Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/99

Rh 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. 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