There is no reason to doubt that the “science” or “philosophy” of which Paul was so anxious that the disciples should beware, was the same which was afterwards so well known by the designation of Gnosticism.  The second century was the period of its most vigorous development, and it then, for a time, almost engrossed the attention of the Church; but it was already beginning to exert a pernicious influence, and it is therefore noticed by the vigilant apostle.  Whilst it acknowledged, to a certain extent, the authority of the Christian revelation, it also borrowed largely from Platonism; and, in a spirit of accommodation to the system of the Athenian sage, it rejected some of the leading doctrines of the gospel.  Plato never seems to have entertained the sublime conception of the creation of all things out of nothing by the word of the Most High.  He held that matter is essentially evil, and that it existed from eternity. [202:4] The false teachers who disturbed the Church in the apostolic age adopted both these views; and the errors which they propagated and of which the New Testament takes notice, flowed from their unsound philosophy by direct and necessary consequence.  As a right understanding of certain passages of Scripture depends on an acquaintance with their system, it may here be expedient to advert somewhat more particularly to a few of its peculiar features.

The Gnostics alleged that the present world owes neither its origin nor its arrangement to the Supreme God.  They maintained that its constituent parts have been always in existence; and that, as the great Father of Lights would have been contaminated by contact with corrupt matter, the visible frame of things was fashioned, without His knowledge, by an inferior Intelligence.  These principles obviously derogated from the glory of Jehovah.  By ascribing to matter an independent and eternal existence, they impugned the doctrine of God’s Omnipotent Sovereignty; and by representing it as regulated without His sanction by a spiritual agent of a lower rank, they denied His Universal Providence.  The apostle, therefore, felt it necessary to enter his protest against all such cosmogonies.  He declared that Jehovah alone, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, existed from eternity; and that all things spiritual and material arose out of nothing in obedience to the word of the second person of the Godhead.  “By Him,” says he, “were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created by Him and for Him, and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist.” [203:1]