as credentials for the truth of their tenets. The history
of these heretics has, however, less interest than some of
their peculiarities might seem to promise. What, for
instance, can be said of the story told by Rodulph Glaber
of a countryman of Vertus near Chalons who had a vision,
at its warning put away his wife, went to the church,
there destroyed a cross and a picture of the Saviour, and
declaimed to the people on the wickedness of paying
tithes?[1] It is added that he sustained his assertions by
passages from the Bible, while explaining that what the prophets said was in part not to be believed: whence we may gather that he had imbibed some of the special
doctrines of the eastern Paulicians, whose loyalty to the
New Testament is supposed (though the evidence is conflicting) to have been balanced by their repudiation of the Old. An extreme case like this betrays, with however much exaggeration, the characteristics of medieval heresy, an incongruous mixture of heterogeneous elements, a dualism borrowed from the religion of Zoroaster, ill-compacted with a rationalism that claimed to represent the teaching of saint Paul.
From the first ages of Christianity there had always been a tendency more or less widely operative, to free the religion from its burthen of Jewish principles and traditions. The puritanism of the Hebrew scriptures was exchanged for another puritanism resting upon the idea of the essential evilness of matter. Marcion and Manes at different epochs framed systems of which the uniting principle was the double reign of good and evil. The authority of the prime God was confronted by a restless malignant power whose rule was coëval with the existence of the universe. The opposition of spirit and
- ↑ As omnimodis superfluuni et inane, Rodulph Glab. hist. ii. 11, Bouquet 10. 23. The chronicler is sure that the man (his name was Leutard) was out of his mind; and it is remarkable that the bishop to whom the scene was reported felt satisfied with the explanation and let him go free. Leutard proceeded to drown himself in a reaction, it was said, of despair, At the same time, as Neander hints, p. 445, it is not improbable that the suicide was a figment and that the enthusiast fell a victim to the fanatic zeal of the populace.
