Spirit; but the harlot community prostituting itself for hire to an ignorant, superstitious, and besotted world.
But Izebel or Jezebel, is not only etymologically an appropriate type of the clerical orders of Christendom, whose constituents are “the prophets” of the world; the origin, and character, and fate of the woman are also typical of the origin, character, and fate of the “reverend divines,” and doctors of divinity, who minister to the itching ears of those who heap up to themselves teachers after their own lusts, and are turned aside to fables. Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal, the idolatrous king of the Zidonians, whose name imported dedication to Baal the false god, the lord of the people; whom Balaam had before taught the Israelites to serve with fornication and idolatry. Now the origin of the clergy is analogous to this. They were begotten in idolatry, or in Baal. “The Lord saw folly in the prophets of Samaria; they prophesied in Baal, and caused his people Israel to err”—Jer. xxiii. 13. Peter also testifies this of certain prophets, styling themselves christian teachers, in his day. In writing to the elect he says, “there will be false teachers among you, who privily will bring in damnable heresies. These, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption. They have eyes full of an adulteress (full of Jezebel) and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls; a heart have they exercised with covetous practices; cursed children, who have forsaken p. 326 the right way, and are gone astray, following the Way of Balaam son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness. They are wells without water, clouds that are carried of a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.” Such were the clergy in their origin. The generation of the clerical Jezebel in our day, however, differs from the generation of their brethren and fathers in the days of Peter in this, that our clergy never were the children of God, and were never in the right way; therefore, though the accursed preachers of other gospels than the true one, they are not “cursed children;” and have not “forsaken the right way,” because they were never in it. “The Way of Balaam” is emphatically the Way of the Clergy in all post-apostolical and pre-millennial generations. Their eyes are full of Jezebel, whose original practice is proverbially “the ministerial sin.” They speak evil of the things they do not understand; and they undertake to teach what they know nothing about; and therefore, they are “wells without water.”
These clerical prophets in Balaam, and therefore in Baal, in undertaking to speak to the edification, exhortation, and comfort of souls, being of a class represented by a woman, “called herself a prophetess.” They became an ecclesiastical woman prophesying deceits. She was begotten of falsehood, so that the father of the clergy is “the Devil, who was a liar from the beginning.” “Except ye be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, ye cannot be saved.” This was the first element of the falsehood enunciated to christians by teachers in the presence of the apostles. They set up the dogma, that a Gentile must believe the gospel, be immersed, be circumcised, and keep the law, in order to salvation. This was the first lie taught for truth after the ascension of Jesus; and those who taught it, constituted in themselves, and therefore originated the anti-apostolic order, familiarly known in our day as “the clergy.” Hence, the clergy are Judaizers to this day—commanding to fast, to abstain from meats, to keep holy days, and sabbaths. But the falsehood which generated their order was not complete till the principles of heathen philosophy were commingled with the Judaic dogma. This was effected when they denied the resurrection of the body in affirming, as Justin testifies they did, that what they call “souls” went immediately to heaven at death. This Judaized Heathenism constituted what Paul calls “a lie,” and “the Mystery of Iniquity”—a system of falsehood formative of the clerical order, which gave them a parentage like that of Jezebel. The principles styled Baal, (for Baal having no real existence, was only a system of ideas, so called, that lorded it over those who acknowledged it,) gave origin to the clergy who worship Baal and preach him everywhere. The Sidonians believed p. 327 in immortal souls, in their going to heaven at death, and in a place of torment, where the wicked burned in fire eternally. They also believed in sacrifice to propitiate the Deity, and in making long and noisy prayers, by which to induce him to hear them. Our clergy have not advanced one step beyond this since the days of Jezebel. She believed these things, and were she personally in existence now, she could have no scruples in becoming a member of any clergyman’s church in this city, Catholic or Protestant. It is true, the clergy now hold a few principles, or rather opinions, unknown to Jezebel and her clergy, the original prophets of immortal-soulism. They believe in a Jesus of whom she had never heard; but their belief in this other Jesus whom Paul did not preach, does not at all interfere with their hearty adhesion to the Baal-System of Ideas. Their eyes are full of Jezebel, and she was full of Baal.
Prostitution, and eating the sacrifices offered to the idol-representations of the dead, whose souls were said to be alive, were institutions of Baal-Religion. When Israel were seduced by the Moabitish women to worship Baal, at the suggestion of Balaam, they committed whoredom with them, and eat the sacrifices of their gods. The Balaamite clergy were guilty of the same thing. They privily introduced idolatrous practices among christians. They taught them to eat of the sacrifices sold as holy meat, by which they became partakers of the idol-altars, and propitiated the heathen, for in so doing, they contributed to the support of the pagan priesthood. But Paul objected to this sort of compromise in toto. His argument was, that the things the Gentiles sacrificed they sacrificed to demons, to the ghosts of dead men, and not to God; and that in eating of them knowingly, they had fellowship with their imaginary demons. He told them that when they went to the butcher’s they should ask no question, but just buy whatever came to hand. They would then buy in ignorance, having no knowledge whether there was sacrificed meat or not. But if any one said, “this is offered in sacrifice to idols,” he told them not to eat it, for the eating then involved a principle of fellowship with deified ghosts, in the judgment of him who invited to eat.
