Gnosticism assumed a variety of forms, and almost every one of its teachers had his own distinctive creed; but, as a system, it was always known by certain remarkable features.  It uniformly ignored the doctrine that God made all things out of nothing; [430:2] and, taking for granted the eternity of matter, it tried to account, on philosophical principles, for the moral and spiritual phenomena of the world which we inhabit.  The Gnosis, [430:3] or knowledge, which it supplied, and from which it derived its designation, was a strange congeries of wild speculations.  The Scriptures describe the Most High as humbling Himself to behold the things that are on earth, [431:1] as exercising a constant providence over all His creatures, as decking the lilies of the valley, and as numbering the very hairs of our heads; but Gnosticism exhibited the Supreme God as separated by an immeasurable interval from matter, and as having no direct communication with anything thus contaminated.  The theory by means of which many of its adherents endeavoured to solve the problem of the origin of evil, [431:2] and to trace the connexion between the finite and the infinite, was not without ingenuity.  They maintained that a series of Aeons, or divine beings, emanated from the Primal Essence; but, as sound issuing from a given point gradually becomes fainter until it is finally lost in silence, each generation of Aeons, as it receded from the great Fountain of Spiritual Existence, lost somewhat of the vigour of divinity; and at length an Aeon was produced without power sufficient to maintain its place in the Pleroma, or habitation of the Godhead.  This scheme of a series of Aeons of gradually decreasing excellence was apparently designed to shew how, from an Almighty and Perfect Intelligence, a weak and erring being might be generated.  There were Gnostics who carried the principle of attenuation so far as to teach that the inhabitants of the celestial world were distributed into no less than three hundred and sixty-five heavens, [431:3] each somewhat inferior to the other.  According to some of these systems, an Aeon removed by many emanations from the source of Deity, and, in consequence, possessed of comparatively little strength, passed over the bounds of the Pleroma, and imparted life to matter.  Another Power, called the Demiurge, was now produced, who, out of the materials already in existence, fashioned the present world.  The human race, ushered, under such circumstances, upon the stage of time, are ignorant of the true God, and in bondage to corrupt matter.  But all men are not in a state of equal degradation.  Some possess a spiritual nature; some, a physical or animal nature; and some, only a corporeal or carnal nature.  Jesus now appeared, and, at His baptism in the Jordan, Christ, a powerful Aeon, joined Him, that He might be fitted for redeeming souls from the ignorance and slavery in which they are entangled.  This Saviour taught the human family the knowledge