“I stood upon a high mountain, and I saw a huge man and another who was mutilated [or perhaps only smaller, κολοβὸν] and I heard a voice of thunder, and I drew near to hearken and he spoke to me and said, ‘I am thou and thou art I; and where thou art, there am I, and I am scattered through all things. And whencesoever thou dost wish, collect me, and in collecting me, thou dost collect thyself[275].’” Is the greater and lesser man here the Adamas or Father-and-Son of the Ophites, in which case the latter part of the passage doubtless refers to the scattering of the light through the world of matter and the necessity of its collection and return to the Godhead. The “I am thou and thou art I” phrase is repeated in the _Pistis Sophia_ by the risen Jesus to His disciples[276], and seems to refer to the final union of the perfected human soul with the Deity. In addition to these books, the Ophites whom Irenaeus and Hippolytus describe quoted freely from the Canonical books of the Old Testament, from one of the apocryphal books of Ezra and from the Book of Tobit, as also from such books of the Canonical New Testament as the Gospels, including that of St John, and most of the Pauline Epistles, including that to the Hebrews[277]. But it would be going too far to say that they “accepted” these or attributed to them a Divine origin, or thought them inspired in the sense in which the word was used by the Catholic Church. On the contrary, Epiphanius complains that they thought many of the contents of the Old Testament Books at any rate were inspired only by Ialdabaoth and the creators of the world of matter for the purpose of misleading mankind[278]; and throughout they seem to have considered all the Canonical Scriptures that they quote as on an equality with the writings of Homer, Hesiod, the legendary Orpheus, and other heathen writers such as Herodotus. Without attempting to deny or question the historical truth of the facts or legends recorded by all these authors, they regarded them merely as figures having an allegorical or typical meaning, which they could interpret in any manner they pleased, so as to make them accord with their own preconceived theories. Thus the Naassenes when they found St Luke quoting from the Proverbs of Solomon that “the just will fall seven times and rise again,” declared that this referred to the downward passage of man’s soul through the planetary heavens[279]; and Justinus, one of the Ophite teachers, finding a story in Herodotus about Heracles and the serpent-tailed girl whom he met in Scythia, said that it was a type of the generation of the universe by the combination of the invisible and unforeseeing Demiurge and the female principle or Sophia[280]. The same dialectic had already been made use of by the Orphics, by Philo of Alexandria, and by Simon Magus; but the Ophites seem to have been the first to apply it to all literature. The full effect of this method of interpretation we shall