Paul’s anxiety was that the Corinthian brethren should “not have fellowship with demons,” or deified imaginary ghosts, called “immortal souls. These demons had a table and a cup, as well as the Lord; and Paul taught that they could not partake of both without sin. The same demons have a table and a cup now, modified, however, in this, that bread cut up into pieces, emblematic of the divisions of antichristendom, is substituted for meats offered to the demons. The table spread by the clergy, and called by them “the sacrament,” is the modern table of the p. 328 demons. It is the table of those who believe in deified immortal souls, who are the gods of the clerical system. It is Jezebel’s table, at which a saint cannot eat without having fellowship with the demons she funeralizes to glory, which is sin. Her churches are a synagogue of unbaptized “miserable sinners,” as they proclaim themselves to be in their prayers, and consequently, her table cannot be the Lord’s, for his teaching has no place for such there—the miserable patrons of demons belong to Jezebel, not to the spouse of Christ.
Again, prostitution, literal and figurative, is a notorious clerical vice, and characteristic of Jezebel. She forbids to marry, and in so doing, “teaches to commit fornication.” The priests of the Romish Jezebel are literally a body of whoremongers and adulterers, and their nunneries houses of ill fame; and though, on account of the marriage of the Protestant clergy, this is not the case to the same extent, yet spiritually they are in the same condemnation; for “fornication,” in its figurative sense, imports unhallowed union with the world, and blasphemy against God. They are all guilty of this. If they knew the truth, and told the world the truth, the world would not support them. Now, “all that is of the world is not of the Father;” and “he that is the friend of the world is the enemy of God;” they pretend to be God’s servants, to be his church or spouse, and yet they serve the world for hire. They are therefore prostitutes and men-pleasers, and consequently, cannot possibly be the servants of Christ, whose name they blaspheme in all their institutions.
The literal Jezebel was a persecutor and slayer of the prophets of Yahweh; and the antitypical, or clerical, Jezebel has been preëminently so. The clergy from their origin until now, have always been opposed to the truth; and have always had a hand in stirring up persecution for its suppression. The civil power, or the Diabolos, has been the instrument of their malevolence and cruelty; and though they cannot inflict personal violence in this country, they still retain much power for evil in the territory of the Beast. But the fate of Jezebel awaits them. She was hurled from her high and queenly estate with violence, and devoured by dogs so completely, that they found not of her what to bury. Jezebel has not yet come to this. She is still in her glory, rioting in drunkenness and prostitution.
It was a fault charged upon the presbytery of the ecclesia in Thyatira, that they permitted some of the Jezebel class to teach the servants of Christ there. It was the duty of an eldership not to allow error to be inculcated. They appear to have been too tolerant. Teaching which led to practices and conclusions subversive of morality and the gospel ought not to have been allowed. They had the truth, which had been p. 329 divinely planted among them, and all things not according to that, they ought to have authoritatively suppressed. This course would have been an effectual barrier against Jezebel, and her Balaamite and Nikolaitan progeny. But this course was not pursued. She obtained a foothold, and the consequence has been the extinction of Antipas in Thyatira, where none are now to be found who hold fast the name and the faith of Jesus Christ as his faithful witnesses.
“I gave Jezebel time,” saith the Spirit, “that she might heartily turn from her prostitution; but she turned not.” As we have said, Jezebel still lives, and she lives in sin. In the days of John she was without political sovereignty; she was the daughter of Ethbaal the idolater; but she had not been married to the Greco-Latin Ahab. The Judaizing and Gnostic clergy were actively working the Mystery of Iniquity into authority; they had organized it into a synagogue, and were privily insinuating it into the elderships; but they had not yet succeeded in allying themselves to the State. The apostles, while living, warned them and exhorted them to turn from their evil course; but, as John says, “they hear us not;” and went out from fellowship with them, and circumvented them in every possible way. Referring to these whom he calls “the Satan” after whom some had turned aside, Paul says, in writing to Timothy, “this thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me; of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes.” These were two clergymen, friends of Balaam and Jezebel the prophetess, who taught the inherent immortality of the soul of the flesh; and therefore, with two other clergymen named Hymenæus and Philetus, said that the resurrection is already past; and that, consequently, there is no future resurrection of the dead; resurrection being unnecessary upon the Jezebel principle of the immortal soul of sinful flesh going immediately to heaven at the death of the body. Paul argues ably against this heathen absurdity in 1 Cor. xv. But it had no effect upon Jezebel the prophetess; for “seducers waxed worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived;” and she still went on in her vicious course.” “I gave her time,” says the Spirit, “that she might heartily turn from her prostitution.” Instead of slaying every deceiver in communion with her, as he had Ananias and his wife Sapphira, he gave her time. That time has not yet expired; for Jezebel lives, but has not repented; but instead thereof, “sits as a woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus,” upon an association of ensanguined and blasphemous powers, represented by “a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy”—Rev. xvii. 3, 6.
