It is a most suggestive fact that there is not a word in the so-called sacred _Scriptures_ to show that Jesus was actually regarded as a God by his disciples. Neither before nor after his death did they pay him divine honors. Their relation to him was only that of disciples and “master;” by which name they addressed him, as the followers of Pythagoras and Plato addressed their respective masters before them. Whatever words may have been put into the mouths of Jesus, Peter, John, Paul, and others, there is not a single act of adoration recorded on their part, nor did Jesus himself ever declare his identity with _his Father_. He accused the Pharisees of _stoning_ their prophets, not of deicide. He termed himself the son of God, but took care to assert repeatedly that they were all the children of God, who was the Heavenly Father of all. In preaching this, he but repeated a doctrine taught ages earlier by Hermes, Plato, and other philosophers. Strange contradiction! Jesus, whom we are asked to worship as the one living God, is found, immediately after his Resurrection, saying to Mary Magdalene: “I am not yet ascended _to my Father_; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto _my Father_ and _your_ Father, and to _my_ God and _your_ God!” (_John_ xx. 17.) Does this look like identifying himself with his Father? “_My_ Father and _your_ Father, _my_ God and _your_ God,” implies, on his part, a desire to be considered on a perfect equality with his brethren--nothing more. Theodoret writes: “The hæretics agree with us respecting the beginning of all things.... But they say there is not one Christ (God), but one above, and the other below. And this last _formerly dwelt in many_; but _the Jesus_, they at one time say is _from_ God, at another they call him a SPIRIT.”[341] This spirit is the Christos, the _messenger_ of life, who is sometimes called the Angel _Gabriel_ (in Hebrew, the mighty one of God), and who took with the Gnostics the place of the Logos, while the Holy Spirit was considered _Life_.[342] With the sect of the Nazarenes, though, the Spiritus, or Holy Ghost, had less honor. While nearly every Gnostic sect considered it a Female Power, whether they called it _Binah_, נינה, _Sophia_, the Divine Intellect, with the Nazarene sect it was the _Female Spiritus_, the astral light, the genetrix of all things of _matter_, the chaos in its evil aspect, made _turbido_ by the Demiurge. At the creation of man, “it was light on the side of the FATHER, and it was light (material light) on the side of the MOTHER. And this is the ‘_two-fold_ man,’”[343] says the _Sohar_. “That day (the last one) will perish the seven badly-disposed stellars, also the sons of man, who have confessed the _Spiritus_, the Messias (false), the Deus, and the MOTHER of the SPIRITUS shall perish.”[344]