accurately their descent, it would be necessary to know the exact point in the history of each sect at which such tenets appeared. But the Fathers seldom thought of distinguishing between the opinions of an heresiarch and those of his successors, and the literary habits of the time were not in favour of accurate quotation of documents or even of names[69]. This forms the chief difficulty in dealing with the history of the Gnostic teaching, and although the discovery of fresh documents contemporary with those we now possess would undoubtedly throw additional light upon the subject, it is probable that it will never be entirely overcome. Generally speaking, however, Gnosticism played a most important part in the history of Christianity. Renan’s view that it was a disease which, like croup, went near to strangling the infant Church is often quoted[70]; but in the long run it is probable that Gnosticism was on the whole favourable to her development. In religion, sentiment often plays a larger part than reason; and any faith which would enable men of weight and influence to continue the religious practices in which they had been brought up, with at the outset but slight modification, was sure of wide acceptance. There seems no doubt that the earlier Gnostics continued to attend the mysteries of the Chthonian deities in Greece and of their Oriental analogues, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the like elsewhere, while professing to place upon what they there saw a Christian interpretation[71]. Here they acted like the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump, and this did much to spread the knowledge of the new faith among those spiritually-minded Gentiles, who would never have felt any interest in Christianity so long as it remained merely a branch of Judaism[72]. Most of them, moreover, sooner or later abandoned their Gnosticism, and became practising members of the Catholic Church, who sometimes went a long way to meet them. As Renan has said, none of them ever relapsed into Paganism[73], and in this way the so-called heresies became at once the feeders of orthodox Christianity and its richest recruiting-ground[74]. They offered in fact an easy road by which the wealthy, the learned, and the highly-placed could pass from Paganism to Christianity without suffering the inconvenience imposed upon the first followers of the Apostles.