Gnosticism then, in Egypt soon relapsed into the magic from which it was originally derived; and we can no longer wonder that the Fathers of the Church strove as fiercely against it as they did. In the age when books like the _Texts of the Saviour_ and the fragments in the Papyrus Bruce could be written, the methods of Clement of Alexandria, who treated Valentinus and his school as Christians bent on the truth though led into error by a misunderstanding of the purport of heathen philosophy, were clearly out of place. “Ravening wolves,” “wild beasts,” “serpents,” and “lying rogues” are some of the terms the Fathers now bestow upon them[678], and as soon as the conversion of Constantine put the sword of the civil power into their hands, they used it to such effect that Gnosticism perished entirely in some places and in others dragged on a lingering existence under other forms. The compromise that had served for some time to reconcile the great mass of the unthinking people to the religion of Christ thus broke down[679]; and Egypt again showed her power of resisting and transforming all ideas other than those which thousands of years had made sacred to her people. Meanwhile, the bridge between Paganism and Christianity which Gnosticism afforded had been crossed by many. As the Ophites showed the inhabitants of Asia Minor how to combine the practice of their ancestral worships with the Christian revelation, so Valentinus and his successors allowed the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven without the difficulties attendant on the passage of the camel through the needle’s eye. The authors of the _Texts of the Saviour_ and the Bruce Papyrus went further and made it possible for the Egyptian _fellah_—then as now hating change, and most tenacious of his own beliefs—to accept the hope of salvation offered by the new faith while giving up none of his traditional lore upon the nature of the next world. In this way, doubtless, many thousands were converted to Christianity who would otherwise have kept aloof from it, and thus hastened its triumph over the State. But the law which seems to compel every religion to borrow the weapons of its adversaries leads sometimes to strange results, and this was never more plainly marked than in the case of Egypt. The history of Egyptian Christianity has yet to be written; but it seems from the first to have been distinguished in many important particulars from that which conquered the West, and it is impossible to attribute these differences to any other source than Gnosticism. The Pharaonic Egyptian had always been fanatical, submissive like all Africans to priestly influence, and easily absorbed in concern for his own spiritual welfare. Given the passion for defining the undefinable and the love of useless detail which marked everything in the old faith, and in systems like those of the Coptic texts which form the subject of this chapter he had the religion to his mind. Nor were other and less abstract