matter, of good and evil, was so fundamental that it was
impossible, in their view, to conceive the incarnation of the
Deity in a human body or his liability to the sufferings
of man: such facts, they held with the primitive docetists,
were illusions to the senses; they were true only in an
ideal acceptation. The same principle forbade their
allowing any spiritual, or at least any perfecting, virtue
to the material act of baptism or to the sacramental
elements of bread and wine. They rejected every emblem
of religious worship, the image, the painted cross, the
reliques of saints. The human soul was deprived of all
accessory aids to salvation, of all that interposed between
spirit and spirit: celibacy, the proof of its conquest over
matter, was the one indispensable condition to eternal
happiness. The schemes of the Manicheans and the
Marcionites came to diverge in the idea of the church.
Manes inaugurated a priestly caste; his theory was sacerdotal: the later Marcionites on the other hand adopted a
congregational system.
From Syria the Marcionites, or as they were afterwards known, the Paulicians, spread over the eastern provinces of Asia Minor. They seem to have absorbed the remnant of the Manicheans; at least they inherited their ill-repute: original differences of doctrine may have been forgotten in community of oppression.[1] They grew strong and resisted, for a while were victorious; it was attempted to break their strength by a policy of transportation, and numbers were carried over at different times into Thrace, where they came to form a powerful and aggressive community. Extending from Bulgaria among the strictly Slavonian populations of Servia and Bosnia, the Bogomiles, as they are now called, appear to have found the
- ↑ In this way it appears possible to reconcile the title usually applied to the heretics of western Europe with their known lineage from the Paulicians whose teaching in regard to the church was plainly opposed to Manichaism: cf. Evans pp. xxxiii, xxxiv. The distinction is pointed out by Mosheim, Instit. Hist, eccles. 312, ed. 2, Helmstadt 1764 quarto; and by Gf rorer 3. 199. See on the whole subject of the history of the sect, Gibbon's fifty-fourth chapter [with Mr. J.B. Bury s notes, and ap- pendix vi.,invol. 6. 540sqq., 1898].
