Carpocrates was one of these revivalists. Everything except faith, all good works, all exterior observances, all respect for human laws, were indifferent, worse than indifferent, to the Christian: these exhibited, where found, an entanglement of the soul in the web woven for it by the God of this world, of the Jews, of the Law. The body was of the earth, the soul of heaven. Here, again, Carpocrates followed and distorted the teaching of St. Paul; the body was under the Law, the soul was free. Whatsoever was done in the body did not affect the soul. “It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”(502) “All depends upon faith and love,” said Carpocrates; “externals are altogether matters of indifference. He who ascribes moral worth to these makes himself their slave, subjects himself to those spirits of the world from whom all religious and political ordinances have proceeded; he cannot, after death, pass out of the sphere of the metempsychosis. But he who can abandon himself to every lust without being affected by any, who can thus bid defiance to the laws of those earthly spirits, will after death rise to the unity of that Original One, with whom he has, by uniting himself, freed himself, even in this present life, from all fetters.”(503) Epiphanes, the son of Carpocrates, a youth of remarkable ability, who died young, exhausted by the excesses to which his solifidianism exposed him, wrote a work on Justification by Faith, in which he said: “All nature manifests a striving after unity and fellowship; the laws of man contradicting these laws of nature, and yet unable to subdue the appetites implanted in human nature by the Creator himself—these first introduced sin.”(504) With Epiphanes, St. Epiphanius couples Isidore, and quotes from his writings directions how the Faithful are to obtain disengagement from passion, so as to attain union with God. Dean Milman, in his “History of Christianity,” charitably hopes that the licentiousness attributed to these sects was deduced by the Fathers from their writings, and was not actually practised by them. But the extracts from the books of Isidore, Epiphanes and Carpocrates, are sufficient to show that their doctrines were subversive of morality, and that, when taught as religious truths to men with human passions, they could not fail to produce immoral results. An extract from Isidore, preserved by Epiphanius, giving instructions to his followers how to conduct themselves, was designed to be put in practice. It is impossible even to quote it, so revolting is its indecency. In substance it is this: No man can approach the Supreme God except when perfectly disengaged from earthly passion. This disengagement cannot be attained without first satisfying passion; therefore the exhaustion of desire consequent on the gratification of passion is the proper preparation for prayer.(505)