The writers of the second, third, and fourth centuries, styled by the p. 330 clergy of our day “the Fathers,” with probably an exception or two, were all of Jezebel. In the letter before us, they are styled “her children;” they were such, because they were unfaithful to the truth; and though they suffered death by the pagan power for their opinions, it was, in the providence of God, a present punishment for their iniquity. “Behold,” saith the Spirit, “I cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into a great tribulation, except they may have heartily turned from their deeds. And I will kill her children with death, and all the ecclesias shall know that I am the searcher of reins and hearts.” In reading the history of these centuries the student of ecclesiastical history must not suppose that all called “christians” who died by the hand of the executioner, were put to death for their adherence to the name and faith of Jesus Christ. Multitudes had a rage for martyrdom, and gave their bodies to the fire in expiation of iniquity, transgression, and apostasy. These were “those who committed adultery with Jezebel,” the clerical fathers, and “her children,” who looked up to those fathers as the deluded people of “the religious world” look up now to the clergy who deceive them, regarding them with awe as their “spiritual guides” and “fathers in God.” The tribulation that came upon the body indiscriminately regarded as “christian” by the pagan authorities, an apostle terms “judgment beginning at the House of God.” “If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye,” says Peter; “for the Spirit of glory and of the Deity resteth upon you; on their part (on that of the persecutor) he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or an evil-doer, or as a busy body in other men’s matters. Yet if any man suffer as a christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf. For the time is come that judgment begin at the house of God: and if first at us, what shall the end be of them who obey not the gospel of the Deity? And if the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?”—1 Epist. iv. 14-18. Many suffered “as evil-doers” under the name of “christian.” Thus Milner observes, “many heretics, who wore the name of christians, were guilty of the most detestable enormities; these were indiscriminately charged by the pagans on the christians in general.” And again, “the abominations of heretics, whom ignorance and malice will ever confound with real christians, furnished the enemies of Christ with some tolerably specious pretensions. Probably these were much exaggerated; but whatever they were, the whole Christian Name was accused of them.” “The injudicious conduct of apologists,” says Gibbon, “betrayed the common cause of christianity, to gratify their devout hatred to the domestic enemies p. 331 of the church. It was sometimes faintly insinuated, and sometimes boldly asserted, that the same bloody sacrifices, and the same incestuous festivals, which were so falsely ascribed to the orthodox believers, were in reality celebrated by the Marcionites, by the Carpocratians, and by several other sects of the Gnostics. Accusations of a similar kind were retorted upon the church by the schismatics who had departed from its communion, and it was confessed upon all sides, that the most scandalous licentiousness of manners prevailed among great numbers of those who affected the name of christians.” The apocalyptic letters plainly testify to the existence of this state of things in the christendom of the close of the first century. There were two classes—the Antipas, or faithful witnesses, who held the truth in righteousness; and the Nikolaitans, or children of Jezebel, who held the doctrine of Balaam, and seduced the servants of Jesus Christ to the practice of deeds which he detested. Against these judgment is threatened in the words, “I will kill Jezebel’s children with death; and all the ecclesias shall know that I am he who searches the reins and hearts.” To kill with death is to destroy with violence—by judgment through the magistrate, who wielded the sword of office for the execution of the law. To kill with death was not to permit the offenders to die a natural death. All such, who gave their bodies to be burned, or to be thrown to the wild beasts, or to any other form of martyrdom, were mere “sounding brass and tinkling cymbals;” and heirs of the vengeance to be revealed in “the Second Death.” They had not faith to give them the victory over the world; so the world overcame them by its seductions, and exposed them to be “hurt of the Second Death,” which is manifested after the resurrection of the flesh. When this time arrives, the “bed” will have been prepared for Jezebel, and she will then be “cast into it;” and not she only, but with her them that commit adultery. This bed is the “great tribulation,” or “sorrow,” in which the antichristian apostasy is to be destroyed at the apocalypse of Jesus Christ in “the Hour of Judgment;” when Babylon, the Great City, falls because of her having prostituted and debauched all the nations with her blasphemies and abominations. The ecclesiasticism of the earth and of the whole habitable, with all the clerical orders by which it is upheld, will be utterly abolished by the wrath of the Deity poured out without mixture, which they will be compelled to drink with great torment in the presence of Jesus and the Saints—Rev. xiv. 7-11; xviii. 2. Into this bed of tribulation Jezebel is at length cast, with all her antichristian and clerical adherents, who, in the text last quoted, are typified by “demons,” “foul spirits,” and “hateful birds;” for the Thyatiran Jezebel is but the germ of that Babylon which, as a p. 332 mighty Upas banded with brass and iron, now overshadows all nations with its pestiferous and besotting influence.
