a great number from the Church and to seduce many of the faithful women. Valentinus, perhaps, is somewhat unfairly held responsible by the Fathers for such a perversion of his own teaching which he would, perhaps, have condemned as loudly as they. Scandals of the kind here hinted at were not unknown in the Catholic Church itself, and Christian ministers have been found in all ages, sects, and countries who have been willing to abuse for their own purposes the power which religion gives them over the opposite sex. It is true, too, that people, as has been well said, are seldom either as good or as bad as their creed, and the doctrine that “God sees no sin in His elect” has been preached in our own time without being followed by the “wretchlessness of most unclean living” which the 17th article of the Church of England declares to be one of the probable consequences of predestinarian teaching. The later Valentinians certainly did not forbid marriage, as is shown by the pathetic epitaph from a grave in the Via Nazionale quoted by Renan[451], and thus avoided some of the moral dangers with which the practice of celibacy is sometimes reproached. Of the fortunes of the Valentinian sect after the death of Valentinus, we have very little precise information. Tertullian speaks of it as being in his time the most numerous society of heretics (_frequentissimum plane collegium haereticorum_), and in the West it extended from Rome, as we have seen, into Gaul and even into Spain, where it existed at the end of the 4th century[452]. Probably, however, it here propagated itself sporadically, its opinions appearing now and then among isolated writers and teachers, who probably drew their disciples carefully from among the Christian community, and only disclosed their system to those who showed some aptitude for it. Of such was doubtless “my fair sister Flora” (ἀδελφή μου καλὴ Φλώρα), to whom Valentinus’ successor Ptolemy wrote a letter setting out his tenets which Epiphanius has preserved for us[453]. As the quotations in it presuppose an acquaintance on her part with Old Testament history as well as with the Canonical Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, there can be little doubt that she was already a Christian convert. This mode of propaganda was the more obnoxious to the episcopate that it was likely to escape for some time the observation of the overseers of the Church, and is quite sufficient to explain the pains which bishops like Irenaeus and Hippolytus took to expose and refute the doctrines of the Valentinians, as well as what they say with doubtful accuracy about the secrecy which was observed concerning them[454]. In the East, things were probably different, and Heracleon’s Commentaries on the Gospels, from which Origen quotes freely, would on the face of it have been useless unless addressed to the Christian community at large, and make no attempt to conceal their heretical teaching. In Egypt, however, the