The Phrygian mountaineer, Montanus, furnishes the earliest example, and a very striking one, of this enthusiastic or prophetic kind of mysticism. He and his followers had been cradled in the fiercest and most frantic superstitions of heathendom. Terrible was Cybele, the mountain mother, throned among the misty fastnesses of Ida. Maddest uproar echoed through the glens on her great days of festival. There is beating of drum and timbrel, clashing of cymbals, shrill crying of pipes; incessant the mournful sound of barbarous horns; loud, above all, the groans and shrieks and yells from frenzied votaries whom the goddess has possessed. They toss their heads; they leap; they whirl; they wallow convulsed upon the rocks, cutting themselves with knives; they brandish, they hurl their weapons; their worship is a foaming, raving, rushing to-and-fro, till the driving deity flings them down exhausted, senseless. Among these demoniacs—_sanguine fleti, Terrificas capitum quatientes numine cristas_, as Lucretius has described them—these Corybantes, or head-tossers, Christianity made its way, exorcising a legion of evil spirits. But the enthusiastic temperament was not expelled. These wild men, become Christians, carried much of the old fervour into the new faith. Violent excitement, ecstatic transport, oracular utterance, were to them the dazzling signs of the divine victory—of the forcible dislodgment of the power of Darkness by the power of Light. So Montanus readily believes, and finds numbers to believe, that he is the subject of a divine possession. Against the bloodthirsty mob in the villages and towns—against a Marcus Aurelius, ordaining massacre from the high places of the Cæsars—had not God armed his own with gifts beyond the common measure—with rapture—with vision—with prophecy? Yes! the promised Paraclete was indeed among them, and it was not they, but He, who spake. So thought the Montanists, as they announced new precepts to the Church; as they foretold the gathering judgment of Antichrist and the dawning triumph of the saints; as they hastened forth, defiant and sublime, to provoke from their persecutors the martyr’s crown. Let us not overlook the real heroism of these men, while touching on their errors. But their conception of the Church of Christ, so analogous, in many respects, to that of the early Quakers—was it the right one? According to Montanus, the Church was to be maintained in the world by a succession of miraculous interventions. From time to time, fresh outpourings of the Spirit would inspire fresh companies of prophets to ordain ritual, to confute heresy, to organize and modify the Church according to the changing necessities of each period. He denied that the Scripture was an adequate source, whence to draw the refutation of error and the new supplies of truth demanded by the exigencies of the future. As Romanism sets up an infallible Pope to decide concerning truth, and in fact to supplement revelation, as the