They live no longer in the faith of reason.
—Coleridge.
[82] There is, of course, no novelty in these ideas, which are merely a recrudescence and restatement of the notions to which Plutarch thus alludes:—
“We shall also get our hands on the dull crowd, who take pleasure in associating the ideas about these gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of corn and sowings and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the sown corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout.... They should take very good heed, and be apprehensive lest unwittingly they write off the sacred mysteries and dissolve them into winds and streams and sowings and ploughings and passions of earth and changes of seasons.”
[83] “The Gnostic movement began long before the Christian era (what its original historical impulse was we do not know), and only one aspect of it, and that from a strictly limited point of view, has been treated by ecclesiastical historians.”—Lamplugh, Rev. F., The Gnosis of the Light, 1918, p. 10.
[84] Holmes, Rice, Ancient Britain, p. 295.
[85] Ibid., p. 373.