If Valentinianism did not degenerate into the frantic licentiousness of the earlier Pauline heretics, it was because the doctrine of Valentine was an intellectual, theosophical system, quite above the comprehension of vulgar minds, and therefore only embraced by exalted mystics and cold philosophers. The Valentinians were not accused of mutilating the Scriptures, but of evaporating their significance. “Marcion,” says Tertullian, “knife in hand, has cut the Scriptures to pieces, to give support to his system; Valentine has the appearance of sparing them, and of trying rather to accommodate his errors to them, than of accommodating them to his errors. Nevertheless, he has curtailed, interpolated more than did Marcion, by taking from the words their force and natural value, to give them forced significations.”(476) The Pauline filiation of the sect can hardly be mistaken. The relation of Valentine’s ideas to those of Marcion, and those of Marcion to the doctrines of St. Paul, are fundamental. But, moreover, they claimed a filiation more obvious than that of ideas—they asserted that they derived their doctrines from Theodas, disciple of the Apostle of the Gentiles.(477) The great importance they attributed to the Epistles of St. Paul is another evidence of their belonging to the anti‐judaizing family of heretics, if another proof be needed. The Valentinians possessed a number of apocryphal works. “Their number is infinite,” says Irenaeus.(478) But this probably applies not to the first Valentinians, but to the Valentinian sects, among whom apocryphal works did abound. Certain it is, that in all the extracts made from the writings of Valentine, Ptolemy and Heracleon, by Origen, Epiphanius, Tertullian, &c., though they abound in quotations from St. Paul’s Epistles and from the Canonical Gospels, there are none from any other source. Nevertheless, Irenaeus attributes to them possession of a “Gospel of Truth” (Evangelium Veritatis). “This Scripture,” says he, “does not in any point agree with our four Canonical Gospels.”(479) To this also, perhaps, Tertullian refers, when he says that the Valentinians possessed “their own Gospel in addition to ours.”(480) Epiphanius, however, makes no mention of this Gospel; he knew the writings of the Valentinians well, and has inserted extracts in his work on heresies. III. The Gospel Of Eve. The immoral tendency of Valentinianism broke out in coarse, flagrant licentiousness as soon as the doctrines of the sect had soaked down out of the stratum of educated men to the ranks of the undisciplined and vulgar. Valentinianism assumed two forms, broke into two sects,—the Marcosians and the Ophites.