The system of Basilides was, like the system of ancient Egypt, and like that of the Japanese Shingon, dualistic. It represented two Worlds (buthos and zue), the World of Light and the World of Darkness. The former--like the glaring noon of an Egyptian summer's day--was still, immovable, fixed, the world of permanent ideas; the other, like the streets that are filled with life at sunset, is the world of motion, of birth, of death--in short, the world of Nature.

In the centre of the World of Light--the Diamond-World (Kongo Kai), as the Shingon well calls it, to denote its fixed and permanent nature--the Egyptians placed God, the unknown I AM, whose name the priests of Pharaoh would not pronounce. The Gnostics called him Pater Innatus; in the Japanese Shingon it is Roshana, the Buddha of Light, Eternal. From that central and eternal Deity emanate, or proceed, four Beings--Eons in Gnosticism, Buddhas in the Shingon--who surround the central God on the Four Quarters. The Gnostics termed

them Logos, Phronesis, Sophia, Dynamis. The Shingon personifies them as Ashuku, Hosho, Amida, Fukujoju; but it treats Ashuku as representing that reason (logos) by which a man is capable of faith, Hosho as the sense (fronesis) which enables a man to regulate his conduct, Amida as the Wisdom (sofia) which enables a man to understand and explain the divine laws, and Fukujoju as the practical power which manifests itself in salvation (dunamis).

Emanating from this central God, with his four modes of manifestation, we have, in the Gnostic system, a number of minor Aeons and other mysterious beings, evidently borrowed from the gods of Egypt. They numbered 365, which number written in Greek numerals spelled the word Abraxas or Abrasax, and this name was consequently given by the Basilidean and other Gnostics to the Deity,

as a whole; not to the central Pater Innatus of the World of Light, but to the whole fulness or pleroma made up of all the Aeons within that world. It is evidently in opposition to this splitting up of the Godhead amongst many minor and unsubstantial beings that St. Paul insists that there is but one God, the Father, one Lord (and not four)--and that in that one Lord dwells the whole Pleroma of the Godhead in a bodily manner. St. Paul scarcely seems to be conscious of the gods of Greece and Rome; he never speaks against the great goddess of Ephesine superstition. He is keenly alive to the dangers which may beset the Faith which he is commissioned to preach from Gnostic foes disguised as friends.