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dualism of Zoroaster entered as an element , the demiurgus represented Ahriman , and was a being essentially hostile to the good and supreme deity . From him the old dispensation proceeding was in its spirit and its precepts directly opposed to the new : the present world was a mass of evil ; matter was to be insulted and destroyed in every possible way ; and between earth and heaven
there was no union and sympathy whatever . These views operating upon minds of different temperaments , led to different practical results : with the pure they led to the extreme of asceticism ; with the impure to unbounded licentiousness ; and , in both cases , from the same principle , a contempt for matter . From the opposite tendencies of these two schools , the Alexandrine and the Syrian , they might be further designated as the Judaizing and the anti-Judaic ,
It is unfavourable to our forming a just appreciation of the character of the Gnostics , that we know their sentiments only from a few fragments which have been preserved of their writings , and from the representations given of them by their avowed enemies . Their leaders appear for the most part to have been men of good moral character , and actuated by pure intentions , but led away by
an unbounded love of speculation , and by the vain hope of finding in Christianity the solution of difficulties which it does not undertake to explain . Their great and fundamental error had its source in the fruitless attempt to associate with Christianity the speculations of what was then called philosophy . Smitten with the moral beauty of the gospel , and charmed with the new light which it
seemed to throw on the dark and hitherto inexplicable enigma of existence , they did not perceive the simple , practical end for which its revelations were exclusively calculated , and fancied they saw in it a key to the whole train of mysteries , on which they had been accustomed to exercise their thoughts . Blending its facts and its doctrines , in the most arbitrary manner , with the conceptions
which they had derived from heathen sources , and which , whenever they felt the want of any supplementary idea to complete their theories , they continued to borrow with the most indiscriminate appropriation from the endless systems and fragments of systems still in existence around them ; they attempted , out of these heterogeneous elements , to make a consistent whole of their religion and their philosophy , and thus furnish a complete solution
of the moral problem of the universe . They did not understand , what perhaps is not yet generally understood , the distinction between religion and philosophy , the moral cultivation of the heart and the effort of the intellect to grasp universal truth ; and from confounding their provinces they produced , what Lord Bacon represents as an inevitable result , an heretical religion and a fabulous philosophy . Their besetting sin was the pride of intellect , the ambition of transcending the barriers prescribed to the hurnan faculties , and of
Untitled Article
Spirit of Gnosticism . 569
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 569, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/57/
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