It was also the case that the spread of the tenets of Valentinus and his followers was attended with some peculiar social dangers of its own. Their division of mankind into the three natural classes of spiritual, psychical, and hylic, if carried to its logical conclusion, brought with it some strange results. As the spiritual or pneumatics were saved in any event, and were, already even in this life, as was expressly said, a kind of “gods,” it was manifestly not for them to trouble themselves about obedience to the moral law. The same conclusion applied to the hylics who were doomed to annihilation in any case, and whose struggles towards righteousness were bound to be inefficacious. There remained the psychics or animal men, for whom indeed a certain course of life was prescribed before they could attain salvation. But with the excessive freedom of interpretation and the licence of variation that Valentinus apparently allowed his followers, the exact limits of this course must always have been a matter of doubt; and it was here that many corruptions and debasements of his teaching began to show themselves. For it was an age when religious impostors of all kinds found an easy market in the credulity of their fellows, and charlatans everywhere abounded who were ready to support their claims to exclusive knowledge of holy things by false miracles and juggling tricks. Hippolytus gives us a long list of such devices including the means of answering questions in sealed letters, producing an apparition, and the like, which he declares the heresiarchs learnt from the magicians and used as proof of their own doctrines[447]. One knows at any rate from Lucian’s evidence that religious pretenders like Alexander of Abonoteichos were not negligent of such practices, and charlatans of his kind were perhaps especially likely to be attracted to the timid and wealthy followers of Valentinus. A Valentinian impostor of this sort, if the Fathers are to be believed, was the Jewish magician Marcus, who taught a system corresponding in most points with that given above, but made use of it in his own interest as a means of moneymaking and for the corruption of women. Irenaeus speaks of the doctrine of this Marcus as being an especial snare to the Christians of Gaul, into which country Marcus or some follower of his perhaps travelled while Irenaeus was Bishop of Lyons[448]. By a mode of interpretation which was indeed a caricature of Valentinus’ own, Marcus found proof of the existence and order of his aeons in the values of the letters composing Divine names and in words like Jesus and Christos[449]. He seems, too, to have himself administered baptism accompanied by exorcisms in the Hebrew language, and to have profaned the Eucharist with juggling tricks which made the cup to overflow and turned the water it contained into wine having the semblance of blood[450]. Thus, says Irenaeus, he contrived to draw away