erved the mysteries of Cybele and Adonis, and celebrated his
magic rites with human victims, intended also, according to Lampridius,
to unite with his horrible superstition "the Jewish and Samaritan
religions and the Christian rite, that so the priesthood of Heliogabalus
might comprise the mystery of every worship." Hence, more or less, the
stories which occur in ecclesiastical history of the conversion or
good-will of the emperors to the Christian faith, of Hadrian, Mammaea,
and others, besides Heliogabalus and Alexander. Such stories might often
mean little more than that they favored it among other forms of oriental
superstition.

What has been said is sufficient to bring before the mind an historical
fact, which indeed does not need evidence. Upon the established
religions of Europe the East had renewed her encroachments, and was
pouring forth a family of rites which in various ways attracted the
attention of the luxurious, the political, the ignorant, the restless,
and the remorseful. Armenian, Chaldee, Egyptian, Jew, Syrian, Phrygian,
as the case might be, was the designation of the new hierophant; and
magic, superstition, barbarism, jugglery, were the names given to his
rite by the world. In this company appeared Christianity. When then
three well-informed writers call Christianity a superstition and a
magical superstition, they were not using words at random, or the
language of abuse, but they were describing it in distinct and
recognized terms as cognate to those gloomy, secret, odious,
disreputable religions which were making so much disturbance up and down
the empire.

The Gnostic family suitably traces its origin to a mixed race, which had
commenced its national history by associating orientalism with
revelation. After the captivity of the ten tribes Samaria was colonized
by "men from Babylon and Cushan, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from
Sepharvaim," who were instructed at their own instance in "the manner of
the God of the land," by one of the priests of the Church of Jeroboam.
The consequence was that "they feared the Lord and served their own
gods." Of this country was Simon, the reputed patriarch of the Gnostics;
and he is introduced in the Acts of the Apostles as professing those
magical powers which were so principal a characteristic of the oriental
mysteries. His heresy, though broken into a multitude of sects, was
poured over the world with a catholicity not inferior in its day to that
of Chr