ng provisions of the Hebrew law, as well as those adapted for an
infant and barbarous people. See Hist of Jews, i. 36, 37, &c.--M.]

[Footnote 30: See Beausobre, Hist. du Manicheisme, l. i. c. 4. Origen
and St. Augustin were among the allegorists.]

It has been remarked with more ingenuity than truth, that the virgin
purity of the church was never violated by schism or heresy before the
reign of Trajan or Hadrian, about one hundred years after the death of
Christ. [31] We may observe with much more propriety, that, during that
period, the disciples of the Messiah were indulged in a freer latitude,
both of faith and practice, than has ever been allowed in succeeding
ages. As the terms of communion were insensibly narrowed, and the
spiritual authority of the prevailing party was exercised with
increasing severity, many of its most respectable adherents, who were
called upon to renounce, were provoked to assert their private opinions,
to pursue the consequences of their mistaken principles, and openly to
erect the standard of rebellion against the unity of the church. The
Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the most learned, and
the most wealthy of the Christian name; and that general appellation,
which expressed a superiority of knowledge, was either assumed by their
own pride, or ironically bestowed by the envy of their adversaries. They
were almost without exception of the race of the Gentiles, and their
principal founders seem to have been natives of Syria or Egypt, where
the warmth of the climate disposes both the mind and the body to
indolent and contemplative devotion. The Gnostics blended with the
faith of Christ many sublime but obscure tenets, which they derived from
oriental philosophy, and even from the religion of Zoroaster, concerning
the eternity of matter, the existence of two principles, and the
mysterious hierarchy of the invisible world. [32] As soon as they
launched out into that vast abyss, they delivered themselves to the
guidance of a disordered imagination; and as the paths of error are
various and infinite, the Gnostics were imperceptibly divided into more
than fifty particular sects, [33] of whom the most celebrated appear to
have been the Basilidians, the Valentinians, the Marcionites, and, in a
still later period, the Manichaeans. Each of these sects could boast
of its bishops and congregations, of its doctors and martyrs; [34] and,
instead of the Four Gospels adopted by the church,