state of things, and thus the primitive Christian hope of an early Parousia, though not expressly denied, seemed practically to have been set aside. Hence the Montanist revivalists proclaimed this hope as most certain, giving a guarantee for it by means of a new divine revelation. Similarly too the moral, ascetic and disciplinary rigorism of the Montanist prophecy is to be estimated as a vigorous reaction against the mild practice prevailing in the church with its tendency to make concessions to human weakness, in favour of the strict exercise of church discipline in view of the nearness of the Parousia. Montanism could also justify the reappearance of prophetic gifts among its founders by referring to the historical tradition which from the Apostolic Age (Acts xi. 27 f.; xxi. 9) presented to view a series of famous prophets and prophetesses, endowed with ecstatic visionary powers. The exclusion of Montanism from the Catholic Church could not, therefore, have been occasioned either by its proclaiming an early Parousia or by its rigorism, or finally, even by its prophetic claims, but purely by its doctrine of the Paraclete. Under the pretence of instituting a new and higher stage of revelation, it had really undertaken to correct the moral and religious doctrines of Christ and the Apostles as defective and incomplete, and had thereby proved itself to the representatives of the church to be undoubtedly a pseudo-prophecy. The spiritual pride with which the Montanists proclaimed themselves to be the privileged people of the Holy Spirit, Πνευματικοὶ, _Spirituales_ and characterized the Catholics as, on the contrary, Ψυχικοὶ, _Carnales_, as also the assumption that chose their own obscure Pepuza for the site of the heavenly Jerusalem, and the manifold extravagances committed by their prophets and prophetesses in their ecstatic trances, must have greatly tended to create an aversion to every form of spiritualistic manifestation. The origin of Montanism, the contesting of it and its final expulsion, constitute indeed a highly significant crisis in the historical development of the church, conditioned not so much by a separatistic sectarian tendency, but rather by the struggle of two tendencies existing within the church, in which the tendency represented by Montanism and honestly endeavouring the salvation of the church, went under, while that which was victorious would have put an end to all enthusiasm. The expulsion of Montanism from the church contributed greatly to freeing the church from the reproach so often advanced against it of being a narrow sect, made its consenting to the terms, demands and conditions of everyday life in the world easier, gave a freer course and more powerful impulse to its development in constitution and worship dependent upon these, as well as in the further building up of its