There was again another class; viz. Christians by birth and education, brought up in leisure, and given to study, who, never having received the Gospel humbly and practically, became infected with the unsettled spirit of speculative inquiry. These would see the apparent incongruities between the law and the Gospel, especially in the spirit in which each was administered; and instead of being contented to be ignorant of that which had not been revealed, would endeavour to form some system independent of revelation, by which to account for these incongruities. To these two classes we shall see that Gnosticism also adapted itself; and indeed to the latter it would be specially adapted in the licentiousness of its morals. For being brought up without their own choice in a system of great strictness, at which their nature perhaps rebelled, and which they had themselves never heartily embraced; and yet not liking to renounce it on the distinct avowal of a love of vice, they would gladly close with a scheme which gave unbounded license the character of superior wisdom, and even of duty itself. We see then what there was in the character of the times to prepare men for such a system as Gnosticism. But it did not grow up at once into all its completeness. It developed itself by degrees, as men were prepared for it; and when we have considered it in its leading features, we can scarcely fail to acquiesce in the view of it taken by the Christian writers contemporary with it; viz. that it was a scheme specially concocted by the author of evil, as antagonist to Christianity.