_Old Testament_ as their standard, no wonder that the Christians were forced by the exceptional position in which they were placed through their own ignorance, to make the best of it. The first groups of Christians, whom Renan shows numbering but from seven to twelve men in _each church_, belonged unquestionably to the poorest and most ignorant classes. They had and could have no idea of the highly philosophical doctrines of the Platonists and Gnostics, and evidently knew as little about their own newly-made-up religion. To these, who if Jews, had been crushed under the tyrannical dominion of the “law,” as enforced by the elders of the synagogues, and if Pagans had been always excluded, as the lower castes are until now in India, from the religious mysteries, the God of the Jews and the “Father” preached by Jesus were all one. The contention which reigned from the first years following the death of Jesus, between the two parties, the Pauline and the Petrine--were deplorable. What one did, the other deemed a sacred duty to undo. If the _Homilies_ are considered apocryphal, and cannot very well be accepted as an infallible standard by which to measure the animosity which raged between the two apostles, we have the _Bible_, and the proofs afforded therein are plentiful. So hopelessly entangled seems Irenæus in his fruitless endeavors to describe, to all outward appearance at least, the true doctrines of the many Gnostic sects of which he treats and to present them at the same time as abominable “heresies,” that he either deliberately, or through ignorance, confounds all of them in such a way that few metaphysicians would be able to disentangle them, without the _Kabala_ and the _Codex_ as the true keys. Thus, for instance, he cannot even tell the difference between the Sethianites and the Ophites, and tells us that they called the “God of all,” “_Hominem_,” a MAN, and his mind the SECOND man, or the “_Son of man_.” So does Theodoret, who lived more than two centuries after Irenæus, and who makes a sad mess of the chronological order in which the various sects succeeded each other.[297] Neither the Sethianites, (a branch of the Jewish Nazarenes) nor the Ophites, a purely Greek sect, have ever held anything of the kind. Irenæus contradicts his own words by describing in another place the doctrines of Cerinthus, the direct disciple of Simon Magus. He says that Cerinthus taught that the world was not created by the FIRST GOD, but by a virtue (virtus) or power, an Æon so distant from the First Cause that he was even ignorant of HIM who _is above all things_. This Æon subjected Jesus, he begot him physically through Joseph from one who was not a virgin, but simply the wife of that Joseph, and Jesus was born like all other men. Viewed from this physical aspect of his nature, Jesus was called the “son of man.” It is only after his _baptism_, that _Christos_, the anointed, descended from the Princeliness of above, in the figure of