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 men to remove them. He could only direct attention to the evil; he could bring no new spirit, no new organisation which might tend to check it.

So there grew up a distinct feeling of opposition to the Church, an opposition which found expression through a body of heretics difficult at the present day to understand—heretics who bear divers names and whom it is hard to bring under any common term, but who may all be said to have been revivers of the old Manichean system, and to have believed in two opposed principles at work in the world. Having destroyed the fundamental belief in the unity of God, they naturally passed on to divide the world into two parts, to draw an entire opposition between matter and spirit, to regard the human body and all that was concerned with it as being inherently evil, and consequently to set up a strange asceticism which threatened the foundations of religion and society alike. This body of heretics was divided into two strongly marked classes; the Cathari professing beliefs which they kept secret, and which were really destructive of the unity of God, and led to asceticism through their affirmation of the inherent evil of matter; and the Waldenses, poor men who protested against prevalent evils, and set forth the necessity of going behind authority in search of greater purity of belief. These heretics became almost entire masters of what was then the chief and most progressive population of Europe—the commercial towns that were springing up in Northern Italy and in the south of France. To a statesman taking a survey of the conditions of those times, it would seem most probable that the new