spel, the Old Testament, and the wisdom connected
with the old cults, was philosophically, that is, scientifically,
manipulated by means of allegory, and the aggregate of mythological
powers translated into an aggregate of ideas. The Pythagorean and
Platonic, more rarely the Stoic philosophy, were compelled to do service
here. Great Gnostic schools, which were at the same time unions for
worship, first enter into the clear light of history in this form, (see
previous section), and on the conflict with these, surrounded as they
were by a multitude of dissimilar and related formations, depends the
progress of the development.[340]

We are no longer able to form a perfectly clear picture of how these
schools came into being, or how they were related to the Churches. It
lay in the nature of the case that the heads of the schools, like the
early itinerant heretical teachers, devoted attention chiefly, if not
exclusively, to those who were already Christian, that is, to the
Christian communities.[341] From the Ignatian Epistles, the Shepherd of
Hermas (Vis. III. 7. 1; Sim. VIII. 6. 5; IX. 19. and especially 22) and
the Didache (XI. 1. 2) we see that those teachers who boasted of a
special knowledge, and sought to introduce "strange" doctrines, aimed at
gaining the entire churches. The beginning, as a rule, was necessarily
the formation of conventicles. In the first period therefore, when there
was no really fixed standard for warding off the foreign
doctrines--Hermas is unable even to characterise the false
doctrines--the warnings were commonly exhausted in the exhortation:
[Greek: kollasthe tois hagiois, hoti hoi kollomenoi autois
hagiasthesontai] ["connect yourselves with the saints, because those who
are connected with them shall be sanctified"]. As a rule, the doctrines
may really have crept in unobserved, and those gained over to them may
for long have taken part in a two-fold worship, the public worship of
the churches, and the new consecration. Those teachers must of course
have assumed a more aggressive attitude who rejected the Old Testament.
The attitude of the Church, when it enjoyed competent guidance, was one
of decided opposition towards unmasked or recognised false teachers. Yet
Irenaeus' account of Cerdo in Rome shews us how difficult it was at the
beginning to get rid of a false teacher.[342] For Justin, about the year
150, the Marcionites, Valentinians, Basilideans and Saturninians, are
groups outside the co