It was, no doubt, in this way that he kept up that character for faith and piety, of which Epiphanius speaks, and to which Tertullian alludes(692). Irenæus has given us numerous instances in which he and his followers quoted the Scriptures as supporting their own doctrine(693): but they will be found to be either forced accommodations of numbers and names, or violent perversions of the letter of Scripture, or mystical interpretations put upon it in such a way as that it may almost be made to mean anything. The success of such interpretations was of course aided by the equally unnatural accommodations of Scripture customary with the orthodox, at least those of the Alexandrian school. There are, likewise, some fragments of his preserved by Clement of Alexandria(694), which have the same tone as the system generally; but one of these(695), in which he compares the heart occupied by divers evil passions to an inn or caravanserai defiled by travellers, appears at first sight so unobjectionable, that, out of the connection in which it stands, one should hardly suspect any evil meaning. It is however intended to teach the Gnostic tenet, that the heart of the spiritual man is no more a partaker of the evil wrought in it by evil spirits, than a caravanserai in the nuisances committed by every wanton traveller. This is evidently another, and a less offensive way of stating that to the spiritual mind no passion can communicate any permanent pollution, and that the elect are not to be called to account for what they fall into in this world: and its inoffensiveness at first sight is no bad illustration of the habit Irenæus charges them with of teaching their heresies by stealth(696). Section VII. Secundus, Epiphanes, Ptolemy, Colorbasus, And Marcus. Irenæus mentions several successors of Valentinus, some more at length than others. Respecting SECUNDUS, who was the contemporary and disciple of Valentinus(697), he is very brief, merely informing us that he divided the first ogdoad into two tetrads, the right and the left, which he denominated _light_ and _darkness_: and that he asserted that the Being which erred and was forsaken by the upper powers was not one of the thirty, but one of their productions(698). The latter idea would appear to have for its object to remove the origin of evil further from the First Cause: but the former seems to be a contradiction to it, as it brings darkness into the Pleroma.