c. =The Carpocratians.= In the system of their founder Carpocrates, who lived at Alexandria in the first half of the second century, God is the eternal Mould, the unity without distinctions, from whom all being flows and to whom all returns again. From Him the ἄγγελοι κοσμοποιοί revolted. By the creation of the world they established a distinct order of existence apart from God and consolidated it by the law issuing from them and the national religions of Jews and Gentiles founded by them. Thus true religion or the way of return for the human spirit into the One and All consists theoretically in Gnosis, practically in emancipation from the commands of the Demiurge and in a life κατὰ φύσιν. The distinction of good and bad actions rests merely on human opinions. Man is redeemed by faith and love. In order to be able to overcome the powers that created the world, he is in need of magic which is intimately connected with Gnosis. Every human spirit who has not fully attained to this end of all religious endeavour, is subjected, until he reaches it, to the assumption of one bodily form after another. Among the heroes of humanity who with special energy and success have assailed the kingdom of the Demiurge by contempt of his law and spread of the true Gnosis, a particularly conspicuous place is assigned to Jesus, the son of Joseph. What he was for the Jews, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, etc., were for the Gentiles. To the talented son of Carpocrates, named Epiphanes, who died in his seventeenth year, after impressing upon his father’s Gnostic system a boundless communistic and libertine tendency with community of goods and wives, his followers erected a temple at Cephalonia, in which they set up for divine honours the statues of Christ and the Greek philosophers. At the close of their Agapæ, they indulged in _Concubitus promiscuus_. d. =The Prodicians= flourished about the time of Clement of Alexandria, and were connected, perhaps, through their founder Prodicus, with the Carpocratians. In order to prove their dominion over the sensible world they were wont to appear in their assemblies naked, and hence are also called =Adamites=. So soon as they succeeded in thus reaching the state of innocence that had preceded the fall, they maintained that as pneumatical king’s sons they were raised above all law and entitled to indulge in unbridled lust.