themselves are servants of corruption, for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.... For if _they have escaped_ the pollution of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour, they are again entangled therein, and overcome ... it had _been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness_, than after they have known it to turn from the holy _commandment delivered unto them_” (_Second Epistle_). Peter certainly cannot have meant the Gnostics, for they had never seen “the holy commandment delivered unto them;” Paul had. They never promised any one “liberty” from bondage, but Paul had done so repeatedly. Moreover the latter rejects the “old covenant,” Agar the bondwoman; and Peter holds fast to it. Paul warns the people against the _powers_ and _dignities_ (the lower angels of the kabalists); and Peter, as will be shown further, respects them and _denounces those who do not_. Peter preaches circumcision, and Paul forbids it. Later, when all these extraordinary blunders, contradictions, dissensions and inventions were forcibly crammed into a frame elaborately executed by the episcopal caste of the new religion, and called Christianity; and the chaotic picture itself cunningly preserved from too close scrutiny by a whole array of formidable Church penances and anathemas, which kept the curious back under the false pretense of sacrilege and profanation of divine mysteries; and millions of people had been butchered in the name of the God of mercy--then came the Reformation. It certainly deserves its name in its fullest paradoxical sense. It abandoned Peter and alleges to have chosen Paul for its only leader. And the apostle who thundered against the old law of bondage; who left full liberty to Christians to either observe the Sabbath or set it aside; who rejects everything anterior to John the Baptist, is now the professed standard-bearer of Protestantism, which holds to the _old_ law more than the Jews, imprisons those who view the Sabbath as Jesus and Paul did, and outvies the synagogue of the first century in dogmatic intolerance! But who then _were_ the first Christians, may still be asked? Doubtless the Ebionites; and in this we follow the authority of the best critics. “There can be little doubt that the author (of the _Clementine Homilies_) was a representative of Ebionitic Gnosticism, which _had once been the purest form of primitive Christianity_....”[304] And who were the Ebionites? The pupils and followers of the early Nazarenes, the kabalistic Gnostics. In the preface to the _Codex Nazaræus_, the translator says: “That also the Nazarenes did not reject ... the Æons is natural. For of the Ebionites who acknowledged them (the Æons), these were the instructors.”[305]