The reason for this paucity of documents is also plain enough. “The antidote to the scorpion’s bite,” to use a patristic figure of speech[41], was felt by the early Church to be the actual cautery, and its leaders spared no pains to rout out and burn the writings of the heretics pending the time when they could apply the same treatment to their authors. Even before their alliance with Constantine had put the resources of the State at their disposal, they had contrived to use the secular arm for this purpose. In several persecutions, notably that of Diocletian, which was probably the most severe of them all, the Christian scriptures were particularly sought for by the Inquisitors of the State, and many of the orthodox boasted that they had arranged that the police should find the writings of the heretics in their stead[42]. Later, when it came to the turn of the Christians to dictate imperial edicts, the possession of heretical writings was made punishable with severe penalties[43]. Between orthodox Christian and Pagan it is a wonder that any have survived to us. A lucky chance, however, has prevented us from being entirely ignorant of what the Gnostics had to say for themselves. In 1851, a MS. which had been known to be in the British Museum since 1778, was published with a translation into a curious mixture of Latin and Greek by the learned Petermann, and turned out to include a sort of Gospel coming from some early Gnostic sect[44]. From a note made on it by a writer who seems to have been nearly contemporary with its scribes, it is known as _Pistis Sophia_ or “_Faith-Wisdom_”; and the same MS. also contains fragments of other works coming from a cognate source. In 1891, a papyrus in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, which had been brought into this country in 1769 by the traveller Bruce, was also published with a French translation by M. Amélineau, an ex-Abbé who has long made the later Egyptian language his peculiar study, and proved to contain two documents connected with the system disclosed in the _Pistis Sophia_[45]. Both MSS. are in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or Upper Egypt, to which fact they probably owe their escape from the notice of the Byzantine Inquisitors; and they purport to contain revelations as to the next world and the means of attaining salvation therein made by Jesus on His return to earth after the Resurrection. Although these several documents were evidently not all written at one time and place, and cannot be assigned to a single author, the notes and emendations appearing on the MSS. show that most of them must have been in the possession of members of the same school as their composers; and that therefore we have here for the first time direct and authentic evidence of the Gnostic tenets, as put forward by their adherents instead of by their opponents.