“Never were men more perplexed and bewildered than the A-Gnostic Christians of the third and fourth centuries—who had started from a new beginning altogether, which they had been taught to consider solely historic—when they turned to look back for the first time to find that an apparition of their faith was following them one way and confronting them in another; a shadow that threatened to steal away their substance, mocking them with its aërial unreality; the ghost of the body of truth which they had embraced as a solid and eternal reality claiming to be the rightful owner of their possessions; a phantom Christ without flesh or bone; a crucifixion that only occurred in cloudland; a parody of the drama of salvation performed in the air, with never a cross to cling to, not a nail-wound to thrust the fingers into and hold on by, not one drop of blood to wash away their sins. It was horrible. It was devilish. It was the devil, they said, and thus they sought to account for Gnosticism and fight down their fears. ‘You poor ignorant idiotai!’ said the Gnostics, ‘you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically.’—‘You spawn of Satan!’ responded the Christians, ‘you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a Satanic interpretation to the word of revelation and falsifying the oracles of God. You are converting the solid facts of our history into your new-fangled allegories.’—‘Nay,’ replied the Gnostics, ‘it is you who have taken the allegories of mythology for historic facts.’ And they were right. It was in consequence of their taking the allegorical tradition of the fall for reality that the Christian Fathers considered woman to be accursed, and called her a serpent, a scorpion, the devil in feminine form.” The Gnostics are said by Gibbon to have been “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name.” They were finally forbidden by Theodosias I. to assemble at their places of meeting or to teach their doctrines. Their books, too, were burned, so that we have now no full account of them. Only those who lied about them have been permitted a hearing.