being the root of the whole matter concerning Equinoctial Christolatry. “Nothing is more astounding, on their own showing, than the ignorance of the Fathers about the nature, the significance, the descent of Gnosticism, and its rootage in the remotest past. They knew nothing of evolution or the survival of types, and for them the new beginning with Christ carnalized obliterated all that preceded. Such a thing as priority, natural genesis, or the doctrine of development did not trouble those who considered that the more the myth the greater was the miracle which proved the divinity. “Also, it has been asserted from the time of Irenæus down to that of Mansel that the Gnostic heretics of the second century invented a number of spurious Gospels in imitation of or in opposition to the true gospel of Christ, which has descended to us as canonical, authentic, and historic. This is a popular delusion, false enough to damn all belief in it from the beginning until now. The ignorance of the past manifested by men like Irenæus is the measure of the value of their testimony to the origines of Equinoctial Christolatry. They who pretend to know all concerning the founding and the founder know nothing of the foundations.... “Gnosticism, according to those who are ignorant of its origin and relationships, was supposed and assumed to have originated in the second century; the first being carefully avoided, only proves that the A-Gnostics, who had literally adopted the pre-Christian types, and believed they had been historically fulfilled, were then for the first time becoming conscious of the cult that preceded theirs and face to face with those who held them to be the heretics. Gnosticism was no birth or new thing in the second century, it was no perverter or corrupter of Christian doctrines divinely revealed, but the voice of an older cult growing more audible in its protest against a superstition as degrading and debasing now as when it was denounced by men like Tacitus, Pliny, Julian, Marcus Aurelius, and Porphyry. For what could be more shocking to any sense really religious than the belief that the very God himself had descended on earth as an embryo in a virgin’s womb, to run the risk of abortion and universal miscarriage during nine months in utero, and then dying on a cross to save his own created world or a portion of its people from eternal perdition? The opponents of the latest superstition were too intelligent to accept a dying deity....