the book inscribed Baruch in which he who reads will know the whole management of their myth. Now, though I have met with many heresies, beloved, I have met with none worse than this. But truly, as the saying is, we ought, imitating his Heracles, to cleanse the Augean dunghill or rather trench, having fallen into which his followers will never be washed clean nor indeed be able to come up out of it. 28. Since then we have set forth the designs of Justinus the Gnostic falsely so called, it seems fitting to set forth also [Sidenote: p. 241.] in the succeeding books the tenets of the heresies which follow him[332] and to leave none of them unrefuted; the things said by them being quite sufficient when exposed to make an example of them, if and only their hidden and unspeakable (mysteries) would leap to light into which the senseless are hardly and with much toil initiated.[333] Let us see now what Simon says. END OF VOL. I. FOOTNOTES [Footnote 1: In this chapter, Hippolytus treats of what is probably a late form of the Ophite heresy, certainly one of the first to enter into rivalry with the Catholic Church. For its doctrines and practices, the reader must be referred to the chapter on the Ophites in the translator’s _Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity_, vol. II; but it may be said here that it seems to have sprung from a combination of the corrupt Judaism then practised in Asia Minor with the Pagan myths or legends prevalent all over Western Asia, which may some day be traced back to the Sumerians and the earliest civilization of which we have any record. Yet the Ophites admitted the truth of the Gospel narrative, and asserted the existence of a Supreme Being endowed with the attributes of both sexes and manifesting Himself to man by means of a Deity called His son, who was nevertheless identified with both the masculine and feminine aspects of his Father. This triad, which the Ophites called the First Man, the Second Man, and the First Woman or Holy Spirit, they represented as creating the planetary worlds as well as the “world of form,” by the intermediary of an inferior power called Sophia or Wisdom and her son Jaldabaoth, who is expressly stated to be the God of the Jews.