The sketch, however, of Simon, to whatever extent he went, was sufficiently filled up by his successors. In his system of angelic beings they defined their number, and to a certain extent fixed their functions. There was at last a body of these formed between the Supreme Being and the authors of this world, perfect in holiness and obedience. The defection of one of these was made as much as possible the work of accident. She was made, according to various schemes, sometimes to be totally excluded from this perfect society, sometimes to be restored to it again, leaving an imperfect offspring behind her. From her or her offspring, sprang the Creator, who is sometimes represented as the chief of seven angels, sometimes as a peculiar being having the angels under him. The creation of man is represented as the work of this imperfect being, but the spark of heavenly life in him as an emanation, more or less direct, from the First Cause. In this way the scheme became more definite; but from the same cause it became a set of schemes more or less inconsistent with each other, but all aiming at having a succession of mysteries to be communicated by degrees. In this way the minds of men were amused and tantalized, and prevented from a serious search after truth; whilst if one scheme was searched to the bottom, and its stock of mysteries exhausted, there was still another and another refinement to lure him away from the real truth. There was, however, the uniform tendency to remove the government of this world from the cognizance of the Supreme Being, and to represent the author of the law and the prophets as an imperfect, self‐ contradictory, cruel being. There was the same mode of rendering null the distinction between moral good and evil, by attributing it to opinion, or custom, or the ordinance of the God of this world. There was the same attempt to nullify the Gospel, by doing away with the Christian idea of the incarnate Son of God, and representing the advent of Jesus as a portion of the Gnostic scheme. For whether Jesus was considered as only _apparently_ a man, or as _merely_ a man; whether the Saviour dwelt in him or made use of him; whether it were the Saviour, or the Christ, or the Only‐begotten, or the Jesus above, who interested himself for the redemption of the spiritual seed, it all amounted to the same thing in the end. It abolished the real salvation of the soul; it took away the incarnation and atonement; it made the Gospel of no effect.