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Deeming themselves admitted into immediate intercourse with God and the spiritual world , it is not surprising that the more enthusiastic among them should have aspired to the exercise of supernatural powers , and fallen into the practice of magic , or , as it was then called , thaumaturgy . If Simon Magus , who is mentioned in Acts , was a Gnostic ^ he must have been one of this description : but the more respectable of their leaders were not chargeable with such practices .
The Egyptian schools of Basilides and Valentinus were distinguished for their bold and fanciful conceptions . They agreed in their fundamental ideas , but differed in the developement of them : the ^ vvoujlzis of Basilides were the same with the aeons of Valentinus , emanations from the supreme God . Basilides taught the metempsychosis , and believed the soul to be in a continual
course of migration to higher stages of being , from plants and even stones , in which he thought the principle of life might be imprisoned , to beasts , birds , men , and angels . Valentinus made a distinction between the Christianity of the natural (^ vy ^ itos ) and that of the spiritual (^ tvew ^ tixos- ) man ; the former was the result of miracles , striking on the outward sense and rested on authority ; the latter proceeded from an interior conviction of the truth , which
required no external evidence to produce it . To these Egyptian schools , the gems or amulets , wrought over with curious characters and signs , and known to antiquaries by the name of abraxas , are usually ascribed . Lardner ( vol . ix . p . 300—4 , ) questions the fact of such stones having ever been used by any Christian sect . The probability is ( Matter , Li . p . 54 ) they did not belong to the learned of these sects , since we do not find them mentioned , as in
that case they infallibly would have been , by their opponents : but they were worn by the vulgar as charms to protect them against the influence o ^ evil spirits , and may be regarded as one among the many indications of the imperceptible shades with which the corrupted forms of Christianity , especially in the lower classes ., melted awav into heathenism .
We leave it to ecclesiastical antiquaries to describe and arrange the endless diversities of the forms of Gnosticism ; but we may observe , that of all the Gnostic schools , the most practical in its tendency , and the purest apparently in its intentions , was that of Marcion . Though his school forms a class almost by itself , yet , from the country of its origin , and from the principle of contrariety between the Old and New Testaments , by which it was chiefly
characterised , it must be referred to the Syrian rather than the Alexandrine gnosis . Marcion ' s object , mistaken as might be his means of obtaining it , was the restoration of pure and primitive Christianity from the dregs of tradition . Neander says , he was the first of the Protestants who may thus date their origin from the high antiquity of the second century . Marcion was originally , it seems probable , a heathen ; though his father had become a
Untitled Article
572 On the Influence of the
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 572, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/60/
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