I. The Gnostics were a school of eclectics which be-

came conspicuous amid the chaotic vortex of all reli- gions in Alexandria, during the first century. They sought to furnish the young Christian church with a philosophic creed, and ranked themselves as the only initiates into a mystical system of Christian truth which was too exalted for the masses. Their thought
IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 227
was an elaborate structure of Greek ideas built upon Parsee Dualism, maintaining that the world was cre- ated by some fallen spirit or principle, and that the spirits of men were enticed from a preexistent higher stage by the Creator into the slavery of material bodies. The evils and sins of life belong only to the degraded prison-house of the spirit. The world is only an ob- ject of contempt. Virtue consists in severest asceti- cism. To combat their theory that Jesus was one of a vast number of beings between man and God, the fourth Gospel was written. They spread widely through the first and second centuries in many branches of belief. But most of their strength was absorbed into Manichaeism, which was a more logical union of Persian with Christian and Greek ideas. In this simple faith the world is a creation not of a fallen spirit, but of the primary evil principle, while the spirit of man is the creation of God, and the conflict between flesh and spirit is that between the powers of light and darkness. The Gnostic and Manichaean notions of preexistence perpetuated themselves in many of the medieval sects, especially the Bogomiles, Paulicians, and Priscillians. Seven adherents of the Priscillian heresy were put to death in Spain a. d. 385, as the first instance of the death penalty visited by a Christian magistrate for erroneous belief. The Ital- ian Cathari were another sect holding this form of re- incarnation, against whom the Albigensian Crusade of the elder De Montfort was sent, and the inquisition devised by St. Dominic. Still they thrived in secret and possessed a disguised hierarchy which long sur- vived their violent persecution. Similar sects de- scended from them still exist among the Russian dis- senters.
228 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.