), and the purity of their
life? We hear of no similar edifice being erected in the second century
on the basis of any other Oriental cult--even the Mithras cult is
scarcely to be mentioned here--as the Gnostic was on the foundation of
the Christian.[316] The Christian communities, however, together with
their worship of Christ, formed the real solid basis of the greater
number and the most important of the Gnostic systems, and in this fact
we have, on the very threshold of the great conflict, a triumph of
Christianity over Hellenism. The triumph lay in the recognition of what
Christianity had already performed as a moral and social power. This
recognition found expression in bringing the highest that one possessed
as a gift to be consecrated by the new religion, a philosophy of
religion whose end was plain and simple, but whose means were mysterious
and complicated.

Sec. 3. _History of Gnosticism and the forms in which it appeared._

In the previous section we have been contemplating Gnosticism as it
reached its prime in the great schools of Basilides and Valentinus, and
those related to them,[317] at the close of the period we are now
considering, and became an important factor in the history of dogma. But
this Gnosticism had (1) preliminary stages, and (2) was always
accompanied by a great number of sects, schools and undertakings which
were only in part related to it, and yet, reasonably enough, were
grouped together with it.

To begin with the second point, the great Gnostic schools were flanked
on the right and left by a motley series of groups which at their
extremities can hardly be distinguished from popular Christianity on the
one hand, and from the Hellenic and the common world on the other.[318]
On the right were communities such as the Encratites, which put all
stress on a strict asceticism, in support of which they urged the
example of Christ, but which here and there fell into dualistic
ideas.[319] There were further, whole communities which, for decennia,
drew their views of Christ from books which represented him as a
heavenly spirit who had merely assumed an apparent body.[320] There were
also individual teachers who brought forward peculiar opinions without
thereby causing any immediate stir in the Churches.[321] On the left
there were schools such as the Carpocratians, in which the philosophy
and communism of Plato were taught, the son of the founder and second
teacher Epiphanes honoured as a G