with in the last part of the Introduction to make further reference to them unnecessary, and the conclusion there come to, that the whole of this Document is magical rather than religious must only be repeated. That the four-fold division of man’s incorporeal part comes from the belief of Pagan Egypt hardly needs demonstration when we see how closely the Spirit Counterfeit of our text corresponds to the _Ka_ or double, while the Fate which leads every man to his appointed death is a familiar personage in Egyptian folk-lore. If in the description of the cup of oblivion, the author for once seems to borrow from Plato, it is by no means certain whence Plato drew his fable, if not from Egypt itself.[107] One must see, then, I think, in the Third Document the work of a Valentinian, but of one of late date, who had slipped back, as the whole sect probably did, into the systematised sorcery of his ancestor’s faith, and whose Christianity mainly consisted in putting the account of the semi-magical “mysteries” or secrets by which he hoped to escape the horrors of hell, into the mouth of its Founder. But there are also many other signs that this must have been later in date than the two first Documents. The author shows a much greater acquaintance with the letter of the New Testament than his predecessors, and while those quote almost entirely from Matthew, the quotations in the Third Document are taken largely from Luke. The author goes so far in one place as to quote from the Epistle to the Romans as having been written by “our brother Paul,”[108] which some writers think did not appear until well on in the second century. The author, too, frequently refers to the persecutions and the “torments which are in the law” as something imminent and pressing on all Christians alike, and this can hardly be said of any measures taken before the reign of Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), when Valentinus had long been dead. The story of the woman who “came to repent” and the subsequent command to St. Peter to “perform the mystery which will cut off this soul from the Kingdom of Light,” together with the many mysteries enumerated as exercising a magical effect on the living and the dead, argue an established and regulated ritual which can hardly have been organised in the lifetime of Valentinus or of his immediate successors, Ptolemy and Heracleon.[109]