In the hands of Valentinus religion becomes an imbroglio which only an expert could master; and the functions of the Christ in particular are a mere tangle of mystery. Nous, the first of many "Æons," is the "only begotten" Son, his mother being Ennoia, Thought; yet with him is born Truth; and these three with the Father make a first Tetrad. Then Nous produces the Logos and Life; which beget Man and the Church; which two pairs beget more Æons; and so on. In a later stage, after a "fall," Nous begets the Christos and the Holy Spirit; while later still the Æons produce the Æon Jesus, Sophia and Horos playing a part in the evolution. Such a maze, though it is said to have had many devotees, could not possibly be the creed of a popular Church, even in Egypt; and wherever the gospels went their ostensibly concrete Jesus held his own against such spectral competition. The systems which made Jesus non-human and those which made of him an elusive abstraction were alike disadvantaged as against that which declared him to have been born of woman and to have suffered the last agony for the sons of men. Women could weep for the crucified Man-God as they had immemorially done for Adonis and Osiris: they could not shed tears for a phantasmagoric series of Nous--Logos--Christ--Æons--Jesus, begetting and begotten. Other Gnostics, still making mystical pretensions, were content to represent Jesus as a superior human being born of Joseph and Mary in the course of nature. Carpocrates of Alexandria, who so taught in the reign of Hadrian, had a large following. Such tolerance of "materialism," however, brought on the sect charges of all manner of sensuality; and there is categorical record that, following Plato, they sought to practise community of women. Similarly, the Basilidians were charged with regarding all bodily appetites as indifferent, their founder having set his face against the glorification of virginity, and taught that Jesus was not absolutely sinless, since God could never permit an innocent being to be punished. There is no proof, however, that any sect-founder was openly antinomian; and while license doubtless occurred in many, we have the evidence of the Pauline epistles that it could rise in the heart of the primitive Church as easily as in any sect. In the same way, whatever might be the doctrine of particular sections, it may be taken as certain that the charge of bowing before persecution, cast at some, held partly true of nearly all.