that Roman
Christianity had done its work, and had now come to its inevitable
termination. He proceeded to show that there are epochs or ages in the
Divine government of the world; that, during the Jewish dispensation, it
had been under the immediate influence of God the Father; during the
Christian dispensation, it had been under that of God the Son; and that
the time had now arrived when it would be under the influence of God the
Holy Ghost; that, in the coming ages, there would be no longer any need
of faith, but that all things would be according to wisdom and reason.
It was the ushering in of a new time. So spake, with needful obscurity,
the Abbot Joachim, and so, more plainly, the General of the Franciscans
in his Introduction. "The Everlasting Gospel" was declared by its
adherents to have supplanted the New Testament, as that had supplanted
the Old--these three books constituting a threefold revelation,
answering to the Trinity of the Godhead. At once there was a cry from
the whole hierarchy. [Sidenote: Attempts to destroy the book.] The Pope,
Alexander IV., without delay, took measures for the destruction of the
book. Whoever kept or concealed a copy was excommunicated. But among the
lower mendicants--the Spiritualists, as they were termed--the work was
held in the most devout repute. With them it had taken the place of the
Holy Scriptures. [Sidenote: The Comment on the Apocalypse.] So far from
being suppressed, it was followed, in about forty years, A.D. 1297, by
the Comment on the Apocalypse, by John Peter Oliva, who, in Sicily, had
accepted the three epochs or ages, and divided the middle one--the
Christian--into seven stages: the age of the Apostles; that of the
Martyrs; that of Heresies; that of Hermits; that of the Monastic System;
that of the overthrow of Anti-Christ, and that of the coming Millennium.
He agreed with his predecessors in the impending abolition of Roman
Christianity, stigmatized that Church as the purple harlot, and with
them affirmed that the pope and all his hierarchy had become superfluous
and obsolete--"their work was done, their doom sealed." [Sidenote:
Spread of these doctrines among ecclesiastics.] His zealous followers
declared that the sacraments of the Church were now all useless, those
administering them having no longer any jurisdiction. The burning of
thousands of these "Fratricelli" by the Inquisition was altogether
inadequate to suppress them. Eventually, when the Reformation