When we meet such people, whatever the proximate origin of their particular tenets, we take farewell with a tear and perhaps with a sigh. The Dukhobortsy, of whom I have spoken, would find much in the manual of these Armenian adoptionists with which those resolute children of the Reformation in Europe would cordially agree. Traces of adoptionism are to be found in the teaching of St. Gregory himself and in the early institutions of the Armenian State Church. We must regret that what is probably the earliest source for our knowledge of that teaching has not yet been translated into one of our Western tongues. [191] In one passage the saint instructs us that the Spirit, coming down at the Baptism, gave to Jesus the glory which became His. John the Baptist is represented as the depositary of the Divine favours conferred of old upon Israel; and it was he who conferred these favours--priesthood, prophecy and kingship--upon our Lord Jesus Christ. [192] It is, I think, scarcely fair to argue from such passages that the Christianity of Gregory was, as a whole, of an adoptionist type. But it is interesting to remember in this connection that the Armenians celebrate the birth and the baptism of Christ upon one and the same day, the 6th of January. And we may perhaps be surprised to read that in the canons of St. Sahak, one of the pillars of the early State Church (390-439), the feast of the birth of Christ is not included in the list of festivals which are formulated in some detail. [193] We know that St. Gregory himself brought to Armenia with great pomp certain relics of St. John the Baptist; and the number of monasteries in Armenia which are dedicated to the hermit on the Jordan testify to the peculiar veneration in which he has been held. But the influence of orthodoxy in the West must early have restrained these adoptionist tendencies; and it is not improbable that they became identified with that stubborn heresy of their native land which is often mentioned and deplored by Armenian writers. [194] There are reasons for supposing that the Messalianism (meteslenuthium) against which is directed a cruel canon of the Armenian Council of Shahapivan, convened in about the middle of the fifth century, was in effect a manifestation of this native heresy, and was identical with the Paulicianism which was specifically stigmatised by a canon of the Council held in Dvin (valley of the Araxes) in the year 719. The first of these synods enacted that priests convicted of Messalianism should be branded on the forehead with the figure of a fox. This particular punishment was the same which was meted out to the Paulicians of Armenia during the persecutions of the eleventh century. The Council of Dvin forbade all intercourse with members of this sect under pain of heavy punishments. The pontiff of the day, John the Philosopher, composed a tract against them, in which he speaks of them as dregs of the incestuous flock of the Paulicians, and informs us that they had