pled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy;
which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians;
and lastly, the religion of the Jews. These were often more or less
mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judae; and in
the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed
in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the
writers before their conversion. The first Christian teachers, the
apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of
the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and
Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste,
and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the
latter an abstract speculative theology. It is of the Egyptian Jews that
Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already
converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of
Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, or Science, for the name means no more, was not then new
in Alexandria, nor were its followers originally Christians. It was the
proud name claimed for their opinions by those who studied the Eastern
philosophy of the Magi; and Egypt seems to have been as much its native
soil as India. The name of Gnostic, says Weber, was generally given to
those who distinguished between belief on authority and gnosis, i.e.,
between the ordinary comprehension and a higher knowledge only granted
to a few gifted or chosen ones. They were split up into different sects,
according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the
platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its
symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant. The "creed of those
who know" never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one
personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and
rules over everything with unlimited wisdom and love. The god of
the Gnostics is a dark, mysterious being which can only arrive at a
consciousness of itself through a manifold descending scale of forces,
which flow from the god himself. The visible world was created out of
dead and evil matter by Demiurgos, the divine work-master, a production
and subordinate of the highest god. Man, too, is a production of this
subordinate creator, a production subject to a blind fate, and a prey to
those powers which rule between heaven and earth, without free-will,
the only thin