Now this “great tribulation,” which is yet antitypically to come upon “Babylon, the Great, the Mother of Harlots,” was typically poured out upon the Thyatiran Jezebel previous to the taking of the pagan hierarchy out of the way, which prevented the manifestation of the Lawless One, who would be set up as the head of Jezebel, and as a substitute for Christ upon earth. As Christ is the Head of the true Woman, the body of the faithful; so the Pope is the present Head of Jezebel, the Mother of Harlots, and of all her family. But, before Christ appears in power, his woman passes “through much tribulation to enter into the kingdom of the Deity”—Acts xiv. 22; and so, before Antichrist (the power which set up as Christ’s substitute, and is now incorporated in the chief styled “the Pope”) appeared in power, the Thyatiran Adulteress was made to pass through “a great tribulation” ere she could enter into the kingdom of this world; and mount the scarlet-colored beast; and “sit a Queen, and no widow;” and, intoxicated with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the witnesses of Jesus, say with complacency, “I shall see no sorrow.” She had to pass through the “Ten Days,” which the Spirit forewarned the Smyrneans they would be tried with, when the Diabolos should cast of them into prison, or the house of death. The reader is here referred to what has been written about the “ten days’ tribulation” on page 240. “All the ecclesias” in the proconsular Asia were afflicted by this; and Thyatira’s, consequently, among the rest.
But the Ten Days’ tribulation of Trajan’s reign was but an earnest, as it were, of the great tribulation to which the christian name would be subjected before the Jezebel Apostasy from apostolic teaching should attain to political sovereignty over the nations, and be “spued out of the mouth of the Spirit.” They had to pass through that “Hour of trial, which,” the Spirit forewarned the Philadelphians of, “should come upon the whole habitable, to prove them that dwell upon the earth”—Rev. iii. 10. Judgment the most terrible would befall her, which “all the ecclesias” would perceive was the hand of God punishing her by the sword of the ruler for her abominations.
And so it was. Ecclesiastical historians inform us, that in the third century the pure light of the gospel was much clouded and depraved by an unhappy nurture of philosophical self-righteousness and superstition. With the exception of three years, the christians had enjoyed a long peace of thirty-seven years to A. D. 248. This, it appears from one of Origen’s homilies, was followed by a great degree of lukewarmness, and even of much religious indecorum. The declension p. 333 seems to have been remarkable. “Several,” says he, “come to church only on solemn festivals; and then not so much for instruction as diversion; some go out again as soon as they have heard the lecture, without conferring, or asking the pastors any questions; others stay not till the lecture is ended; and others hear not so much as a single word, but entertain themselves in a corner of the church.” “Elsewhere,” says Milner, “he complains of the ambitious and haughty manners of pastors, and of the improper steps which some took to obtain preferments.” At this time, the reigning emperor, Philip the Arabian, who murdered his predecessor, is styled by Eusebius a christian; “and indeed, that he was so by profession,” says Milner, “seems well attested by the concurrent voice of antiquity;” and he adds, “there is no doubt but in the fourth year of his reign, A. D. 247, he allowed and conducted the secular games which were full of idolatry.”
This Philip was slain and succeeded by Decius, A. D. 248. His enmity to Philip conspired with his pagan prejudices to bring on the most dreadful persecution ever yet experienced by christians. It was evident that nothing less than the destruction of the christian name was intended. The persecution raged with astonishing fury both in the East and West. Cyprian, an overseer in “the church” at Carthage during the persecution, recognizes it as a chastisement for sin. In a treatise of his concerning “the Lapsed,” is an account of the declension that had taken place before his conversion, and which moved God to chastise “the church.” “If the cause of our miseries,” says he, “be investigated, the cure of the wound may be found. The Lord would have his family to be TRIED. And because long peace had corrupted the discipline divinely revealed to us, the heavenly chastisement hath raised up our faith, which had lain almost dormant; and when, by our sins, we had deserved to suffer still more, the merciful Lord so moderated all things, that the whole scene rather deserves the name of A TRIAL than a persecution. Each had been bent on improving his patrimony; and had forgotten what believers had done under the Apostles, and what they ought always to do. They were brooding over the arts of amassing wealth. The pastors and the deacons each forgot their duty; works of mercy were neglected, and discipline was at the lowest ebb. Luxury and effeminacy prevailed. Meretricious arts in dress were cultivated. Fraud and deceit were practised among brethren. Christians could unite themselves in matrimony with unbelievers; could swear not only without reverence, but even without veracity. With haughty asperity they despised their ecclesiastical superiors. They railed against one another with outrageous acrimony, and conducted quarrels with determined malice. Even many bishops, who p. 334 ought to be guides and patterns for the rest, neglecting the peculiar duties of their stations, gave themselves up to secular pursuits. They deserted their places of residence and their flocks: they travelled through distant provinces in quest of pleasure and gain; gave no assistance to the needy brethren; but were insatiable in their thirst of money. They possessed estates by fraud, and multiplied usury. What have we not deserved to suffer for such a conduct? Even the Divine Word hath foretold us what we might expect, saying, ‘If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments, I will visit their offences with the rod, and their sin with scourges.’ These things had been denounced and foretold, but in vain. Our sins had brought our affairs to that pass, that because we had despised the Lord’s directions, we were obliged to undergo a correction of our multiplied evils, and a trial of our faith by severe remedies.”
