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Rh views and carrying on such practices as are here described were persecuted by the Greek Church. In many respects their position resembles that of the iconoclastic emperors, some of whom came from the neighbourhood of the Paulicians and may have been influenced by them. Ancient Oriental Baptists, these people were in many respects Protestants before Protestantism. They held to a simple spiritual conception of Christianity, to a democratic Church order, and to an unorthodox view of the nature of Christ. A dogmatic, hierarchical, ritualistic, superstitious Church could not possibly tolerate them. Their fiercest enemies were the monks, of whom they had no good opinion. They said that the devil's favourite disguise was the appearance of a monk.

The first leader of the Paulicians known to us, commonly regarded as their founder, was Constantine, who came from the village of Mananalis, not far from the cataract of the Euphrates mentioned by Pliny. Like so many other great leaders of religion he received his first impulse from Scripture. A deacon coming home from Syria, where he had been held captive by the Saracens, was hospitably entertained by Constantine, in return for which kindness he gave his host two volumes, one containing the Gospels and the other St. Paul's Epistles. Constantine eagerly devoured them, and they lit in him the fire of missionary enthusiasm. Especially interested in St. Paul, he adopted the name of the apostle's companion Silvanus, started on a tour of preaching about the year 657, and continued his work for some twenty-seven years. Going up the course of the Euphrates, he crossed the great barrier of the Taurus and carried his gospel into more western regions of Asia Minor. He had now left the tolerant rule of the caliphate, which in so far as it gave liberty to the Christians did not trouble itself to distinguish between the sects, regarding orthodoxy and heresy with equal contempt, and he had come within the bounds both of the empire and of the Church. There his success in founding churches of his own persuasion, which he named after St. Paul's churches, was so great that the Emperor Constantine