Of course this spirit of perversion was nothing new; many centuries earlier the prophet Isaiah had denounced it in the words: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness!" But the role of the Gnostics was to reduce perversion to a system by binding men together into sects working under the guise of enlightenment in order to obscure all recognized ideas of morality and religion. It is this which constitutes their importance in the history of secret societies. Whether the Gnostics themselves can be described as a secret society, or rather as a ramification of secret societies, is open to question. M. Matter, quoting a number of third-century writers, shows the possibility that they had mysteries and initiations; the Church Fathers definitely asserted this to be the case.[120] According to Tertullian, the Valentinians continued, or rather perverted, the mysteries of Eleusis, out of which they made a "sanctuary of prostitution."[121] The Valentinians are known to have divided their members into three classes--the Pneumatics, the Psychics, and the Hylics (i.e. materialists); the Basilideans are also said to have possessed secret doctrines known to hardly one in a thousand of the sect. From all this M. Matter concludes that: 1. The Gnostics professed to hold by means of tradition a secret doctrine superior to that contained in the public writings of the apostles. 2. That they did not communicate this doctrine to everyone.... 3. That they communicated it by means of emblems and symbols, as the Diagram of the Ophites proves. 4. That in these communications they imitated the rites and trials of the mysteries of Eleusis.[122] This claim to the possession of a secret oral tradition, whether known under the name of γνῶσις or of Cabala, confirms the conception of the Gnostics as Cabalists and shows how far they had departed from Christian teaching. For if only in this idea of "one doctrine for the ignorant and another for the initiated," the Gnostics had restored the very system which Christianity had come to destroy.[123] Manicheism Whilst we have seen the Gnostic sects working for more or less subversive purposes under the guise of esoteric doctrines, we find in the Manicheans of Persia, who followed a century later, a sect embodying the same tendencies and approaching still nearer to secret society organization.