(5) Inconsistencies. Here it is that sistency is added to absurdity in the Gnostic scheme. For let the intermediate mons be as many as the wildest imagination could devise, still God was the remote, if not the proximate cause of creation. Added to which, we are to suppose that the Demiurgus formed the world without the knowledge of God, and that, having formed it, he rebelled against him. Here again we find a strong resemblance to the Oriental doctrine of two principles, good and evil, or light and dark ness. The two principles were always at enmit'y with each other. God must have been conceived to be more powerful than matter, or an emanation from God could not have shaped or molded it into form: yet God was not able to reduce matter to its primeval chaos, nor to destroy the evil which the Demiurgus had produced. What God could not prevent he was always endeavoring to cure ; and here it is that the Gnostics borrowed so large ly from the Christian schcme. The names, in deed, of several of their mons were evidently taken from terms which they found in the gos pel. Thus we meet with Logos, Monogenes, Zoe, Eeclesia. all of them successive emanations from the supreme God, and all dwelling in the pleroma. At length we meet with Christ and the Holy Ghost, as two of the last mons 1,vhich were put forth. Christ was sent into the world to rem edy the evil which the creative mon, or Demiur gus. had caused. He was to emancipate men from the tyranny of matter. or the evil principle; and by revealing to them the true God, who was hitherto unknown, to fit them, by a perfection and sublimity of knowledge, to enter the Divine pleroma. To give this knowledge was the end and object of Christ's coming upon earth : and hence the inventors and believers of the doctrine assumed to themselves the name of Gnostics.
(6) Summary. Professor Burton gives a brief and clear summary of the Gnostic doctrines in the following passage, which well deserves to be retained in the memory:—'The system was stated to have begun with Simon Magus; by which I would understand that the system of uniting Christianity with Gnosticism began with that her etic ; for the seeds of Gnosticism, as we shall see presently, had been sol,vn long before. What Si mon Magus began was brought to perfection by Valentinus, who came to Rome in the former part of the second century ; and what we know of Gnosticism is taken principally from writers who opposed Valentinits. Contemporary with him there were many other Gnostic leaders, who held different opinions; but in the sketch which I have given, I have endeavored to explain those principles which, under certain modifications, were common to all the Gnostics. That the supreme God, or the Good Principle, was not the creator of the world, but that it was created by an evil, or at least an inferior being; that God produced from himself a succession of mons or emanations, who dwell with him in the pleroma ; that one of these ;eons was Christ, who came upon earth to reveal the knowledge of the true God; that he was not incarnate, but either assumed an unsub stantial body, or descended upon Jesus at hi.: baptism; that the God of the Old Testament was not the father of Jesus Christ ; that there was no resurrection or final judgment. This is an outline of the Gnostic doctrines as acknowledged by nearly all of them.' J. P. P.