Yet another way was open to the convinced Marcionite who could not bring himself to reject Marcion’s view that the true purport of Jesus’ teaching had been obscured by the additions of Judaizing apostles. The sect of the followers of Manes, who began to show themselves in the Western part of the Roman Empire shortly before Constantine’s conversion, professed a dualism more uncompromising than any that Marcion had taught, and coupled with it an organization so skilful and effective that it was able for some ten centuries longer to defy the efforts of the rest of Christendom for its suppression. In its division of all Manichaeans into the two great classes of Perfect and Hearers it drew very close to Marcionite practice; and the liberty which it allowed the Hearers of outwardly professing any faith they pleased must have enabled the Marcionite who joined it to keep those articles of his former creed most dear to him without coming into violent collision with either Church or State. Hence the tradition seems well founded which asserts that the majority of those Marcionites, who did not become reconciled with the Catholic Church after Constantine’s alliance with it, joined the ranks of the Manichaeans, and so ceased to exist as a separate community[765]. The direct influence of Marcion’s teaching upon that of the Catholic Church was probably very small. In spite of the efforts of recent writers to maintain the contrary[766], it is difficult to see that this first attempt, honest and sincere as it undoubtedly was, at the reformation of Christianity ever bore fruit of lasting value. Its main principle which, as we have seen, was the rejection of the Jewish scriptures and their bearing upon the Mission of Jesus, has been ignored, since Marcion’s death as in his lifetime, by every other Church and sect professing Christian doctrines. His common-sense view, that the words of the Christian Bible must mean what their authors and their contemporaries would have naturally taken them to mean, and do not for the most part contain any deeply hidden or allegorical significance, was in like manner repudiated by the whole of Christendom, which, up to the latter part of the XIXth century, continued to construe the greater part of its sacred books by trope and figure[767]. There remains then only the asceticism and austerity that Marcion practised which the orthodox could have borrowed from him. But, we have seen that the religious abstinence from procreation, and from the use of meat and wine, can be traced back to the appearance of Orphism in Greece some five hundred years before the Birth of Christ; and if the Christian Church adopted, as it partly did, these practices in a modified form, it was by way of inheritance from a source which was much nearer to it than Marcion’s heresy. That many of Marcion’s ideas have been revived in our own day is likely enough, and this opinion has been put forward with much skill and