tions for
the edification of others, and whose injunctions are to be obeyed.

VI. Christian Worship is a service of God in spirit and in truth (a
spiritual sacrifice), and therefore has no legal ceremonial and
statutory rules. The value of the sacred acts and consecrations which
are connected with the cultus, consists in the communication of
spiritual blessings. (Didache X., [Greek: hemin de echariso, despota,
pneumatiken trophen kai poton kai zoen aionion dia tou paidos sou]).

VII. Everything that Jesus Christ brought with him, may be summed up in
[Greek: gnosis kai zoe], or in the knowledge of immortal life.[158] To
possess the perfect knowledge was, in wide circles, an expression for
the sum total of the Gospel.[159]

VIII. Christians, as such, no longer take into account the distinctions
of race, age, rank, nationality and worldly culture, but the Christian
community must be conceived as a communion resting on a divine election.
Opinions were divided about the ground of that election.

IX. As Christianity is the only true religion, and as it is no national
religion, but somehow concerns the whole of humanity, or its best part,
it follows that it can have nothing in common with the Jewish nation and
its contemporary cultus. The Jewish nation in which Jesus Christ
appeared, has, for the time at least, no special relation to the God
whom Jesus revealed. Whether it had such a relation at an earlier period
is doubtful (cf. here, e.g., the attitude of Marcion, Ptolemaeus the
disciple of Valentinus, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Aristides
and Justin); but certain it is that God has now cast it off, and that
all revelations of God, so far as they took place at all before Christ,
(the majority assumed that there had been such revelations and
considered the Old Testament as a holy record), must have aimed solely
at the call of the "new people", and in some way prepared for the
revelation of God through his Son.[160]

[Footnote 152: See, as to this, Celsus in Orig. III. 10 ff. and V. 59
ff.]

[Footnote 153: The marks adduced in the text do not certainly hold good
for some comparatively unimportant Gnostic groups, but they do apply to
the great majority of them, and in the main to Marcion also.]

[Footnote 154: Most of the Gnostic schools know only one God, and put
all emphasis on the knowledge of the oneness, supramundaneness, and
spirituality of this God. The AEons, the Demiurgus, the God of matter, do
not