When Christianity began to spread, and Jesus was believed on by multitudes, and reverenced by many who did not receive him, it became politic to recognise the Gospel in the same manner in which the Law had been recognised. Accordingly, the external facts of the life of Jesus were not disputed, but a new spirit was given to them. Jesus was a manifestation of the Supreme God, as Simon was; come upon the same errand, to destroy the Jewish law; and thence an object of hatred to the Jews, who triumphed so far as to crucify the external body in which he appeared, but had no power over him who had inhabited it. Here there was just enough of truth to impose upon a person brought up to believe the Gospel without really loving it, and falsehood enough altogether to prevent its reception. The sketch which I have now traced is the nucleus of Gnosticism. Simon’s dignifying his paramour with the title of the Thought of the First Cause, and his figment of her having been in a perpetual state of transmigration, was no doubt an after thought to cover the grossness which prying minds might fancy in the great empiric; an end which might not be sufficiently accomplished by his doctrine that all actions were indifferent. Whether Simon really invented the first ogdoad of pure emanations from the Great Father may be doubted; for the testimony to that fact does not appear sufficiently early, and those who assert it contradict each other in the names of them. But that he taught that there were Excellences and Powers, as well as angels, appears from Irenæus. Yet as that author undertakes to tell the share which Simon had in forming the system, and certainly attributes the regularity of it to his successors, it appears most probable that he defined nothing as to the number or functions of those celestial beings.