soul from all necessity to show seals or defences to the lesser powers and will exalt him after his death to the rank of a king in the kingdom of light, although it will not make him equal to those who have received the mystery of the Ineffable One[576]. It therefore seems probable that these “twelve mysteries of the First Mystery” all refer to the rite of baptism, and are called twelve instead of one only to accord with some trifling juggling with words and letters such as was common with the followers of Valentinus[577]. That baptism was held in the sub-Apostolic age to be, in the words of Döllinger, “not a mere sign, pledge, or symbol of grace, but an actual communication of it wrought by the risen and glorified Christ on the men He would convert and sanctify, and a bond to unite the body of the Church with its Head[578],” will perhaps be admitted. According to the same author, St Paul teaches that “by Baptism man is incorporated with Christ, and puts on Christ, so that the sacramental washing does away with all natural distinctions or race;—Greek and Jew, slave and free, men and women, are one in Christ, members of His body, children of God and of the seed of Abraham[579].” He tells us also that the same Apostle “not only divides man into body and spirit, but distinguishes in the bodily nature, the gross, visible, bodily frame, and a hidden, inner, ‘spiritual’ body not subject to limits of space or cognizable by the senses; this last, which shall hereafter be raised, is alone fit for and capable of organic union with the glorified body of Christ, of substantial incorporation with it[580].” If Döllinger in the XIXth century could thus interpret St Paul’s words, is it extraordinary that the author of the _Pistis Sophia_ should put the same construction on similar statements some sixteen centuries earlier? So the late Dr Hatch, writing of baptism in this connection, says: “The expressions which the more literary ages have tended to construe metaphorically were taken literally. It was a real washing away of sins; it was a real birth into a new life; it was a real adoption into a divine sonship[581].” If this be so, it seems to follow that the Mystery of the Ineffable One must be the other and the greatest of the Christian sacraments. Jesus tells His disciples that it is the “One and unique word,” and that the soul of one who has received it “after going forth from the body of matter of the Archons” will become “a great flood of light” and will fly into the height, no power being able to restrain it, nor even to know whither it goes. He continues: