although their trinitarian orthodoxy could not be questioned, was pronounced to be like heretical baptism null, because administered _extra ecclesiam_, and a second baptism declared necessary on admission to the Catholic church. And although at the Council of Nicæa in A.D. 325 and of Constantinople in A.D. 381, the validity of heretics’ baptism was admitted if given orderly in the name of the Holy Trinity, the baptism of the Montanists was excluded because it was thought that the Paraclete of Montanism could not be recognised as the Holy Spirit of the church.--Already in the time of Constantine the Great the Montanists were spreading out from Phrygia over all the neighbouring provinces, and were called from the place where they originated Κατάφρυγες and Pepuziani. The Emperor now forbade them holding any public assemblies for worship and ordered that all places for public service should be taken from them and given over to the Catholic church. Far stricter laws than even these were enforced against them by later emperors down to the 5th century, _e.g._ prohibition of all Montanist writings, deprivation of almost all civil rights, banishment of their clergy to the mines, etc. Thus they could only prolong a miserable existence in secret, and by the beginning of the sixth century every trace of them had disappeared. § 40.2. =Montanism at Rome.=--The movement called forth by Montanism in the East spread by and by also into the West. When the first news reached Gaul of the synodal proceedings in Asia Minor that had rent the church, the Confessors imprisoned at Lyons and Vienne during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius, of whom more than one belonged to a colony that had emigrated from Phrygia to Gaul, were displeased, and, along with their report of the persecution they had endured (§ 32, 8), addressed a letter to those of Asia Minor, not given by Eusebius, but reckoned pious and orthodox, exhorting to peace and the preservation of unity. At the same time (A.D. 177) they sent the Presbyter Irenæus to Rome in order to win from Bishop Eleutherus (A.D. 174-189), who was opposed to Montanism, a mild and pacific sentence. Owing, however, to the arrival of Praxeas, a Confessor of Asia Minor and a bitter opponent of Montanism, a formal condemnation was at last obtained (§ 33, 4). Tertullian relates that the Roman bishop, at the instigation of Praxeas, revoked the letters of peace which had been already prepared in opposition to his predecessors. It is matter of controversy whether by this unnamed bishop Eleutherus is meant, who then was first inclined to a peaceable decision by Irenæus and thereafter by the picture of Montanist extravagances given by Praxeas was led again to form another opinion; or that it was, what seems from the chronological references most probable, his successor Victor (A.D. 189-199), in