e present day. But if in this peaceful community no
actually anti-Christian influence is to be discerned, the same cannot be
said of the succeeding pseudo-Christian sects which, whilst professing
Christianity, mingled with Christian doctrines the poison of the
perverted Cabala, main source of the errors which henceforth rent the
Christian Church in twain.

The Gnostics

The first school of thought to create a schism in Christianity was the
collection of sects known under the generic name of Gnosticism. In its
purer forms Gnosticism aimed at supplementing faith by knowledge of
eternal verities and at giving a wider meaning to Christianity by
linking it up with earlier faiths. "The belief that the divinity had
been manifested in the religious institutions of all nations"[103] thus
led to the conception of a sort of universal religion containing the
divine elements of all.

Gnosticism, however, as the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_ points out, "was
Jewish in character long before it became Christian."[104] M. Matter
indicates Syria and Palestine as its cradle and Alexandria as the centre
by which it was influenced at the time of its alliance with
Christianity. This influence again was predominantly Jewish. Philo and
Aristobulus, the leading Jewish philosophers of Alexandria, "wholly
attached to the ancient religion of their fathers, both resolved to
adorn it with the spoils of other systems and to open to Judaism the way
to immense conquests."[105] This method of borrowing from other races
and religions those ideas useful for their purpose has always been the
custom of the Jews. The Cabala, as we have seen, was made up of these
heterogeneous elements. And it is here we find the principal progenitor
of Gnosticism. The Freemason Ragon gives the clue in the words: "The
Cabala is the key of the occult sciences. The Gnostics were born of the
Cabalists."[106]

For the Cabala was much older than the Gnostics. Modern historians who
date it merely from the publication of the Zohar by Moses de Leon in the
thirteenth century or from the school of Luria in the sixteenth century
obscure this most important fact which Jewish savants have always
clearly, recognized.[107] The _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, whilst denying the
certainty of connexion between Gnosticism and the Cabala, nevertheless
admits that the investigations of the anti-Cabalist Graetz "must be
resumed on a new basis," and it goes on to show that "it was Alexandria
of the fir