he place of personal investigation. It was for the Church to decide
who deviated too far from the divine truth which she guarded. The idea
of a "heretic" took firmer and firmer shape. During the first
centuries of Christianity, the search for the divine path was a much
more personal matter than it afterwards became. A long distance had
been travelled before Augustine's conviction became possible: "I
should not believe in the truth of the Gospels unless the authority of
the Catholic Church forced me to do so" (_cf._ p. 143).

The conflict between the method of the Mysteries and that of the
Christian religion acquired a special stamp through the various
Gnostic sects and writers. We may class as Gnostics all the writers of
the first Christian centuries who sought for a deep, spiritual meaning
in Christian teachings. (A brilliant account of the development of the
Gnosis is given in G.R.S. Mead's book mentioned above, _Fragments of a
Faith Forgotten_.) We understand the Gnostics when we look upon them
as saturated with the ancient wisdom of the Mysteries, and striving to
understand Christianity from that point of view. For them, Christ was
the Logos, and as such of a spiritual nature. In His primal essence,
He cannot approach man from without. He must be awakened in the soul.
But the historical Jesus must bear some relation to the spiritual
Logos. This was the crucial point for the Gnostics. Some settled it in
one way, some in another. The essential point common to them all was
that to arrive at a true understanding of the Christ-idea, mere
historical tradition was not enough, but that it must be sought either
in the wisdom of the Mysteries, or in the Neo-Platonic philosophy
which was derived from the same source. The Gnostics had confidence in
human wisdom, and believed it capable of bringing forth a Christ by
whom the historical Christ could be measured: in fact, through whom
alone the latter could be understood and beheld in the right light.

Of special interest from this point of view is the doctrine given in
the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. It is true that there is no
mention of these writings till the sixth century; it matters little
when and where they were written, the point is that they give an
account of Christianity which is clothed in the language of the
Neo-Platonic philosophy and presented in the form of a spiritual
contemplation of the higher world. At all events this is a form of
delineation which bel