those who had departed this life before His advent? "For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness: His countenance beholdeth uprightness."[1] "But he that loveth wickedness hateth his own soul."[2]
If, then, in the deluge all sinful flesh perished, punishment having been inflicted on them for correction, we must first believe that the will of God, which is disciplinary and beneficent,[3] saves those who turn to Him. Then, too, the more subtle substance, the soul, could never receive any injury from the grosser element of water, its subtle and simple nature rendering it impalpable, called as it is incorporeal. But whatever is gross, made so in consequence of sin, this is cast away along with the carnal spirit which lusts against the soul.
Now also Valentinus, the Coryphæus of those who herald community, in his book on The Intercourse of Friends, writes in these words: "Many of the things that are written, though in common books, are found written in the church of God. For those sayings which proceed from the heart are vain. For the law written in the heart is the People[4] of the Beloved—loved and loving Him." For whether it be the Jewish writings or those of the philosophers that he calls "the Common Books," he makes the truth common. And Isidore, at once son and disciple to Basilides, in the first book of the Expositions of the Prophet Parchor, writes also in these words: "The Attics say that certain things were intimated to Socrates, in consequence of a dæmon attending on him. And Aristotle says that all men are provided with dæmons, that attend on them during the time they are in the body,—having taken this piece of prophetic instruction and transferred it to his own books, without acknowledging whence he had abstracted this statement." And again, in the second book of his work, he thus writes: "And let no one think that what we say is peculiar to the elect, was said before by any philosophers. For it is not a discovery of theirs. For having
