i.e., the Valentinians and some other Gnostics. Theodoret, Ep. 145. “Valentinus, and Basilides, and Bardesanes, and Harmonius, and those of their company, allow indeed the Virgin’s conception and the birth, but affirm that God the Word took nothing of the Virgin, but in a manner made Himself a passage through her as through a conduit, and that in manifesting Himself to men He was employing a mere phantom, and only seeming to be a man; as He appeared to Abraham and certain other of the ancients.” S. Epiph. Hær. xxxi. 7. “They affirm that He brought down His body from Heaven, and that as water through a conduit, so He passed through the Virgin Mary taking nothing of His mother’s womb, but having His body from Heaven, as I said before.” Comp. Massuet’s 1st Dissert. prefixed to the Benedictine Irenæus, sec. 73. [Comp. the recovered work of Hippolytus (unknown when the Oxford translation was made), Refutation of all Heresies, Book VI., VII., Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. V. pp. 81 et sqq.—R.]