But it stood to reason that the great bulk of the Bogomilian flock could never attain to this higher standard. In the abstract, no doubt, the simple ‘believer’ accepted the doctrine which his spiritual guides were careful to instil into him, that his soul was an angel fallen from above and fettered in the prison-house of his body, and that only by perpetual mortification of the flesh could he hope to set the celestial captive free at last. But the laws of nature and society are perpetually holding back religious extravagance from its logical consequences, and the simple ‘believer’ was content to govern himself by the more ordinary standard of mankind. As in Provence and Italy, so in Bosnia, he dispensed himself from the prohibition against drinking wine; and though the ‘perfect’ refused to bear arms and preached against war as devilish, the mass of the heretics, Sclavonic as well as Romance, showed that on occasion they could measure swords with the most orthodox. Though marriage was contrary to their tenets, the Bogomiles took wives, the man, however, in Bosnia only taking the woman on the condition that she was good and true to him, reserving the right of dismissing her if he thought her conduct unsatisfactory; an arrangement productive of laxity, and giving occasion to the orthodox adversary of which he was not slow to take advantage.[32] Yet, though in his manner of life falling short of the extreme asceticism of ‘the perfect,’ the ordinary Bogomile, on the showing of his enemies themselves, distinguished himself by his superior industry and thrift, and put to shame the saintly idleness of more orthodox professors by refusing to neglect his work on feast-days. Among the Bogomiles, beggars were looked on with contempt.[33] The ‘perfect’ themselves abhorred what was slothful in a monastic life, and the ‘heresiarch’ Basil set a good example by earning his living as a doctor. The simple believer devoted part of the worldly goods thus acquired to the relief of sick and indigent brothers, and also to the support of Gospellers among unbelievers, but neither his industry nor his good works could satisfy his conscience. The higher life of the ‘perfect’ was a perpetual reproach to him. His soul seemed clotted with the contagion of a too sensual existence, nor did his theology allow him a purgatory for the imbodied and imbruted spirit. Standing on the threshold of another world, and forced to choose between heaven and hell, the simple ‘believer’ considered it essential to his salvation that he should be admitted into the ranks of the ‘perfect’ by a death-bed ceremony of initiation, which reappears as _la Convenenza_ among the more Western Patarenes of Italy and Provence.