to the true fold in order to introduce
discord and to betray the Church to the Gentiles.

St. Peter, the true Simon, is said to have followed the false Simon from
city to city, out-rivalling his Satanic miracles by orthodox miracles,
until at length they reached Rome. Here Simon Magus by his magic arts
succeeded in flying up into the sky in the presence of the Emperor and
his court, but at the word of Peter the charm was broken and the wizard
fell to earth and was killed.

But, besides this, the so-called Gnostic heresy introduced other
elements into the legend. These Gnostics were a sect that arose in the
early times of Christianity. They pretended to a special insight into
the divine nature, and combined Platonic and oriental theories with
Christian dogmas. They tried to convert the story of the Redemption into
a cosmological myth, and regarded the human person of Christ as a kind
of phantom--a magic apparition. Some of these Gnostics seem to have
accepted Simon Magus as the 'Power of God'--as the Logos, or divine
Reason, by which the world was created (or reduced from chaos to an
ordered Cosmos). From this a curious myth arose. This Logos, or creative
Power, was identified with the Sun-god, as the source of life, and as
Sun-god was united to the Moon-goddess, Selene. Now the words Helen and
Selene are connected in Greek, and Helen of Troy was accepted by these
Gnostics as a mythical form of the goddess of the moon. Hence it came
that in the Gnostic form of the Simon Magus legend he was married to
Helen of Troy, and this notion found its way into the old Faust-legend,
and is used by Goethe in that exceedingly wonderful and beautiful part
of his great poem which is called the _Helena_.

After the suppression of Gnostic and other early heresies came the
contest of the now united and politically powerful Church against the
outer world of heathendom. While retaining for herself what we may call
a monopoly in orthodox magic the Church condemned as in league with the
devil _all_ speculation, whether theological or scientific--the one as
leading to heresy, the other to sensual ends, such as riches, fame, and
those lusts of the flesh and that pride of intellect which were fatal to
the contemplative and ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity.

It was not among Teuton and Celtic savages but among the learned
adherents of the old Greek philosophy that the Church in those earlier
days found her most dangerous and obstinate ad