"The Gnostic doctrine," adds the author above quoted, "concerning the creation of the world by one or more inferior beings of an evil, or at least an imperfect nature, led that sect to deny the divine authority of the books of the Old Testament, whose accounts of the origin of things so palpably contradicted this idle fiction. Through a frantic aversion to those books, they lavished their encomiums upon the _Serpent_, the first author of sin, and held in veneration some of the most impious and profligate persons of whom mention is made in sacred history." Those boasters furnished a notable example for all pretenders to philosophy and rationalism in religion, who take reason for their guide, and deem it competent to determine what it is proper for the Supreme Being to do; who or what kind of being it is most proper should be the creator of such a world as this; at what time, in what manner, of what materials, and for what ends the world should be created; and whether the Mosaic record should be wholly rejected, or only so far as this subject, that of miracles, inspiration, the universality of the Deluge, the doctrine of vicarious atonement, and a few others, are concerned. The controlling influence to which the heretics and theorists of the first centuries were manifestly subject, was that of their philosophy. Assuming that their philosophical dogmas were true and founded in the nature of things, they argued, as do our modern geologists, from their assumptions, that the Scriptures must be consistent with them; and since they were not taught in Scripture, nor consistent with the apparent import of the language of Scripture, they found it necessary to imagine an occult, allegorical, tropical, or spiritual meaning, couched under the forms of the natural language. Thus Origen held "that, under cover of the words, phrases, images, and narratives of the Scriptures, the Holy Spirit had concealed the internal reasons and grounds of things; that in the body of Holy Writ [so he denominates the _proper sense_ of the words] there was a _soul_, [a recondite sense,] and that this soul exhibits, to careful contemplators of it, as it were in a mirror, the causes, connections, and dependences of both human and Divine wisdom." Murdock's Commentaries of Mosheim, II. 156, 165. He took up "the ancient doctrine of the Pharisees and Essenees, that of a double sense in Holy Scripture;" and to confirm his philosophical notions by the authority of the sacred oracles, by "bending the sense of Scripture to suit his purpose, eliminated from the Bible whatever was repugnant to his favorite opinions." Ibid. 165. "It is very certain that the Jews, and among them the Pharisees especially, and Essenees, before the birth of our Saviour, believed that in the language of the Bible, besides the sense which is obvious to the reader, there is another more remote and recondite, concealed under the words of Scripture." Murdock's Commentaries of Mosheim, II. 166.