Their Messianic dreams haunted them more and more persistently. The land was full of visionaries, and they always found disciples. A prophet named Theudas induced more than four hundred persons to follow him into the wilderness by declaring that he would cause them to pass dry-shod over Jordan. Fadus, the procurator, despatched a body of horsemen, who slew him and dispersed his following. The author of the Acts, who placed the said Theudas before the time of Judas the Gaulonite, indicates the comparison generally made between the preaching of these two agitators and that of the Apostles. Roman governors and Jewish lovers of order saw no great difference between men inspired and robbers. Tiberius Alexander, a renegade Jew of Alexandria, who succeeded Fadus in the government of Judea, crucified two sons of Judas the Gaulonite, who were still upholding the sect of the Zealots. As for the populace, they were well disposed to all attempts, but among innovators they liked those who adopted violent measures better than those whose methods were peaceable; thus, as the Gospel relates, Barabbas was preferred to Jesus. Samaria, like Jerusalem, had its prophets and its messiahs. In the days of Pontius Pilate there was one who gathered together a great multitude on Mount Gerizim, promising to show them the sacred vessels which had been buried there by Moses. Pilate punished these wretched people so severely that Vitellius, governor of Syria, compelled him to go to Rome, there to exculpate himself before Tiberius. In the reign of Claudius one Simon of Gittha taught in Samaria with great success a subtle form of theology borrowed from the Judæo-Egyptian schools of Alexandria, which subsequently reappears in the mythological doctrines of Christian Gnosticism. He assigned the principal rôle in it to himself, giving himself out to be an incarnation of the great power of God, though he acknowledged the divine mission of Jesus. He averred that in him, Simon, God had revealed himself to the Samaritans in the character of the Father, as he had revealed himself to the Jews in the crucifixion of the Son, and to the Gentiles by the gift of the Holy Ghost. The doctrine of the Trinity, perhaps borrowed from Egypt, has become a part of Christianity, but Simon appears to have given a place in it to the Feminine Principle, probably represented by the Holy Ghost, that name being feminine in Hebrew. Wherever he went he took with him a very beautiful woman, whom he had bought in the market at Tyre. Her name was Helen, and Simon, identifying her with Homer’s Helen, deduced from the name a mystical scheme of redemption for the Eternal Feminine. It was the time when Christianity was first preached, and the Apostles were credited with miraculous powers of healing by the laying on of hands. A prophet ought to work miracles, and Simon was accordingly anxious to purchase their methods, and proposed that they should work together. The invincible repugnance of the Jew for the