4.  And he enjoined mysteries of obscenity and—­to set it forth more seriously—­of the sheddings of bodies, emissionum virorom, feminarum menstruorum, and that they should be gathered up for mysteries in a most filthy collection; that these were the mysteries of life, and of the most perfect Gnosis—­a practice which anyone who has understanding from God would most naturally consider to be most filthy conduct and death rather than life.  And he supposes names for the Dominions and Principalities, and says there are different heavens, and sets forth Powers for each firmament and heaven, and tricks them out with barbarous names, and says that no man can be saved in any other fashion than by learning this mystagogy, and how to offer such sacrifices to the Universal Father through these Dominions and Principalities.  And he says that this world (aeon) was constructed defectively by Dominions and Principalities of evil.  And he considers that corruption and destruction are of the flesh alone, but that there is a purification of souls and that, only if they are established in initiation by means of his misleading Gnosis.  This is the beginning of the so-called Gnostics.  And he pretended that the Law was not of God, but of the left-hand Power, and that the Prophets were not from the Good God but from this or the other Power.  And he lays it down for each of them as he pleases:  the Law was of one, David of another, Isaiah of another, Ezekiel again of another, and ascribes each of the Prophets to some one Dominion.  And all of them were from the left-hand Power and outside the Perfection,[49] and every one that believed in the Old Testament was subject to death.

5.  But this doctrine is overturned by the truth itself.  For if he were the Great Power of God, and the harlot with him the Holy Spirit, as he himself says, let him say what is the name of the Power or in what word[50] he discovered the epithet for the woman and nothing for himself at all.  And how and at what time is he found at Rome successively paying back his debt, when in the midst of the city of the Romans the miserable fellow fell down and died?  And in what scripture did Peter prove to him that he had neither lot nor share in the heritage of the fear of God?  And could the world not have its existence in the Good God, when all the good were chosen by him?  And how could it be a left-hand Power which spake in the Law and Prophets, when it has preached the coming of the Christ, the Good God, and forbids mean things?  And how could there not be one divine nature and the same spirit of the New and Old Testament, when the Lord said:  “I am not come to destroy the Law, but to fulfil it"?[51] And that He might show that the Law was declared through Him and was given through Moses, and that the grace of the Gospel has been preached through himself and his