I hasten to add that the Manicheans, following the little-known Gnostics, made matter the evil principle in Nature, as opposed to spirit, the principle of good. We have seen that it had come originally from the East. Manes himself, away back in the third century, had been a Mesopotamian, and in the fourth century his disciples seem to have been widely distributed from Persia to the Atlantic. They were hated. “Manicheans and Mathematicians (i.e., sorcerers) were alone excepted from the general toleration of Valentinian, in the fourth century.”[14] They reappear, under the name of Paulicians, in the East Roman Empire, during the tenth century, and thence passed into Bulgaria. Later, in Western Europe, they were often known as Bulgars, “Bougres,” or “Buggers.” From Bulgaria they spread westward into what is now Bosnia, and from Bosnia westward again into Northern Italy. By the middle of the eleventh century they were numerous and influential throughout Lombardy and especially in Milan. Lea suggests that without the impulse these people gave to extreme asceticism, and especially their contempt for marriage, Pope Gregory VII would not have been able to get his decrees forbidding the marriage of priests obeyed in Northern Italy. “Vernon Lee”[15] gives ... “a very curious anecdote, unearthed by the learned ecclesiastical historian Tocco, and consigned in his extremely suggestive book on mediæval heresies. A certain priest of Milan became so revered for his sanctity and learning, and for the marvellous cures he worked, that the people insisted on burying him before the high altar, and resorting to his tomb as to that of a saint. The holy man became even more undoubtedly saintly after his death; and in the face of the miracles which were wrought by his intercession, it became necessary to proceed to his beatification. The Church was about to establish his miraculous sainthood, when, in the official process of collecting the necessary information, it was discovered that the supposed saint was a Manichean heretic, a _Catharus_, a believer in the wicked Demiurgus, the creating Satan, the defeat of the spiritual God, and the uselessness of the coming of Christ. It was quite probable that he had spat upon the crucifix as a symbol of the devil’s triumph; it was quite possible that he had said masses to Satan as the true creator of all matter. Be this as it may, that priest’s half-canonized bones were publicly burnt and their ashes scattered to the wind. The anecdote shows that the Manichean heresies, some ascetic and tender, others brutal and foul, had made their way into the most holy places. And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such