Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: contemporaries, that we cannot study their systems without being led to look beyond them to the philosophy of the age ; and, in doing so, we shall find that the Christian fathers suffer as little by a comparison with the Heathen philosophers, as with the Gnostic heretics. Such are some of the considerations incidentally presented to us in the inquiry on which we are now about to enter. The Gnostics may be separated into two great divisions; the Marcionites, on the one hand, and the Theosophic Gnostics, as they may be called, on the other; this epithet being understood as referring to the imaginations of the latter respecting the Supreme God, and the spiritual world, as developed from him. Of the latter class, the Valentinians are the principal representatives, as being the most considerable and numerous sect, and one, the essential characteristics of which appear throughout the systems of other theosophic Gnostics. The fundamental doctrines held in common by the Valentinians and Marcionites were the following ; — That the material world, the visible universe, was not the work of the Supreme Being, but of a far inferior agent, the Demiurgus,or the Creator, who was also the God of the Jews; that the spiritual world, the Pleroma, as it was called, over which the true Divinity presided, and the material world, the realm of the Creator, were widely separated from each other ; that evil was inherent in matter; that the material world, both as being material, and as being the work of an inferior being, was full of imperfection and evil; that the Saviour descended from the spiritual world, as a manifestation of the Supreme God, to reveal him to men, to reform the disorders here existing, and to deliver whatever is spiritual from the dominion of matter; and that the Supreme God had been... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.