Nor was this the only struggle. A wild shepherd lad named Vigilantius, born among the Pyrenean valleys, was fortunate enough to be the slave of St. Sulpicius Severus, whose wealth, culture, talents, and piety rendered him prominent throughout Southern Gaul. The earnest character of the slave attracted the attention of the master; education developed his powers; he was manumitted, and the people of his native Calagurris choose him for their priest. Sent by Sulpicius as bearer of letters to his friends St. Paulinus at Nola, and St. Jerome in his Bethlehem retreat, Vigilantius had the opportunity of comparing the simple Christianity of his native mountains with the splendid pageantry of Rome, the elegant retirement of Nola, and the heated controversialism which agitated the asceticism of Bethlehem. Notwithstanding the cordiality of their first acquaintance, his residence with Jerome was short. Both were too earnestly dogmatic in their natures for harmony to exist between the primitive Cantabrian shepherd and the fierce apostle of Buddhist and Mazdean Christianity, who devoted his life to reconciling the doctrines of the Latin church with the practices of Manichæism. Brief friendship ended in a quarrel, and Vigilantius extended his experiences by a survey of Egypt, where the vast hordes of Nitrian anchorites were involved in civil strife over the question of Origenism. Returning through Italy, he tarried in Milan and among the Alps, where he found the solution of his doubts and the realization of his ideas in the teaching of Jovinian. He had left Gaul a disciple; he returned to it a missionary, prepared to do battle with sacerdotalism in all its forms. Not only did he deny the necessity of celibacy, but he pronounced it to be the fertile source of impurity, and in his zeal for reform he swept away fasting and maceration, he ridiculed the adoration of relics, and pronounced the miracles wrought at their altars to be the work of demons; he objected to the candles and incense around the shrines, to prayers for the dead, and to the oblations of the faithful.[126]