Protestant historians, fearful of claiming relationship with heretics whose views on the Origin of Evil were more logical than their own, have almost or entirely ignored the existence of these Sclavonic Puritans. Yet of all worn-out devices of _ad captandum_ argument this assuredly is the most threadbare, to ignore the transitions of intervening links, and pointing to the extremes of a long concatenation of causes and effects, to seize upon their differences as a proof of disconnection. In the course of ages the development of creeds and churches is not less striking than that of more secular institutions. Bogomilism obeyed an universal law; it paid the universal tribute of successful propagandism; it compromised; or, where it did not compromise, it was ruthlessly stamped out. The Manichæan elements, most distasteful to modern Protestants, were in fact the first to disappear.[74] In its contact with the semi-pagan Christianity of the West, the puritanism of the Gnostic East became, perforce, materialized; just as, ages before, Christianity itself, an earlier wave of the same Eastern puritanism had materialized in its contact with the undiluted heathendom of the Western empire. To a certain extent Bogomilism gained. It lost something of its dreamy transcendentalism, something of its anti-human vigour, and by conforming to the exigencies of Western society, became to a certain extent more practical. Thus by the sixteenth century the path had been cleared for a compromise with orthodoxy itself. The Reformation marks the confluence of the two main currents of religious thought that traverse the middle ages, in their several sources, Romish and Armenian. No doubt, from the orthodox side, which refused to reject all that was beautiful in the older world, which consecrated Greco-Roman civilization and linked art with religion, the West has gained much; but in days of gross materialism and degrading sacerdotalism, it has gained perhaps even more from the purging and elevating influence of these early Puritans. The most devout Protestant need not be afraid to acknowledge the religious obligations which he owes to his spiritual forefathers, Manichæan though they were; while those who perceive in Protestantism itself nothing more than a stepping-stone to still greater freedom of the human mind, and who recognize the universal bearings of the doctrine of Evolution, will be slow to deny that England herself and the most enlightened countries of the modern world may owe a debt, which it is hard to estimate, to the Bogomiles of Bulgaria and Bosnia.