all temples without statues Hadrian’s temples.  But there were other and stronger reasons for Hadrian’s classing the Christians with the Egyptian astrologers.  A Christian heresy was then rising into notice in Egypt in that very form, taking its opinions from the philosophy on which it was engrafted.  Before Christianity was preached in Alexandria, there were already three religions or forms of philosophy belonging to the three races of men who peopled that busy city; first, the Greek philosophy; which was chiefly platonism; secondly, the mysticism of the Egyptians; and lastly, the religion of the Jews.  These were often more or less mixed, as we see them all united in the works of Philo-Judae; and in the writings of the early converts we usually find Christianity clothed in one or other of these forms, according to the opinions held by the writers before their conversion.  The first Christian teachers, the apostolic fathers as they are called, because they had been hearers of the apostles themselves, were mostly Jews; but among the Egyptians and Greeks of Alexandria their religion lost much of its purely moral caste, and became, with the former, an astrological mysticism, and with the latter an abstract speculative theology.  It is of the Egyptian Jews that Hadrian speaks in his letter just quoted; many of them had been already converted to Christianity, and their religion had taken the form of Gnosticism.

Gnosticism, or Science, for the name means no more, was not then new in Alexandria, nor were its followers originally Christians.  It was the proud name claimed for their opinions by those who studied the Eastern philosophy of the Magi; and Egypt seems to have been as much its native soil as India.  The name of Gnostic, says Weber, was generally given to those who distinguished between belief on authority and gnosis, i.e., between the ordinary comprehension and a higher knowledge only granted to a few gifted or chosen ones.  They were split up into different sects, according as they approached more nearly the Eastern theosophy or the platonic philosophy; but in general the Eastern conception, with its symbols and unlimited fantasy, remained dominant.  The “creed of those who know” never reached actual monotheism, the conception of one personal god, who created everything according to his own free will and rules over everything with unlimited wisdom and love.  The god of the Gnostics is a dark, mysterious being which can only arrive at a consciousness of itself through a manifold descending scale of forces, which flow from the god himself.  The visible world was created out of dead and evil matter by Demiurgos, the divine work-master, a production and subordinate of the highest god.  Man, too, is a production of this subordinate creator, a production subject to a blind fate, and a prey to those powers which rule between heaven and earth, without free-will, the only thing which makes the ideas of sin and responsibility possible.  Matter is the seat of evil, and as