appendages. The
Gnostics called themselves believers; and their most celebrated teachers
would willingly have remained in the bosom of the Church; but it soon
appeared that their principles were subversive of the New Testament
revelation; and they were accordingly excluded from ecclesiastical
fellowship.

Gnosticism assumed a variety of forms, and almost every one of its
teachers had his own distinctive creed; but, as a system, it was always
known by certain remarkable features. It uniformly ignored the doctrine
that God made all things out of nothing; [430:2] and, taking for granted
the eternity of matter, it tried to account, on philosophical
principles, for the moral and spiritual phenomena of the world which we
inhabit. The _Gnosis_, [430:3] or knowledge, which it supplied, and from
which it derived its designation, was a strange congeries of wild
speculations. The Scriptures describe the Most High as humbling Himself
to behold the things that are on earth, [431:1] as exercising a constant
providence over all His creatures, as decking the lilies of the valley,
and as numbering the very hairs of our heads; but Gnosticism exhibited
the Supreme God as separated by an immeasurable interval from matter,
and as having no direct communication with anything thus contaminated.
The theory by means of which many of its adherents endeavoured to solve
the problem of the origin of evil, [431:2] and to trace the connexion
between the finite and the infinite, was not without ingenuity. They
maintained that a series of Aeons, or divine beings, emanated from the
Primal Essence; but, as sound issuing from a given point gradually
becomes fainter until it is finally lost in silence, each generation of
Aeons, as it receded from the great Fountain of Spiritual Existence,
lost somewhat of the vigour of divinity; and at length an Aeon was
produced without power sufficient to maintain its place in the Pleroma,
or habitation of the Godhead. This scheme of a series of Aeons of
gradually decreasing excellence was apparently designed to shew how,
from an Almighty and Perfect Intelligence, a weak and erring being might
be generated. There were Gnostics who carried the principle of
attenuation so far as to teach that the inhabitants of the celestial
world were distributed into no less than three hundred and sixty-five
heavens, [431:3] each somewhat inferior to the other. According to some
of these systems, an Aeon removed by many emanations from t