Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/244

218 the year 800. This book reveals a simple Church order with no hierarchy. There is only one grade of the ministry consisting of the "elect," and the ministers are called indifferently by the various titles of apostle, priest, bishop, elder. Admission to the Church is by baptism, which must be sought voluntarily. Infant baptism is repudiated. There is no idea of original sin; therefore infants do not need baptism. The proper time for baptism is the age of thirty. After his baptism, which should be in a river, the Holy Spirit enters the immersed person. There are three sacraments—repentance, baptism, the body and the blood. The latter, the Eucharist, is taken at night, and not separated from the Agape, which is still preserved. Mariolatry and the intercession of saints are rejected; image worship, the use of crosses, relics, incense, candles, and resorting to sacred springs are all repudiated as idolatrous practices. The idea of purgatory is rejected. The holy year begins with the feast of John the Baptist. January 6th is observed as the festival of the baptism and spiritual rebirth of Jesus. Zatik, or Easter, is kept on the 14th Nisan. We meet with no special Sunday observances, and possibly the Saturday Sabbath was maintained. There is no feast of Christmas or of the Annunciation.

When we come to consider the question of doctrine, we note that the word "Trinity" never appears in the book. Yet it is to be observed that the rite of baptism consists of one immersion followed by the throwing of three handfuls of water over the candidate. The system is not Marcionite, for it has no traces of. On the contrary, it is Adoptionist. The Paulicians have been accused of rejecting the Old Testament. But The Key of Truth shows that this was not actually the case. It contains quotations from the Old Testament, though these are but few, and its chief authority is the New Testament, the whole of which it accepts. The Paulicians have also been accused of the Manichæism of holding that the world was created by Satan. This is a libel, perhaps to be attributed to their denial that Christ created it.

We can well understand why people holding such