End of Paganism—Supremacy of Christianity in West—Its borrowings from its defeated rivals—Triumph of Christianity survival of fittest 358-361 Index 362-425 CHAPTER VII POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS It will be seen, from what has been said in the first volume, that, even at the beginning of the Christian era, there was no lack of αἵρεσις or choice of creeds offered to those peoples of the Levant who had outgrown their national religions; and it may be a surprise to many that more notice was not taken by the Christians of the Apostolic age of these early essays at a universal faith. Some writers, indeed, among whom Bishop Lightfoot is perhaps the most notable, have thought that they could detect allusions to them in the Canonical writings, and that by the “worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which man hath not seen, vainly puffed up by the understanding of his flesh[1]” which St Paul condemns in the Epistle to the Colossians, must be understood the teachings of Gnostic sects already in existence[2]. Others have gone further, and think that the Fourth Gospel was itself written under Gnostic influence[3], and that the Apocalypse attributed to the same author vituperates under the name of the Nicolaitans a Christian sect professing Gnostic tenets[4]. Even if this be so, however, the comparatively late date assigned to all these documents[5] must prevent their being received as evidence of what happened in the earliest stage of the Christian Church; and we find no proof that Gnosticism ever seriously competed for popular favour with orthodox Christianity until well into the IInd century[6]. That the first Christians would take little heed either of organized religions like that of the Alexandrian divinities, or of the speculations of the Orphic poets and of such sects as the Simonians is plain, when we consider the way in which their expectation of the Parusia or Second Coming dominated every moment of their lives[7]. They believed with the unquestioning faith of children that their dead Master would presently return to the earth, and that it would then be destroyed to make way for a new state of things in which, while the majority of mankind would be condemned to everlasting fire, His followers should taste all the joys of Paradise. With this before their eyes, they turned, as has been said, their possessions into a common fund[8], they bound themselves together in a strict association for mutual help and comfort, and they set to work to sweep their fellows into the Christian fold with an earnestness and an energy that was the fiercer because the time for its exercise was thought to be so short. “The Lord is at hand and His reward,” a saying which seems to have been a password among them[9], was an idea never absent from their minds, and the result was an outburst of proselytism such as the world till then had never seen.