{"collection":"Gnosticism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/gno/th2/th216.htm","path":"gno/th2/th216.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/gno/th2/th216.htm","text":"Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 2, by G.R.S. Mead, [1906]\nThere is little to be said about this powerful appeal to cease from the drunkenness of physical sensations and to awaken to the Light.\nReitzenstein (p. 194) calls it a \u201cProphetenpredigt\u201d and says that nowhere in the MSS. is it ascribed to Hermes; by which he can only mean that it bears no other superscription than the descriptive sentence which heads it.\nThe style and spirit remind us not so much of C. H., iii. (iv.), as Reitzenstein (p. 206, 1) suggests, as of the interpolated or superadded passages in the \u201cP\u0153mandres\u201d treatise (\u00a7 27):\n\u201cO ye people, earthborn folk, ye who have given yourselves to drunkenness, and sleep, and ignorance, be sober now, cease from your surfeit, cease to be glamoured by irrational sleep!\u201d\nDid this sentence give rise to our little sermon; or is the sentence a summary of the preaching? Or do both sentence and sermon come from a common stock?\nThe last hypothesis seems to be the most satisfactory choice; and we may compare what would appear to be a familiar figure of speech among such communities with logion 3 of the First Oxyrhynchus Fragment:\n\u201cJesus saith: I stood in the midst of the world (\u03c4\u03bf\u1fe6 \u03ba\u03cc\u03c3\u03bc\u03bf\u03c5), and in the flesh did I appear unto them; and I found all men drunken, and none found I athirst among them; and my soul grieveth over the souls of\nmen, because they are blind in their heart and see not . . .\u201d\nCan we fill up the missing word from our sermon?\n\u201cBut sober all they gaze with their hearts\u2019 eyes on Him who willeth to be seen.\u201d\nThe missing word seems, therefore, to be \u201cGod.\u201d\nThe Gospel that is preached is the Beauty of the Gnosis,\u2014\u201cthe Beauty of the Truth and Good that dwells therein\u201d; just as in C. H., i. 27:\n\u201cAnd I began to preach to men the Beauty of Devotion and of the Gnosis.\u201d\nThe tempest-tossed on the Sea of Ignorance are to make for the Harbour of Salvation\u2014evidently some great organization devoted to the holy life; therein they must seek for one who knows, who can take them by the hand and lead them unto the Gates of the Gnosis.\nThis suggests that the organization consisted of a general body, within which were grades of instruction; the many were striving for illumination, some few had reached it.","title":"Thrice-Greatest Hermes, Vol. 2: I. Corpus Hermeticum: Commentary","type":"page"}