A like analogy is to be seen in the practices of the Marcionite churches, so far at any rate as we may trust to the reports of their orthodox opponents. True, as it would seem, to his conviction of the complete failure of the scheme of the Demiurge, Marcion set his face even more sternly than our own Puritans of Cromwell’s time against anything that should look like enjoyment of the things of this world[740]. His followers were enjoined to eat no meat, to abstain from wine even in the Eucharist, which in the Marcionite churches was celebrated with water, and to observe perpetually the strictest continence[741]. The Sabbath was kept by them as a fast and, although this may look like an obedience to Jewish custom, Epiphanius, who is our sole authority for the observance, tells us that Marcion expressly rejected this attribution[742]. Virginity was, according to him, the only state of life for the true Christian; and although he freely baptized unmarried men and eunuchs, he refused baptism to married persons, as has been said, until they were divorced or on the point of death[743]. To the enticements of the circus, the gladiatorial shows, and the theatre, the Marcionites used, according to Tertullian, to return the answer “God forbid!”; and they made the same reply, he tells us, when invited to save their lives in time of persecution by sacrificing a few grains of incense to the genius of the Emperor[744]. The reason of all this austerity was apparently their contempt for the kingdom of the Demiurge and their resolve to do nothing to prolong his rule. Of the spread of the Marcionite heresy we have very little more information than that given above. Prof. Harnack thinks 150-190 A.D. was the “golden age of the Marcionites[745],” but Tertullian evidently considered that some thirty years after the last of these dates they were nearly as numerous as the Valentinians, whom he speaks of as the largest sect of heretics[746]. An inscription found in a Syrian village refers to a “synagogue” of Marcionites occupying a site there in 318 A.D.[747], which is, as has been remarked, older than the earliest dated inscription of the Catholic Church. Theodoret, too, about 440 A.D., boasts of having converted more than a thousand of them, a statement which afterwards swells into eight villages and supposes that they were pretty thickly clustered together[748]. Yet they must have led a miserable existence, being persecuted by the Imperial authorities and their Christian brethren at once, and it is not to be wondered at that Marcion himself addresses some followers in a letter quoted by Tertullian as “my partners in hate and wretchedness[749].” It speaks volumes for their faith that they continued to hold it in spite of everything.