The history of the second century is the history of the clash and conflict between these new mystical and philosophical elements of Christianity and its earlier forms. On the one hand were the majority of the original communities, holding in the main the conception of Christianity which probably finds its best contemporary exposition in the first two books of the Apostolical Constitutions, a religion of stern moral practice and of strict moral discipline, of the simple love of God and the unelaborated faith in Jesus Christ. On the other hand were the new communities, and the new members of the older communities, with their conception of knowledge side by side with faith, and with their tendency to speculate side by side with their acceptance of tradition. The conflict was inevitable. In the current state of educated opinion it would have been as impossible for the original communities to ignore the existence of philosophical elements either in their own body, or in the new communities which were growing up around them, as it would be for the Christian churches of our own day to ignore physical science. The result of the conflict was, that the extreme wing of each of the contending parties dropped off from the main body. The old-fashioned Christians, who would admit of no compromise, and maintained the old usages unchanged, were gradually detached as Ebionites, or Nazaræans. The old orthodoxy became a new heresy. In the lists of the early hand-books they are ranked as the first heretics. The more philosophical Gnostics also passed one by one outside the Christian lines. Their ideas gradually lost their Christian colour. They lived in another, but non-Christian, form. The true Gnostic, though he repudiates the name, is Plotinus. The logical development of the thoughts of Basilides and Justin, of Valentinus and the Naassenes, is to be found in Neo-Platonism—that splendid vision of incomparable and irrecoverable cloudland in which the sun of Greek philosophy set. * * * * *