In this way did the Manichaeans become the Bolshevists of the Middle Ages. Of course I do not use the latter name as indicating membership in a certain well-defined political party which a few years ago established itself as the dominant factor in the old Russian Empire. I refer to a vague and ill-defined term of abuse which people nowadays bestow upon all their personal enemies from the landlord who comes to collect the rent down to the elevator boy who neglects to stop at the right floor. A Manichaean, to a medieval super-Christian, was a most objectionable person. But as he could not very well try him upon any positive charges, he condemned him upon hearsay, a method which has certain unmistakable advantages over the less spectacular and infinitely slower procedure followed by the regular courts of law but which sometimes suffers from a lack of accuracy and is responsible for a great many judicial murders. What made this all the more reprehensible in the case of the poor Manichaeans was the fact that the founder of the original sect, a Persian by the name of Mani, had been the very incarnation of benevolence and charity. He was an historical figure and was born during the first quarter of the third century in the town of Ecbatana where his father, Patak, was a man of considerable wealth and influence. He was educated in Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris, and spent the years of his youth in a community as international, as polyglot, as pious, as godless, as material and as idealistically-spiritual as the New York of our own day. Every heresy, every religion, every schism, every sect of east and west and south and north had its followers among the crowds that visited the great commercial centers of Mesopotamia. Mani listened to all the different preachers and prophets and then distilled a philosophy of his own which was a _mixtum-compositum_ of Buddhism, Christianity, Mithraism and Judaism, with a slight sprinkling of half a dozen old Babylonian superstitions.