The foregoing extract will illustrate the saying of the Spirit, “and all the ecclesias shall know that I am the searcher of reins and hearts.” There were those in the ecclesias, crowded as they were with worthless pastors and people, who discerned the signs of the times. The faithful deplored the evils, and justified God in his chastisements, which were “according to their works.” Exhortations to duty would have made no impression upon them; nothing but the sword could arouse them to a due perception of their position. Avarice, under the teaching of Balaam, had taken deep root among them; and, as soon as the times became dangerous, vast numbers lapsed into idolatry immediately. Even before men were accused of being christians, “many ran to the forum and sacrificed to the gods as they were ordered; and the crowds of apostates were so great that the magistrates wished to delay numbers of them till the next day, but they were importuned,” says Cyprian, “by the wretched suppliants to be allowed to prove themselves heathens that very night.” If Cyprian had lived in the nineteenth instead of in the middle of the third century, he could not have given a more accurate description of the pastors and people who call themselves christians, than is contained in the foregoing extract; and if tribulation such as the Decian were to come upon “the church” now, the multitude of professors would be as hasty and importunate as his contemporaries to protest that they belonged to any thing else than the sect proscribed by the ruling power.
4. The Depths of the Satan as they Speak
But all among the Thyatirans were not impressible by the arts and blandishments of Jezebel and her children. “The rest” were a faithful p. 335 remnant who repudiated her teaching, and “the depths” which they prescribed. We need not repeat here what has been already adduced concerning “the Satan;” but we may add to this, that the sentence, “the depths of the Satan as they speak,” shows that “the Satan” is not a solitary individual, but representative of a plurality of speakers, whose speech is enunciative of deep things, called “depths.” These depths were adverse to the “Name,” “Faith,” and morality, or “works,” styled by the Spirit “his,” and therefore they were Satanic Depths; and those who taught them “the Satan;” and those who received them, both teachers and disciples, “the Synagogue of the Satan;” “Jezebel the prophetess” and the holders of Balaam’s teaching, who styled themselves apostles, and said they were Jews, being the clergy of that synagogue, clerically termed “the Church of God;” but in reality “the habitation of demons, the hold of every foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Antipas, or the faithful witnesses, were “the rest among the Thyatirans who had not acknowledged the depths of the Satan as they speak.” Antipas still retained his original position in “all the ecclesias,” which, although teeming with “false brethren” both in the presbyteries and among the multitude, had not yet been “spued out of the mouth of the Spirit.” Antipas was the remnant of the Woman’s Seed contending earnestly for the faith once for all delivered to the saints against all “the depths of the Satan as they speak;” which in their logical effect upon the minds of Christians perverted the gospel; and made it of no effect in regard to justification and practice. The Star-Presbytery in Ephesus had fallen from its first estate; still it had not fallen to the lowest “depths,” for Antipas was among them as “those who could not bear them that are evil; but tried them who pretended they were apostles, and are not, and found them liars.” Antipas was also among the Smyrneans as “the rich,” because faithful in works, tribulation, and poverty; also among the Sardians as “the few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments;” and in Philadelphia, as the “little strength” of the ecclesia there; which the Spirit says had “kept my word and not denied my name.” But among the Laodiceans the Antipas are not found. Their existence is a supposition, as, “If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” The Satan was triumphant there, and the faithful witnesses reduced to such an insignificant minority as to be noticeable in the prophecy only as an hypothesis. They were “a contemptible few” not submerged in “the depths of the Satan as they speak;” but not enough of them to save the ecclesia from being spued out of the Spirit’s mouth. A few did hear the Spirit’s voice among the Laodiceans, and became fugitives in p. 336 consequence. They were no longer found in “the churches,” but in their own peculiar place, “in the wilderness;” where, as “the Woman” and “the Remnant of her Seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Anointed,” they were “nourished” for 1260 years “from the face of the Serpent,” become a Catholic of the Laodicean type—Rev. xii. 14, 17, 9, 10.
The extract from Cyprian sufficiently illustrates “the depths of the Satan as they speak,” in the practice of the so-called Christians of the middle of the third century. He says that “the long peace,” or time given for Jezebel to repent of her prostitution, instead of being attended with the result desired by the Spirit, produced a contrary effect,—“it corrupted the discipline divinely revealed to us.” In this Cyprian and the Spirit agree; for the latter says, “and she repented not.” “Our faith,” says Cyprian, “was almost dormant;” and his details of practice must have made them an object of contempt even to the pagans. But, though good practice will not always result from sound teaching, owing to the perverseness of the flesh; bad practice is the certain consequence of satanic teaching. The depths of the Satan spoken, produced the depths of the Satan wrought. The energy, or “working of the Satan,” was elaborated by the teaching of “the Fathers” of the second and third centuries. These fathers were the “they” of the text before us; as, “the depths of the Satan as they, ‘the Fathers,’ speak.” Irenæus, Tertullian, Pantænus, Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, Cyprian, and so forth, are a specimen of these clerical fathers whose teaching “corrupted the discipline divinely revealed.” Of Irenæus history testifies that “his philosophy had its usual influence on the mind, in darkening some truths of scripture, and in mixing the doctrine of Christ with human inventions:” “in general, however, notwithstanding some philosophical adulterations, he certainly,” says Milner, “maintained all the essentials of the gospel:” that is to say, what Milner regarded as “the essentials.” He is said to have been instructed in “Christianity” by Polycarp of Smyrna, and Papias of Hierapolis, contemporaries of the apostle John. Irenæus became overseer of the ecclesia at Lyons in France about A. D. 169. One of his sentiments left on record is certainly sound. “If man,” says he, “had not been united to the Deity, he could not have been a partaker of immortality:” another also is perfectly scriptural; speaking of Jesus, he says, “He had flesh and blood, not of a different kind from what men have; but he gathered into himself the very original creation of the Father, and sought that which was lost:” and again, “The Word of God, Jesus Christ, on account of his immense love, became what we are, that he might make us what he is.”
