hrough the century
that followed the physical departure of the Christ, the spirit of mystic
devotion that sought the exstasis, the vision of and the union with the
Divine, while the later great Apostle, S. Paul, represented the wisdom
side of the Mysteries.

The Master did not forget His promise to come to them after the world
had lost sight of Him,[167] and for something over fifty years He
visited them in His subtle spiritual body, continuing the teachings He
had begun while with them, and training them in a knowledge of occult
truths. They lived together, for the most part, in a retired spot on the
outskirts of Judaea, attracting no attention among the many apparently
similar communities of the time, studying the profound truths He taught
them and acquiring "the gifts of the Spirit."

These inner instructions, commenced during His physical life among them
and carried on after He had left the body, formed the basis of the
"Mysteries of Jesus," which we have seen in early Church History, and
gave the inner life which was the nucleus round which gathered the
heterogeneous materials which formed ecclesiastical Christianity.

In the remarkable fragment called the _Pistis Sophia_, we have a
document of the greatest interest bearing on the hidden teaching,
written by the famous Valentinus. In this it is said that during the
eleven years immediately after His death Jesus instructed His disciples
so far as "the regions of the first statutes only, and up to the regions
of the first mystery, the mystery within the veil."[168] They had not so
far learned the distribution of the angelic orders, of part whereof
Ignatius speaks.[169] Then Jesus, being "in the Mount" with His
disciples, and having received His mystic Vesture, the knowledge of all
the regions and the Words of Power which unlocked them, taught His
disciples further, promising: "I will perfect you in every perfection,
from the mysteries of the interior to the mysteries of the exterior: I
will fill you with the Spirit, so that ye shall be called spiritual,
perfect in all perfections."[170] And He taught them of Sophia, the
Wisdom, and of her fall into matter in her attempt to rise unto the
Highest, and of her cries to the Light in which she had trusted, and of
the sending of Jesus to redeem her from chaos, and of her crowning with
His light, and leading forth from bondage. And He told them further of
the highest Mystery the ineffable, the simplest and clearest of all,