The Gnostics and Their Remains

that should explain every difficulty by the help of reason and philosophy alone, although destitute of any solid grounds upon which to lay the first foundation of the fabric. Things being in this state, a religion venerable by its antiquity (itself an impenetrable shield against the shafts of infidelity, as even Tacitus concedes: "Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur" Hist. v. 5), possessing a complete system that solved every problem by a professedly divine revelation, totally setting itself above reason and human experience, but proclaiming unquestioning credence as the most meritorious of virtues, such a religion could not but gain the victory over its disorderly and discordant competitors, which had nothing but arguments deduced from probabilities and analogies wherewith to oppose it. The same contest we behold passing under our own eyes; Roman Catholicism with its doctrines overthrown, exploded, rejected by reason, learning, and philosophy, for the space of three centuries, is again rapidly bringing back into her fold her lost sheep, which, having wandered through the tempting ways of Protestantism, and of philosophy or infidelity, however people choose to call it, and unable to discover any reason that will bear the test for standing fast at any ultimate point as the absolute truth, at last return weary and disappointed to whence they started, and find it conducive to peace of mind to accept assertion for demonstration, and the age of a tenet as equivalent to its truth.

There is yet another consideration that is of great importance in the present inquiry, which is the close affinity between the Judaism of this period and Magian, the extent of which will be pointed out in the following sections when we come to speak of the Talmud. Remembering how much of the machinery of the one was borrowed from the other, there is little cause for astonishment at discovering that what are generally considered peculiarly Jewish titles of Deity upon relics, may rather be attributed to a Magian source.

The three circumstances thus briefly adduced--namely, the direct influence of the religion of Zion as a "mystery" of the most venerable antiquity, vying with those of Egypt and of Babylon; its subsequent indirect influence through its offshoots

p. 29