had a wonderful fascination for men, while on the Christian side the whirlwind of persecution had not for a long time blown its purifying breeze. The catacombs, too, afford some evidences of a mode of respect for the departed that was borrowed from heathen practices, but these on the whole are wonderfully free from traces of superstition. § 40. THE MONTANIST REFORMATION.[108] Earnest and strict as the moral, religious and ascetical requirements of the church of the 2nd and 3rd centuries generally were in regard to the life and morals of its members, and rigidly as these principles were carried out in its penitential discipline, there yet appeared even at this early date, in consequence of various instances of the relaxation of such strictness, certain eager spirits who clamoured for a restoration or even an intensification of the earlier rules of discipline. Such a movement secured for itself a footing about the middle of the 2nd century in Montanism, a growth of Phrygian soil, which without traversing in any way the doctrine of the church, undertook a thorough reformation of the ecclesiastical constitution on the practical side. Montanism, in opposition to the eclecticism of heretical Gnosticism, showed the attitude of Christianity to heathenism to be exclusive; against the spiritualizing and allegorizing tendencies of the church Gnosticism it opposed the realism and literalism of the doctrines and facts of the scripture revelation; against what seemed the excessive secularization of the church it presented a model of church discipline such as the nearness of the Lord’s coming demanded; against hierarchical tendencies that were always being more and more emphasized it maintained the rights of the laity and the membership of the church; while in order to secure the establishment of all these reforms it proclaimed that a prophetically inspired spiritual church had succeeded to Apostolic Christianity.