g which makes the ideas of sin and responsibility possible.
Matter is the seat of evil, and as long as man stands under the
influence of this matter, he is in the hands of evil and knows no
freedom. Redemption can only reach him through those higher beings of
light, which free man from the power of matter and translate him into
the kingdom of light. According to the Gnostic teaching, Christ is
one of these beings of light; he is one of the highest who appeared on
earth, and is transformed into a mythical, allegorical being, with
his human nature, his sufferings and death completely suppressed. The
redeemed soul is then as a kind of angel, or ideal being, brought in
triumph into the idealistic realm of light as soon as it has purified
itself to the nature of a spirit, by means of penitence, chastisements,
and finally the death of the physical body. Hence the Gnostics attached
little importance to the means of mercy in the Church, to the Bible, or
the sacraments; they allowed the Church teaching to exist as a necessary
conception for the people, but they placed their own teachings far above
it as mysterious or secret teachings. As regards their morals and
mode of life, the Gnostics generally went to extremes. It was due to
Gnosticism that art and science found an entrance into the Church. It
preserved the Church from becoming stereotyped in form; but, built up
entirely on ideas and not on historical facts, it died from its own
hollowness and eccentricity.

We still possess the traces of the Gnostic astrology in a number of
amulets and engraved gems, with the word _Abraxas_ or rather _Abrasax_
and other emblems of their superstition, which they kept as charms
against diseases and evil spirits. The word _Abrasax_ may be translated
_Hurt me not_. To their mystic rites we may trace many of the reproaches
thrown upon Christianity, such as that the Christians worshipped the
head of an ass, using the animal's Koptic name _Eeo_, to represent the
name of IAn, or Jahveh. To the same source we may also trace some of
the peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling
Jesus "the good scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto
un-shapen mud of our bodies;" a thought which seems to have been
borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect's habits; and
perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous
to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word _only begotten_. We
trace th