[Footnote 199: L.c., no. 9: [Greek: Christos hen idea gynaikos eschematismenos.] How variable must the misbirths of the Christian imagination have been in this respect also! Unfortunately almost everything of that kind has been lost to us because it has been suppressed. The fragments of the once highly esteemed Apocalypse of Peter are instructive, for they still attest that the existing remains of early Christian literature are not able to give a correct picture of the strength of religious imagination in the first and second centuries. The passages where Christophanies are spoken of in the earliest literature would require to be collected. It would be shown what naive enthusiasm existed. Jesus appears to believers as a child, as a boy, as a youth, as Paul etc. Conversely, glorified men appear in visions with the features of Christ.] [Footnote 200: See Euseb., H. E. V. 16. 9. In Oracle No. 2 an evangelical promise is repeated in a heightened form; but see Papias in Iren., V. 33. 3 f.] [Footnote 201: We may unhesitatingly act on the principle that the Montanist elements, as they appear in Tertullian, are, in all cases, found not in a strengthened, but a weakened, form. So, when even Tertullian still asserts that the Paraclete in the new prophets could overturn or change, and actually did change, regulations of the Apostles, there is no doubt that the new prophets themselves did not adhere to apostolic dicta and had no hesitation in deviating from them. Cf., moreover, the direct declarations on this point in Hippolytus (Syntagma and Philos. VIII. 19) and in Didymus (de trin. III. 41. 2).]