We have something very similar in the judgment of souls in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead. From Chaldaea or from Egypt the Gnostics who used the Gospel of St. Philip drew their doctrine of the soul traversing several circles, and arrested by an angel at the gate of each. The soul, a divine element, is in the earth combined with the body, a work of the Archon. But her aspirations are for that which is above; she strives to “extirpate his roots.” All her “scattered members,” her thoughts, wishes, impulses, are gathered into one up‐tapering flame. Then only does she “know (God) for what He is,” for she has learned the nature of God by introspection. Such, if I mistake not, is the meaning of the passage quoted by St. Epiphanius. The sect which used such a Gospel must have been mystical and ascetic, given to contemplation, and avoiding the indulgence of their animal appetites. It was that, probably, of Prodicus, strung on the same Pauline thread as the heresies of Marcion, Nicolas, Valentine, Marcus, the Ophites, Carpocratians and Cainites. Prodicus, on the strength of St. Paul’s saying that all Christians are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, maintained the sovereignty of every man placed under the Gospel. But a king is above law, is not bound by law. Therefore the Christian is under no bondage of Law, moral or ceremonial. He is lord of the Sabbath, above all ordinances. Prodicus made the whole worship of God to consist in the inner contemplation of the essence of God. External worship was not required of the Christian; that had been imposed by the Demiurge on the Jews and all under his bondage, till the time of the fulness of the Gospel had come.(501) The Prodicians did not constitute an important, widely‐extended sect, and were confounded by many of the early Fathers with other Pauline‐Gnostic sects. VI. The Gospel Of Judas. The Pauline Protestantism of the first two centuries of the Church had not exhausted itself in Valentinianism. The fanatics who held free justification and emancipation from the Law were ready to run to greater lengths than Marcion, Valentine, or even Marcus, was prepared to go. Men of ability and enthusiasm rose and preached, and galvanized the latent Paulinian Gnosticism into temporary life and popularity, and then disappeared; the great wave of natural common‐sense against which they battled returned and overwhelmed their disciples, till another heresiarch arose, made another effort to establish permanently a religion without morality, again to fail before the loudly‐expressed disgust of mankind, and the stolid conviction inherent in human nature that pure morals and pure religion are and must be indissolubly united.