Its rise may be traced in a few words. Northern Africa had long been the home of a perfervid religious fanaticism. Montanism and Novatianism had found there their most violent adherents, to whom there was something peculiarly attractive in extravagant protest against the laxity or the liberalism of the Church elsewhere, and in emphatic insistence on the narrowness of the way which leads to salvation. Those who set up the most impossible standard of attainment; those who demanded from the Christian the most absolute spotlessness of life; those who insisted most strenuously on the enormity of sin and made fewest allowances for the weakness of humanity—these were surest of being heard most gladly in northern Africa. During the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian many of the African Christians had ostentatiously courted martyrdom. According to Catholic authors, such martyrdom had been sought not only by saints, but by men of immoral and dissolute life, who thought to purge the stains of a sinful career by dying in the odour of sanctity. Others, again, while not prepared to die for the faith, were not unwilling to suffer imprisonment for it, inasmuch as their fellow-Christians looked well after the creature comforts of those who languished in gaol. Mensurius, Bishop of Carthage and Primate of Africa, strongly disapproved of these proceedings. He discountenanced the fanaticism, which he knew to be the besetting weakness of his people; refused to recognise as martyrs those who had provoked death; and checked, as far as possible, the indiscriminate charity of his flock. If his critics are to be believed, Mensurius had resort to a trick in order to save the Holy Books of his own cathedral and thus escape the choice of being a _traditor_ or of suffering for conscience’ sake. It was said that when the officers of the civil power demanded the Holy Books in his keeping, he handed over to them a number of heretical volumes, which were at once burnt, while the Sacred Scriptures were carefully concealed. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Mensurius was charged with actual persecution of those Christians who had a sterner sense of duty than himself.