But Irenæus, as it would appear, succeeded only so far with the unstable Florinus as to drive him from his position, that God was the author of evil. From this he went into the Valentinian speculations, by which they endeavour to escape the great difficulty of the origin of evil(60). From them he learnt to believe in an _ogdoad_ of emanations from the Supreme Being, from one of the later of whom, by a species of accident, evil sprung. Irenæus could not give up his ancient friend, but composed for his use a treatise(61) upon this portion of the Gnostic theory. Of this, however, we have not a fragment left which can throw any light upon its structure. There is only the concluding sentence preserved(62), in which he adjures the transcriber of it to compare it most carefully with the original, and to append the adjuration itself to his transcript. We might wonder, perhaps, at the solemnity of the adjuration, did we not consider how important it was that Irenæus himself should not be represented, by any error of the copyist, as holding opinions at variance with the truth he was so anxious to maintain. But although we have no distinct remains of this particular treatise, it is highly probable that it formed the germ of that great work which has, in some sort, remained entire, and upon which the reputation of Irenæus, as a controversial writer, altogether rests. To that I will now direct my attention. The Gnostic theories had risen in the East, and from thence had early spread to Rome; whither came, in succession, most of their eminent teachers. It is not my purpose to give a full account of them. This has been done by the late Dr. E. Burton, in his Bampton Lectures, “_On the heresies of the apostolical age_,” and the notes appended to them. I shall, however, give in detail Irenæus’s account of them in a subsequent part of this work. The general principle of them all was to escape making God the author of evil, by making it to spring, by a species of chance, from some emanation indefinitely removed from the great First Cause. For this purpose, they imagined certain spiritual beings, more or less numerous, the first pair produced by the Supreme Being, in conjunction with an emanation from himself; the rest emanating, for the most part, successively from each preceding pair, and becoming more and more liable to infirmity as they were further distant from the One Original. From one of the most distant they imagined the author of evil to have sprung, whom they also made the creator of the world, and the god of the Jews. They professed to believe in Jesus, but regarded him either as not truly man or as not truly united with the Godhead; and Christ, as well as the Only‐ begotten, the Saviour, and the Life, they looked on as distinct from him.