The disciples of the reformed Magianism of Zoroaster ascribed the creation to the one supreme, invisible Deity, who was to be worshipped directly, not through images, nor through a Mediator, nor any intermediate agencies. The Gentile Gnostics, in distinction from Cerinthus and other Judaizers, in their attempts to subordinate Christianity to their system--which taught that all evil resided in and proceeded from matter, and therefore that the world could not have been created by a good being--ascribed the creation to a created evil being, the evil principle, Satan. They therefore rejected the Old Testament as irreconcilable with this system. Prior to the Advent, they worshipped Satan as creator, and as having chief control in the whole course of things in the world, and being an over-match for the antagonist, good principle: and honoring him in this way, they held Cain, and his other most conspicuous followers and supporters, in the highest veneration. Yearning for some relief from the unmitigated and intolerable miseries which they suffered in their warfare with their bodies, which, as matter, they deemed the seat of corruption, they hailed the appearance of the good principle in Christianity, supported as it was by demonstrations of resistless power, as likely to defeat the antagonist evil principle, the Devil, to whom they still ascribed the creation of the world. Instead of longer worshipping him, therefore, they now taught _that the Supreme Deity, the Creator of the Devil, was to be worshipped. This was the doctrine which undoubtedly had been lost to all idolaters, and which they now promised to restore_.