“God willed that Adam should not eat of that tree; but he did eat; he, therefore, did not remain as God willed him to remain:  it results, therefore, that the maker of Adam was impotent.”

“God willed that Adam should remain in Paradise; but he of his own disgraceful act fell from thence:  therefore the God that made Adam was impotent, inasmuch as he was unable of his own will to keep him in Paradise.”

“(For) he interdicted (he said) Adam from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, by tasting which he would have had power to judge between good and evil, and to avoid this, and follow after that.”

“But (said he) had not that maker of Adam forbidden him to eat of that tree, he would in no way have undergone this judgment and this punishment; for hence is evil here, in that he (Adam) had done contrary to the bidding of God, for God had ordered him not to eat, and he had eaten.”

“Through envy (said he) he forbade Adam to taste of the tree of life, so that, of course, he should not be immortal.”

“For what reason on earth (said he) did God curse the serpent?  For if (he cursed him) as the one who caused the harm, why did he not restrain him from so doing, that is, from seducing Adam?  But if (he cursed him) as one who had brought some advantage, in that he was the cause of Adam’s eating of that good tree, it needs must follow that he was distinctly unrighteous and envious; lastly, if, although from neither of these reasons, he still cursed him, he (the maker of Adam) should most certainly be accused of ignorance and folly.”

Now although there seems no reason why the above contentions should not be considered as in substance the arguments employed by Simon against his antagonists of the dead-letter, yet the tenth century is too late to warrant verbal accuracy, unless there may have been some Syrian translation which escaped the hands of the destroyers.  The above quoted specimen of traditionary Simonian logic, however, is interesting, and will, we believe, be found not altogether out of date in our own times.[94]

Finally, there is one further point that I have reserved for the end of this Part in order that my readers may constantly keep it in mind during the perusal of the Part which follows.

We must always remember that every single syllable we possess about Simon comes from the hands of bitter opponents, from men who had no mercy or toleration for the heretic.  The heretic was accursed, condemned eternally by the very fact of his heresy; an emissary of Satan and the natural enemy of God.  There was no hope for him, no mercy for him; he was irretrievably damned.[95] The Simon of our authorities has no friend; no one to say a word in his favour; he is hounded down the byways of “history” and the highways of tradition, and to crush him is to do God service.  One solitary ray of light beams forth in the fragment of his work called The Great Revelation, one solitary ray, that will illumine the garbled accounts of his doctrine, and speak to the Theosophists of to-day in no uncertain tones that each may say: