the knowledge of God," and the "Gnostic" is "a
man who knows God." So, again, among the early Christians. Take such a
man as Origen. He uses the same word in exactly the same sense; for
when Origen is declaring that the Church has medicine for the sinner,
and that Christ is the Good Physician who heals the diseases of men,
he goes on to say that the Church has also the Gnosis for the wise,
and that you cannot build the Church out of sinners; you must build it
out of Gnostics. These are the men who know, who have the power to
help and to teach; and there can be no medicine for the diseased, no
upholder of the weak, unless, within the limits of the religion, the
Gnostic is to be found. And so Origen lays immense stress on the
Gnostic, and devotes page after page to a description of him: what he
is, what he thinks, what he does; and to the mind of that great
Christian teacher, the Gnostic was the strength of the Church, the
pillar, the buttress of the faith. And so, coming down through the
centuries, since the Christian time, you will find the word Gnostic
used every now and again, but more often the term "Theosophist" and
"Theosophy"; for this term came into use in the later school, the
Neo-Platonists, and became the commonly accepted word for those who
claimed this possibility of knowledge, or even claimed to _know_. And
a phrase regarding this is to be found in the mystic Fourth Gospel,
that of S. John, where into the mouth of the Christ the words are put,
that the "knowledge of God is eternal life"--not the faith, nor the
thought, but the knowledge--again declaring the possibility of this
Gnosis. And the same idea is found along the line of the Hermetic
Science, or Hermetic Philosophy, partly derived from Greece and partly
from Egypt. The Hermetic philosopher also claimed to know, and claimed
that in man was this divine faculty of knowledge, above the reason,
higher than the intellect. And whenever, among the thoughtful and the
learned, you find reference made to "faith," as where, in the Epistle
to the Hebrews, it is said to be "the _evidence_ of things not seen,"
the same idea comes out, and Faith, the real Faith, is only this
intense conviction which grows out of the inner spiritual being of
man, the Self, the Spirit, which justifies to the intellect, to the
senses, that there is God, that God truly exists. And this is so
strongly felt in the East that no one there wants to argue about the
existence of God; it is dec