calls them "the first mendicant Friars."[1] They are said to have believed that prayer drove out the demons as spittle, mucus from the nose, or in the form of a serpent or a sow with a litter of pigs. But probably these absurdities resulted from taking their metaphors literally. A more dangerous and not improbable error was the perfectionism to which they inclined. And yet, like Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection, this may have been a stimulating ideal rather than a vain boast. The first leader of the party was a layman of Mesopotamia named Adelphius. Flavian, the patriarch of Antioch, induced him when an old man to make a confidant of an aged bishop who was really a spy. The Euchite doctrine being thus meanly extracted, Adelphius and his followers were beaten, excommunicated, and banished. From Syria they went to Pamphylia. Condemned over and over again by various local synods, they persisted, and flourished in spite of scorn and hatred. The council of Ephesus confirmed the synod's condemnation of the party, and anathematised a Messalian book called Asceticus. Subsequently the Euchites had a leader named Lampetus, after whom they were sometimes called Lampetians; later still they were called Marcianists, after a leader of the party in the sixth century named Marcian. They lingered on till they mingled with the Bogomiles.[2] In the fourteenth century there was a revival of Euchite ideas and practices among the monks of Mount Athos.
If the charge of immorality—so common in the case of heretics and so generally baseless—was a cruel libel, the only serious objection to these Euchites in the eyes of the modern world would be their idleness. But their slighting the sacraments, to which is to be added the fact that they objected to the choral services of the Church, would be quite enough to account for their condemnation by their contemporaries. We may regard them, however, as simple pietists, in some way allied to Puritanism, in some respects anticipating Quaker views, in some degree approaching the modern devotees of what has been called "the higher life."
- ↑ Church Hist. vol. iii. section iv. i.
- ↑ See p. 225.
