Under his leadership the Donatists rapidly increased in numbers. They were schismatics rather than heretics. They had no great distinctive tenet; what they seem to have insisted upon chiefly was absolute purity within the Church and freedom from worldly taint. That was their ideal, as it has been the ideal of many other wild sectaries since their day. They claimed special revelations of the Divine Will; they insisted upon rebaptising their converts, compelling even holy virgins to take fresh vows on joining their communion, which they boasted was that of the one true Church. Such a sect naturally attracted to itself all the fanatical extremists of Africa and all those who had any grievance against the Catholic authorities. It became the refuge of the revolutionary, the bankrupt, and the criminal, and thus, inside the Donatist movement proper, there grew up a kind of anarchist movement against property, which had little or no connection with religious principles. Constantine, during the remainder of his reign, practically ignored the African Church. He had done what he could and he wiped his hands of it. There soon arose an extravagant sect which took the name of Circumcelliones, from their practice of begging food from cell to cell, or cottage to cottage. They renounced the ordinary routine of daily life. Forming themselves into bands, and styling themselves the Champions of the Lord (ἀγωνιστικόι), they roamed through the countryside, which they kept in a state of abject terror. St. Augustine, in a well-known passage, declares that when their shout of “Praise be to God!” was heard, it was more dreaded than the roar of a lion. They were armed with wooden clubs, which they named “Israels,” and these they did not scruple to use upon the Catholics, whose churches they entered and plundered, committing the most violent excesses, though they were pledged to celibacy. Gibbon justly compares them to the Camisards of Languedoc at the commencement of the 18th century, and others have likened them to the Syrian Assassins at the time of the Crusades and the Jewish Sicarii of Palestine during the first century of the Christian era. They formed, it seems, a sort of Christian Jacquerie, possessed in their wilder moments with a frantic passion for martyrdom and imploring those whom they met to kill them. The best of them were fit only for a madhouse; the worst were fit only for a gaol. Probably they had little connection with the respectable Donatists in the cities, whose organisation was precisely the same as that of the Catholics, and their operations were mainly restricted to the thinly populated districts on the borders of the desert.