p. 337 He has left on record a testimony to the corruption of the faith already prevalent in his day in a letter to Florinus, a person of rank in the emperor’s service, whom he had known in early life. Florinus had been seduced into heresy, concerning which Irenæus says, “Those doctrines, they who were presbyters before us—those who had walked with the apostles—did not deliver to you. For I saw you when I was a boy in the lower Asia with Polycarp; and you were then (though a person of rank in the emperor’s service) very desirous of being approved by him. * * * I can describe the sermons which he preached to the multitude, and how he related to us his converse with John, and with the rest of those who had seen the Lord; how he mentioned their particular expressions, and what things he had heard from them of the Lord, and of his miracles, and of his doctrine. As Polycarp had received from the eye-witnesses of the Word of Life, he told us all things agreeable to the scriptures. These things, then, through the mercy of God visiting me, I heard with seriousness; I wrote them not on paper, but on my heart; and ever since, through the grace of God, I retain a genuine remembrance of them, and I can witness before God, that if that blessed apostolical presbyter had heard some of the doctrines which are now maintained, he would have cried out, and stopped his ears, and in his usual manner have said, ‘O good God! to what times hast thou reserved me, that I should endure these things!’ And he would immediately have fled from the place in which he had heard such doctrines.” Polycarp suffered death A. D. 167. At one time he and Irenæus lived together at Smyrna, and held the same opinions. One Evaristus wrote an account of Polycarp’s martyrdom, which was adopted by the Ecclesia at Smyrna, and sent to that sojourning at Philomelium, a city of Lycaonia. The sentiments therein contained may or may not be regarded as those also of Polycarp their late teacher, and of Irenæus his disciple. Speaking of martyrs in general, the letter says, “they despised the torments of this world, and by one hour redeemed themselves from eternal punishment. The fire of savage tormentors was cold to them; for they had steadily in view a desire to avoid that fire which is eternal and never to be quenched.”
Now the dogma of redemption from eternal punishment by an hour’s burning is nowhere taught in scripture. If Polycarp and Irenæus taught this, they certainly held a depth of the Satan. As to “the fire which is eternal and never to be quenched,” it depends upon the sense of the original, whether it be classed with “the depths of the Satan,” or not. In the modern clerical sense of the words it is a depth; but in the scriptural sense, which is not the clerical, it is not a depth of the Satan; but one of “the deep things of God.” I apprehend that the Smyrneans, p. 338 at least the Antipas among them, certainly would have used the expression in the sense of the Apocalypse which had been sent to their Star-Angel, or Presbytery, some sixty-nine years before. There “the fire which is eternal” is “the fire and brimstone in the presence of the Holy Angels, and in the presence of the Lamb,” styled by Jesus το πυρ το αιωνιον; and which he says, has been then “prepared for the Diabolos and for his agents;” apocalyptically styled, “the Beast and his Image, and the receivers of the mark of his name”—Mat. xxv. 41; Rev. xiv. 9-11; xix. 20. This fire is AIONIAN, because it is kindled when “the Times of the Gentiles are fulfilled,” and at the epoch termed “the Hour of Judgment,” which immediately precedes the AION which continues 1000 years. This Aionian Fire cannot be quenched. It is like that fire kindled in Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah, which Yahweh Elohim said “shall burn and shall not be quenched”—Jer. vii. 20; xvii. 27: nevertheless, the fire went out when its work was done; and Jerusalem was rebuilt, and continued for several hundred years, until it was again consumed in another unquenchable fire, which has also in like manner ceased to burn for ages past—Mark ix. 43, 44. This I believe to be the sense of the Smyrneans; not an eternal fire in the sense of the Satan—a fire whose continuance is measured by the years of God.
