'Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not
right in the sight of God.'--ACTS viii. 21.
The era of the birth of Christianity was one of fermenting opinion and
decaying faith. Then, as now, men's minds were seething and unsettled,
and that unrest which is the precursor of great changes in intellectual
and spiritual habitudes affected the civilised world. Such a period is
ever one of predisposition to superstition. The one true bond which
unites God and man being obscured, and to the consciousness of many
snapped, men's minds become the prey of visionary terrors. Demand
creates supply, and the magician and miracle-worker, the possessor of
mysterious ways into the Unknown, is never far off at such a time.
Partly deceived and partly deceiving, he is as sure a sign of the lack
of profound religious conviction and of the presence of unsatisfied
religious aspirations in men's souls, as the stormy petrel or the
floating seaweed is of a tempest on the seas.
So we find the early preachers of Christianity coming into frequent
contact with pretenders to magical powers. Sadly enough, they were
mostly Jews, who prostituted their clearer knowledge to personal ends,
and having tacked on to it some theosophic rubbish which they had
learned from Alexandria, or mysticism which had filtered to them from
the East, or magic arts from Phrygia, went forth, the only missionaries
that Judaism sent out, to bewilder and torture men's minds. What a fall
from Israel's destination, and what a lesson for the stewards of the
'oracles of God'!
Of such a sort were Elymas, the sorcerer whom Paul found squatting at
the ear of the Roman Governor of Cyprus; the magicians at Ephesus; the
vagabond Jews exorcists, who with profitable eclecticism, as they
thought, tried to add the name of Jesus as one more spell to their
conjurations; and, finally, this Simon the sorcerer. Established in
Samaria, he had been juggling and conjuring and seeing visions, and
professing to be a great mysterious personality, and had more than
permitted the half-heathen Samaritans, who seem to have had more
religious susceptibility and less religious knowledge than the Jews,
and so were a prepared field for all such pretenders, to think of him
as in some sense an incarnation of God, and perhaps to set him up as a
rival or caricature of Him who in the neighbouring Judaea was being
spoken of as the power of God, God manifest in the flesh.
To the city thus moved comes no Apostle, but a Christian man who begins
to preach, and by miracles and teaching draws many souls to Christ.
The story of Simon Magus in his attitude to the Gospel is a very
striking and instructive one. It presents for our purpose now mainly
three points to which I proceed to refer.