al system. Thus
Epiphanus held that since Nature herself reveals the principle of the
community and the unity of all things, human laws which are contrary to
this law of Nature are so many culpable infractions of the legitimate
order of things. Before these laws were imposed on humanity everything
was in common--land, goods, and women. According to certain
contemporaries, the Carpocratians returned to this primitive system by
instituting the community of women and indulging in every kind of
licence.

The further Gnostic sect of Antitacts, following this same cult of human
nature, taught revolt against all positive religion and laws and the
necessity for gratifying the flesh; the Adamites of North Africa, going
a step further in the return to Nature, cast off all clothing at their
religious services so as to represent the primitive innocence of the
garden of Eden--a precedent followed by the Adamites of Germany in the
fifteenth century.[117]

These Gnostics, says Eliphas Levi, under the pretext of "spiritualizing
matter, materialized the spirit in the most revolting ways.... Rebels to
the hierarchic order, ... they wished to substitute the mystical licence
of sensual passions to wise Christian sobriety and obedience to laws....
Enemies of the family, they wished to produce sterility by increasing
debauchery."[118]

By way of systematically perverting the doctrines of the Christian faith
the Gnostics claimed to possess the true versions of the Gospels, and
professed belief in these to the exclusion of all the others.[119] Thus
the Ebionites had their own corrupted version of the Gospel of St.
Matthew founded on the "Gospel of the Hebrews," known earlier to the
Jewish Christians; the Marcosians had their version of St. Luke, the
Cainites their own "Gospel of Judas," and the Valentinians their "Gospel
of St. John." As we shall see later, the Gospel of St. John is the one
that throughout the war on Christianity has been specially chosen for
the purpose of perversion.

Of course this spirit of perversion was nothing new; many centuries
earlier the prophet Isaiah had denounced it in the words: "Woe unto them
that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and
light for darkness!" But the role of the Gnostics was to reduce
perversion to a system by binding men together into sects working under
the guise of enlightenment in order to obscure all recognized ideas of
morality and religion. It is this which con