Polycarp in his last words prayed “for resurrection to eternal life, both of soul, and body in the incorruption of the Holy Spirit.” He looked for life after resurrection of soul and resurrection of body, that they might both then become incorruptible by the Holy Spirit. But those who adopted the letter of Evaristus, and styled themselves “the Catholic Church of Smyrna,” apocalyptically “the Synagogue of the Satan,” declare therein that “he was now crowned with immortality and the prize of unquestionable victory.” This was equivalent to saying, that something called Polycarp had gone direct to heaven, and had obtained the prize. This was one of “the depths of the Satan” so pointedly condemned by Justin as unchristianizing those who held it. Polycarp and they evidently disagreed upon this vital question, although they styled him “an apostolical and prophetical teacher, the bishop of the Catholic Church of Smyrna.” If Irenæus agreed with them that his instructor Polycarp had obtained the prize of immortality without resurrection; if this “philosophical adulteration” formed a part of his philosophy, “the essentials” he maintained would be of little worth. We suspect Irenæus was infected with this depth of the Satan, for he speaks of “the martyrs” hastening to Christ; as though they would enter into his presence before the resurrection! Nay, we are now sure of it; for further on, in his account of the persecution at Lyons and Vienne, he says of Vettius Epagathus who suffered death, “he was, and p. 339 is still, a genuine disciple of Christ, following the Lamb whithersoever he goeth”—a quotation seventy years after John’s death, from Rev. xiv. 4. Now Vettius could only “follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth” after his death, upon the principle of immediate translation to heaven, which was styled “the birthday of martyrdom.” In another place, he speaks of “eternal fire in hell” for the apostate. But enough of Irenæus, who suffered death A. D. 210.
Tertullian wrote much, but of little account. Pantænus was the first master of a catechetical school established at Alexandria, in Egypt; which piqued itself on its superior erudition, and whose taste was ruled by the Platonic philosophers. Pantænus was much addicted to the sect of the Stoics, a sort of romantic pretenders to perfection. The combination of Stoicism with Christianity, in the system of Pantænus, was a depth of the Satan that very much debased the truth, and beclouded the light of the gospel. The Antipas, composed of the simple and unlearned, happily escaped the infection, and preserved unadulterated the genuine simplicity of the faith of Christ. The Stoicized Christianity of Pantænus laid more in the way of the learned, who are always ready to be caught by any bait that flatters intellectual pride. Pantænus always retained the title of the Stoic Philosopher after he had been admitted to eminent employments in the church. Eusebius highly commends him for his philosophy—a blasting wind as it was; a depth of the Satan, highly destructive of Christian vegetation in all infected by it. He died soon after the commencement of the third century, being at the time Catechist of the Alexandrian School for the indoctrination of youthful Satans in “the depths as they speak.”
Clemens Alexandrinus was a disciple of Pantænus, and of the same philosophical, or Satanic, cast of mind. He was of the eclectic sect. He succeeded Pantænus in the school, and became the preceptor of Origen, and other eminent perverters of the truth. Besides the office of Catechist, he filled that of a presbyter in the ecclesia in Alexandria. He was what is styled in our day a “Reverend Divine,” and “Professor of Divinity.” His course of instruction, he tells us, was this: “As the husbandman first waters the soil, and then casts in his seed, so the notions which I derive out of the writings of the Gentiles serve first to water and soften the earthy parts of the soul, that the spiritual seed may be the better cast in, and take vital root in the minds of men.” This was putting the flesh above the Spirit. Milner well says upon this, that “the apostles neither placed Gentile philosophy in the foundation, nor believed that it would at all assist in raising the superstructure of Christianity.” On the contrary, they looked on the philosophical religion of their own times as so much rubbish; but in all ages p. 340 the blandishments of mere reason on such subjects deceive us—“vain man would be wise.” Clemens’ Christianity was Nikolaitanism; and the “divinity” he taught “the depths of the Satan” derived from the writings of the Gentiles, commingled with ideas received from the scriptures, which the philosophy rendered void.
The next clerical constituent of the Satan we have named is Origen. He was preëminently a child of the woman Jezebel, and floundered notably in all the depths as the Fathers speak. He was of a most presumptuous spirit, which incited him to philosophize with great audacity in things religious; and permitted him never to content himself with plain truth, but to hunt after something singular and extraordinary. Demetrius the bishop committed the school in Alexandria to him alone; and he converted it wholly into a school of religious information, or, as it would be styled in our time, a “theological seminary.” He was a courageous, self-denying, learned, exceedingly austere, and pious member of “the Synagogue of the Satan.” “Heretics and philosophers,” says Milner, “attended his lectures; and he took, no doubt, a very excellent method to procure regard to himself at least; he instructed them in profane and secular learning, and obtained among the Gentiles the reputation of a great philosopher. He encouraged many persons to study the liberal arts, assuring them that they would, by that means, be much better furnished for the contemplation of the Holy Scriptures. He was entirely of opinion, that secular and philosophical institutes were very necessary and profitable to his own mind. Does it escape the reader how much in the course of the christian annals we are already departed, though by insensible degrees, from christian simplicity? Here is a man looked up to with reverence, at least by the Eastern Church, as a great luminary; a man who, in his younger days, was himself a scholar of the amphibious Ammonius; who mixed together christianity and pagan philosophy, and who, by reading his motley lectures, drew over, in form at least, many of the heathen philosophers to embrace the religion of Jesus. These mention him often in their books; some dedicate their works to him, and others respectfully deliver them to him as their master. All this Eusebius tells us with much apparent satisfaction. To him the gospel seems to have triumphed over Gentilism by these means. There is no doubt but in a certain sense Origen’s success was great, but, in return, the pure gospel suffered greatly by an admixture of Gentilism. What can this extraordinary teacher and author mean, by asserting the utility, and even the necessity of philosophy for himself as a christian? Are not “the scriptures able to make a man wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto every p. 341 good work?” Suppose a man of common sense, perfectly unacquainted with all the learned lore of Ammonius, to study only the sacred books, is it not conceivable that he may acquire a competent, nay, even an eminent knowledge of the scriptures? But what are all Origen’s labors but vain attempts to mix things which the Holy Spirit has declared will not incorporate? The mischief which actually followed was to be expected: characters were confounded; and henceforward among the learned, the distinction between christian godliness and human philosophy is but faintly marked. If Origen had simply and plainly expounded to his learned auditors the peculiar and vital truths of the gospel, I cannot but suspect that many of them would have ceased to attend his instructions.
