in the Acts above referred to and by the church fathers as originally descriptive of Simon Magus. On the basis of this legendary conglomerate Irenæus, after the example of Justin, describes him as _Magister ac progenitor omnium hæreticorum_. From a house of ill fame in Tyre he bought a slave girl Helena, to whom he assigned the role of the world creating Ἔννοια of God. The angels born of her for the purpose of creating the world had rebelled against her; she was enslaved, and was imprisoned, sometimes in this, sometimes in that, human body; at one time in the body of Helen of Troy, and at last in that of the Tyrian prostitute. In order to redeem her and with her the world enslaved by the rebel angels, the supreme God (ὁ ἐστώς) Himself came down and assumed the form of man, was born unbegotten of man, suffered in appearance in Judea, and reveals Himself to the Samaritans as Father, to the Jews as Son, and to the Gentiles as the Holy Spirit. The salvation of man consists simply in acknowledging Simon and his Helena as the supreme gods. By faith only, not by works, is man justified. The law originated with the evil angels and was devised by them merely to keep men in bondage under them. This last point is evidently transferred to the magician partly from the Apostle Paul, partly from Marcion (§ 27, 11), and is copied from Ebionite sources. The Simon myth is specially rich in legends about the magician’s residence in Rome, to which place he had betaken himself after being often defeated in disputation by the Apostle Peter, and where he was so successful that the Romans erected a column in his honour on an island in the Tiber, which Justin Martyr himself is said to have seen, bearing the inscription: _Simoni sancto Deo_. The discovery in A.D. 1574 of the column dedicated to the Sabine god of oaths, inscribed “_Semoni Sanco Deo Fidio_,” explains how such a legend may have arisen out of a misunderstanding. Although by a successful piece of jugglery--decapitation and rising again the third day, having substituted for himself a goat whom he had bewitched to assume his appearance, whose head was cut off--he won the special favour of Nero, he was thereafter in public disputation before the emperor unmasked by Peter. In order to rehabilitate himself he offered to prove his divine power by ascending up into heaven. For this purpose he mounted a high tower. Peter adjured the angel of Satan, which carried him through the air, and the magician fell with a crash to the ground. Probably there is here transferred to one magician what is told by Suetonius (_Nero_, xii.) and Juvenal (_Sat._ iii.