Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
They would have agreed with great satisfaction, as we have said, to inflict condign and capital punishment upon the heads of the sect; and they would have had no objection, if driven to do something, to get hold of some strangers or slaves, who might be a sort of scapegoats for the rest; but it was impossible, when they once began to persecute, to make distinctions, and not a few of them had relations who were Christians, or at least were on that border-land which the mob might mistake for the domain of Christianity—Marcionites, Tertullianists, Montanists, or Gnostics.
From this came the teaching, subsequently held by numerous other sects, that those born of the Spirit could not be defiled by any acts of the flesh, and that so-called vicious actions were rather to be encouraged as providing experience useful to spiritual welfare. Some branches of the gnostics had 'spiritual marriages, similar to what existed in India in the Sakti rites already described.
Solomon had his seal, by which he commanded all daemons; and there is a whole literature of curious nonsense, which you may read if you will, about the Abraxas and other talismans of the Gnostics in Syria; and another, of the secret virtues which were supposed to reside in gems: especially in the old Roman and Greek gems, carved into intaglios with figures of heathen gods and goddesses.
During all the next month or six weeks, M. Coignard applied himself, day and night, just as he had promised, to the reading of Zosimus the Panopolitan. During the meals we partook of at the table of M. d'Asterac the conversation turned on the opinions of the gnostics and on the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians. Being only an ignorant scholar I was of little use to my good master.
Hermes also suggested that it was only necessary to send our bodily sensations to sleep in order to awake in God and rejoice in immortality! There was a close relationship between Hermes, the Essenes of Egypt, and St. John, the author of Revelation. Indeed, if we search carefully, we find that the Gnostics of every school believed in the possibility of banishing death from the earth.
From the Gnostics the Mohammedans received the tradition; for they believe that when Adam was expelled from Paradise he lived many years on this mountain alone, before he was reunited to Eve on Mount Arafath, which overhangs Mecca. The early Portuguese settlers in the island attributed the sacred footprint to St.
The Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name; and that general appellation, which expressed a superiority of knowledge, was either assumed by their own pride, or ironically bestowed by the envy of their adversaries.
The Gnostics rejected the conception of an anthropomorphic deity who had appeared visibly and audibly to the patriarchs; and they were the authors of the doctrine, very widely spread during the second and third centuries, that God could not in person have been the creator of the world. According to them, God, as pure spirit, could not act directly upon vile and gross matter.
Hence it must be shown that this first Passover is chronologically out of order in the Gospel of John, or the one year ministry advocated by the second century Gnostics, by Clement of Alexandria, by Origen, and of late years by Keim and others, is seen to be impossible.
The so-called foot-mark on Adam's Peak in Ceylon has been attributed by Brahmans to Siva, by Buddhists to Sakyamuni, by Gnostics to Ieu, by Muhammadans to Adam, and by the Portuguese Christians to either St. Thomas or the eunuch of Candace, queen of Ethiopia. J.E. Tennent's Ceylon , ii. 133, quoted in Yule's Marco Polo, ed. H. Cordier, 1903, ii. 321.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking