[Footnote 91: _Spicilegium SS. Patrum ut et Haereticorum Saeculorum post Christum natum, I, II et III_; Johannes Ernestus Grabius; Oxoniae, 1714, ed. alt., Vol. I., pp. 305-312.] [Footnote 92: P. 306.] [Footnote 93: _Comment. de Paradiso_, c. i., pp. 200, _et seqq._, editionis Antverpiensis, anno 1567, in 8vo.] [Footnote 94: Grabe is also interesting for a somewhat wild speculation which he quotes from a British Divine (apud Usserium in _Antiquitatibus Eccles. Britannicae_), that the tonsure of the monks was taken from the Simonians. (Grabe, _op. cit._, p, 697.)] [Footnote 95: In the epistle of St. Ignatius _Ad Trallianos_ (§ 11), Simon is called "the first-born Son of the Devil" ([Greek: prototokon Diabolou huion]); and St. Polycarp seems to refer to Simon in the following passage in his Epistle _Ad Philipp._ (§ 7): "Everyone who shall not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, is antichrist, and who shall not confess the martyrdom of the cross, is of the Devil; and he who translates the words of the Lord according to his own desires, and says there is neither resurrection nor judgment, he is _the first-born of Satan_."] PART III. THE THEOSOPHY OF SIMON. In treating of eschatology and the beginning of things the human mind is ever beset with the same difficulties, and no matter how grand may be the effort of the intellect to transcend itself, the finite must ever fail to comprehend the infinite. How much less then can words define that which even the whole phenomenal universe fails to express! The change from the One to the Many is not to be described. How the All-Deity becomes the primal Trinity, is the eternal problem set for man's solution. No system of religion or philosophy has ever explained this inexplicable mystery, for it cannot be understood by the embodied Soul, whose vision and comprehension are dulled by the grossness of its physical envelope. Even the illuminated Soul that quits its prison house, to bathe in the light of infinitude, can only recollect flashes of the Vision Glorious once it returns again to earth. And this is also the teaching of Simon when he says: I say there are many gods, but one God of all these gods, incomprehensible and unknown to all, ... a Power of immeasurable and ineffable Light, whose greatness is held to be incomprehensible, a Tower which the maker of the world does not know. This is a fundamental dogma of the Gnôsis in all climes and in all ages. The demiurgic deity is not the All-Deity, for there is an infinite succession of universes, each having its particular deity, its Brahmâ, to use the Hindû term, but this Brahmâ is not THAT which is Para-Brahman, that which is beyond Brahmâ. This view of the Simonian Gnôsis has been magnificently anticipated in the _Rig Veda_ (x. 129) which reads in the fine translation of Colebrooke as follows: