Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/98

80 as credentials for the truth of their tenets. The history of these heretics has, however, less interest than some of their peculiarities might seem to promise. What, for instance, can be said of the story told by Rodulph Glaber of a countryman of Vertus near Chalons who had a vision, at its warning put away his wife, went to the church, there destroyed a cross and a picture of the Saviour, and declaimed to the people on the wickedness of paying tithes? It is added that he sustained his assertions by passages from the Bible, while explaining that what the prophets said was in part not to be believed: whence we may gather that he had imbibed some of the special doctrines of the eastern Paulicians, whose loyalty to the New Testament is supposed (though the evidence is conflicting) to have been balanced by their repudiation of the Old. An extreme case like this betrays, with however much exaggeration, the characteristics of medieval heresy, an incongruous mixture of heterogeneous elements, a dualism borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster, ill-compacted with a rationalism that claimed to represent the teaching of saint Paul.

From the first ages of Christianity there had always been a tendency more or less widely operative, to free the religion from its burthen of Jewish principles and traditions. The puritanism of the Hebrew scriptures was exchanged for another puritanism resting upon the idea of the essential evilness of matter. Marcion and Manes at different epochs framed systems of which the uniting principle was the double reign of good and evil. The authority of the prime God was confronted by a restless malignant power whose rule was coëval with the existence of the universe. The opposition of spirit and