he spake evil of her
in his poems; and that afterwards when he repented and wrote what
is called a recantation, in which he sang her praises, he recovered
his sight. So she, transmigrating from body to body, and thereby
also continually undergoing indignity, last of all even stood for
hire in a brothel; and she was the "lost sheep."

3. Wherefore also he himself had come, to take her away for the
first time, and free her from her bonds, and also to guarantee
salvation to men by his "knowledge." For as the Angels were
mismanaging the world, since each of them desired the sovereignty,
he had come to set matters right; and that he had descended,
transforming himself and being made like to the Powers and
Principalities and Angels; so that he appeared to men as a man,
although he was not a man; and was thought to have suffered in
Judaea, although he did not really suffer. The Prophets moreover had
spoken their prophecies under the inspiration of the Angels who
made the world; wherefore those who believed on him and his Helen
paid no further attention to them, and followed their own pleasure
as though free; for men were saved by his grace, and not by
righteous works. For righteous actions are not according to nature,
but from accident, in the manner that the Angels who made the world
have laid it down, by such precepts enslaving men. Wherefore also
he gave new promises that the world should be dissolved and that
they who were his should be freed from the rule of those who made
the world.

4. Wherefore their initiated priests live immorally. And everyone
of them practises magic arts to the best of his ability. They use
exorcisms and incantations. Love philtres also and spells and what
are called "familiars" and "dream-senders," and the rest of the
curious arts are assiduously cultivated by them. They have also an
image of Simon made in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in
that of Minerva; and they worship the (statues); and they have a
designation from their most impiously minded founder, being called
Simonians, from whom the Gnosis, falsely so-called, derives its
origins, as one can learn from their own assertions.

iii. Clemens Alexandrinus (_Stromateis_, ii. 11; vii. 17). Text: _Opera_
(edidit G. Dindorfius); Oxoniae, 1869.

In the first passage th