“The famous Porphyry, than whom christianity had never a more acrimonious enemy, takes notice of Origen’s allegorical mode of interpreting scripture, observes that he was acquainted with him when young, and testifies to his rapid improvement under Ammonius. He asserts, what indeed Eusebius contradicts, that Ammonius, though brought up a christian, turned afterwards a Gentile. He says ‘that Origen continually perused Plato, Numenius, and the rest of the Pythagoreans; that he was well versed in Chæremon the Stoic, and in Cornutus; and that from all these masters he borrowed the Grecian manner of allegorical interpretation, and applied it to the Jewish Scriptures.’ Thus, he introduced such a complicated scheme of fanciful interpretation, as for many ages after, through the excessive respect paid to this man, much obscured the light of scripture.” He died about A. D. 260, aged 70 years, a teacher and seducer of the servants of Christ from the simplicity of their faith into “the depths of the Satan, as they,” the Fathers of the Jezebel apostasy, “speak,” and their children, unto this day.
Now, if the reader compare “the depths” excavated by Origen and his patristic coadjutors in the corruption of the primitive faith and discipline delivered to the saints by the apostles, with “the depths” of the “divinity” taught by the clergy, or spiritual guides of the people, of “every name and denomination,” he will find that they are as intimately related as cause and effect. “The depths of the Satan as they spoke” in apostolic times, were the speculations of Hymeneus and Philetus, and of the many other false prophets that had gone out into the world, acuminated in Origen and others—2 Tim. ii. 17; 1 John iv. 1, whose “word,” or teaching, Paul said would “eat as doth a gangrene.” This is known by all pathologists to be destructive of all organization, and consequently of life. The word-gangrene of “the Satan” has consummated its work upon the theory and practice of christianity apostolically p. 342 delivered. This is obvious to all scripturally enlightened observers of the spiritual system of the world. The word is not preached by the clergy, who are ignorant of the first principles of the oracles of God. They preach the dogmas they have traditionally received from the “false prophets” they style “the Fathers”—the fathers of their “Holy Orders,” at the head of which is “the Holy Father” they term “the Pope.” These fathers were the perverters of the gospel Paul preached, by their inventions, which substituted sacramentalism for faith; nullified the doctrine of a resurrection to judgment; abolished the kingdom; transmuted the great mystery of godliness into scholastic jargon about “trinity;” destroyed the sacrifice of the christian passover by affirming the immaculateness of Christ’s flesh; in short, totally abolished the faith, and instead thereof, set up a system of RHANTIZED HEATHENISM, which may be defined, the sacramental deliverance of immortal ghosts from Plutonic fire and brimstone, and consequent translation into an Elysium beyond the realms of time and space!!! This definition is the symbol of “the depths of the Satan as they speak” now from the pulpits of Satandom in all the world. The Satan’s ministers, transformed, as Paul says, into ministers of righteousness, all proclaim the heathen dogma of a soul or spirit in man capable of disembodied existence in eternal weal or woe; and all the religion or pietistic invention they have patented proposes or professes to do, is to save this phantom from the flames of their Tartarus, and land it in Elysium, which they call Paradise! It is this pagan dogma which lies at the bottom of all their “depths.” Abolish this, and the religion of the clergy is abolished too; for their religion, which is “a cure” for such “souls,” can be of no use to the people if it be proved that there are no such souls in them to be cured. Hence the clergy, when they find courage enough for the conflict, fight hard for hereditary immortality—an immortality derived hereditarily from the earthy Adam, the first sinner upon whom the sentence of death was pronounced by the Judge of all the earth. A man under sentence of death is as a dead man. Immortality derived from a dead man by natural generation, is the immortality for which the clergy contend in all their “depths.” Without it, their craft is destroyed and their occupation gone. It is the great sand-bag of their system, which, when removed from the foundation-corner of their temple, leaves it without support, and in its fall, reveals to the contempt of all observers the shallowness of “the depths as they speak.”