curious inquiries to which they have led, in attempts to disengage their meaning, and trace their relations. They present difficult, though many of them unimportant, problems, of which some may be solved by research and acuteness; and they exhibit the human mind in one of its most extraordinary aspects. To these speculations, also, as at once the strangest and most indefensible part of the doctrines of their opponents, the attention of the fathers was particularly directed. From these causes, they have been put too prominently forward in modern accounts of the Gnostic doctrines, and the reader has been bewildered and confused among obscure and very uncertain details. Coming unacquainted to the subject, he has found himself at once presented with a phantasmagoria of strange shapes, of which he could not discern the relations or significance. Attention should be first directed to the distinctive and striking characteristics common to the Gnostics, and then to the leading ideas involved in the speculations of the theosophic Gnostics. In pursuing the inquiry further, whatever discoveries some have fancied themselves to make, we find, in truth, little information that can be confidently relied on, and few facts of real interest.

any

The fathers, as has been said, were but poor interpreters of the dreams of the theosophic Gnostics. But as regards the whole history of the Gnostics, there is constant need of caution in admitting, and care in scrutinizing, the representations of their catholic opponents. What is related by the fathers concerning supposed heretics of the first century is mixed with fables and improbabilities. Their fuller accounts of the more important sects of the second century, the Marcionites and Valentinians, were founded upon their writings. But there are other cases, in which it admits of no doubt, that even those of the fathers, who are our best authorities, proceeded upon common rumor and oral information, distorted, exaggerated, and unfounded. The conceptions of the Gnostics were, many of them, of such a character, that it was hardly possible, that they should be verbally stated by an unfriendly reporter, without, at least, unintentional misrepresentation. The limits of different sects were undefined, and so also were those which separated the whole body of Christian Gnostics from individuals beyond the outskirts of Christianity, with whom they were confounded. The members of a sect were held together by no creed; their opinions on all but the

essential doctrines of Gnosticism, were unfixed and changing; and some of the speculations of the leading theosophists, it is evident, must have been little adapted to the capacity of the greater number of their professed followers, and very liable to be misunderstood and perverted, even by them. It often requires much acuteness and discrimination, as well as intellectual and moral fairness, to report correctly the system of an individual or a sect, especially when its doctrines, being involved in mysticism, present no definite ideas, even to the minds of those by whom they are held. Some of the ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, could they have had a foreknowledge of the works of their admirers and expositors, in ancient and modern times, would, I believe, have wondered greatly at much which they could, and much which they could not, understand. But the fathers did not write of the Gnostics as admiring historians. With the partial exception of Clement of Alexandria, they wrote as controvertists, whose feelings were enlisted against them. All the errors, but such as spring from intentional dishonesty, to which such controvertists are liable, are to be expected, even from those of their number, on whom alone we can rely, the fathers of the

first three centuries, or the earlier fathers as they may be called, by way of specific distinction. Under circumstances which furnish much less excuse, the grossest mistakes are not unfrequently committed. Thus, a German theologian of our day classes Priestley among decided atheists;* and another, a naturalist himself, states that Locke agreed with Spinoza, Hobbes, and Hume, in believing reputed miracles to be only natural events, referring in evidence of his assertion to a tract by which it is clearly disproved.† A still more remarkable error concerning that great man, is the statement, or implication, to be found, I believe, in some writers above the lowest class, that he referred the origin of all our ideas to sensation. Many similar misrepresentations might be produced; and from such errors, committed, as it were, before our eyes, through the neglect or misuse of means of information open to all, we learn what may have been the errors of ancient writers, at a period when it was incomparably more difficult to ascertain the truth; when all communica

Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens, von August Hahn. (Leipzig, 1828.) p. 178.

+ Institutiones Theologiæ Christianæ Dogmaticæ a I. A. L. Wegscheider. § 48. not. a. p. 111. ed. 2dæ.

tion of knowledge from a distance was tardy and imperfect; when oral accounts, with the misunderstandings and misrepresentations by which they are usually characterized, were often the only source of information attainable; and when the voice of the press, which now makes itself heard on every side, to confirm truth, or to confute error, in regard to all facts that are anywhere of common notoriety, was as yet unuttered. Thus, as reporters of the history and doctrines of the Gnostics, in their obscurer ramifications, even the earlier fathers were, in a great measure, disqualified, not merely by their feelings of dislike toward those heretics, but by the great difficulty of obtaining full and correct knowledge concerning them; and, we may add, by that want of accuracy of conception and representation, which they shared in common with their opponents, and with all others of their age. We must keep in view their prejudices, and their liability to mistake, not merely as respects the doctrines, but also as respects the character and morals of the Gnostics. We may readily believe, that vices, which were more properly to be ascribed to the depravity of individuals, were sometimes brought as general charges against the whole body, to which those individuals were considered as be