to its yoke; and that, in fact, whatever acts they might commit, it was impossible for them either to be polluted by those acts or to fail of salvation(739). Who would not suppose that the modern ultra‐Calvinist was the speaker? So again, at that time, as in these days these tenets were not always taken up as a cloak for licentiousness. Saturninus and Tatian were extremely correct in their lives; and Valentinus was not accused of any peculiar immorality: indeed, he long continued nominally a member of the Church, which, if his conduct had been flagitious, he could not have done. If they despised the restraints of the moral law, they probably supposed, like Toplady and others, that they had higher principles, which would lead them to greater heights of purity: or they were men of a speculative turn, who took up Gnosticism as a theory, without any disposition to make that practical use of it which others did, merely because they were not persons of warm passions. Indeed, if we may judge from a fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria, Valentinus was rather a mystic in his religion(740). There are two or three features in which the Gnostics were the forerunners of a very different class of errors. Transubstantiation no doubt arose in time by a natural depravation of the true doctrine of the Eucharist, through the desire of defining that which Scripture and primitive tradition had left undefined. But it is curious that a hint of it should have been struck out by Marcus, one of the magical Gnostics, who, amongst other arts of legerdemain, hit upon the idea of bringing down into the wine and water _the blood of the supernal grace_, by means of an invocation(741). It is equally curious to read in the account of Carpocrates and his disciples, that they asserted that Pilate had procured a likeness of Jesus Christ to be taken, and that they set his image amongst those of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle and the rest, and decked it with chaplets, and paid to it the selfsame honours which the heathen paid to their idols(742). Nor is it less remarkable that the Gnostics in general, when refuted by the Scriptures, should have spoken in disparagement of them (as I have already pointed out) in terms singularly corresponding with those sometimes made use of by Roman controversialists: “They turn to accuse the Scriptures, as though they were not correct, nor of authority; and say that they are at variance with themselves, _neither can the truth be discovered from them by those who are ignorant of_ THEIR _tradition_(743).” Coincidences of this kind are at least curious; and the further we search the more clearly will it appear that the germs of all subsequent errors appeared in very early times. [Transcriber’s Note: Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.] FOOTNOTES 1 In his “Doctrine of Scripture and of the Primitive Church upon Religious Celibacy,” in reply to the author of “Antient Christianity.”