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Updated: May 15, 2025
Ward struck his cane smartly on the floor, and, looking severely at my brother, bade him beware how he did justify these canting and false pretenders. "They are," he said, "either sad knaves, or silly enthusiasts, they pretend to Divine Revelation, and set up as prophets; like the Rosicrucians and Gnostics, they profess to a knowledge of things beyond what plain Scripture reveals.
All their notions are metaphysical, and I have been so poisoned with the apparent sublimity of their ideas, that I have been almost completely turned from a Christian to a heathen." Like the ancient Gnostics, Kendall tried to combine Christianity with a sublimated version of pagan superstitions; and if moral restrictions stood in the way, he cast them aside.
Thus the 'Gnostics' call themselves such; the name was of their own devising, and declared that whereof they made their boast; it was the same with the 'Cavaliers' of our Civil War. 'Quaker, 'Puritan, 'Roundhead, were all, on the contrary, names devised by others, and never accepted by those to whom they were attached. To the third class 'Whig' and 'Tory' belong.
Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy both lofty and degraded with which the Christian convert had to contend; not merely the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as to call out disgust and indignation, but also the views which the more virtuous and religious of Pagan saints accepted and promulgated: and not saints alone, but those who made the greatest pretension to intellectual culture, like the Gnostics and Manicheans; those men who were the first to ensnare Saint Augustine, specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as the Brahmins of India.
Moreover, the Gnostics subjected the New Testament to the boldest criticism, affirming it to be impossible to arrive at the true doctrines of Christ; and hence they sought to go beyond Christ, explaining difficult subjects by rationalistic interpretations. Cerinthus placed a boundless chasm between God and the world, and filled it up with different orders of spirits as intermediate beings.
The former is represented by the doctrine of freedom inspired by Jacob Böhme; the latter, by the philosophy of mythology and revelation, which goes back to Aristotle and the Gnostics.
For example, the progression is apparent between Plotinus and the frenzied creations of the Gnostics and the Cabalists. With the latter, we come into a world of unbridled fancy which, in place of human romances, invents cosmic romances.
Not even the old Gnostics could present so striking an admixture as that of the Arya Somaj. It has appropriated many of those Christian ethics which have been learned from a century of contact with missionaries and other Christian residents. It has approved the more humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the degradation of woman.
Each of these streams accumulated new ideas on the way: the stream passing through Syria found the Eastern Gnostics of whom Simon Magus is alleged to have been the first. The other stream passed through Rome and found Adoptionism.
Marcion's reading of this verse corresponded with that of other Gnostics, but has no extant manuscript authority. We have touched upon it elsewhere. Adv. xi. 2. Crt. xii. 14. Crt. xii. 38. Crt., combine the two readings in various ways. xvi. 12. xvii. 2. xviii. 19.
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