erse
to those of the established church, both on account of its great
obscurity, and because many of these heresies were mixed up with an
excessive fanaticism. But they fixed themselves so deeply in the hearts
of the inferior and more numerous classes, they bore, generally
speaking, so immediate a relation to the state of manners, and they
illustrate so much that more visible and eminent revolution which
ultimately rose out of them in the sixteenth century, that I must reckon
these among the most interesting phenomena in the progress of European
society.

Many ages elapsed, during which no remarkable instance occurs of a
popular deviation from the prescribed line of belief; and pious
Catholics console themselves by reflecting that their forefathers, in
those times of ignorance, slept at least the sleep of orthodoxy, and
that their darkness was interrupted by no false lights of human
reasoning.[740] But from the twelfth century this can no longer be their
boast. An inundation of heresy broke in that age upon the church, which
no persecution was able thoroughly to repress, till it finally
overspread half the surface of Europe. Of this religious innovation we
must seek the commencement in a different part of the globe. The
Manicheans afford an eminent example of that durable attachment to a
traditional creed, which so many ancient sects, especially in the East,
have cherished through the vicissitudes of ages, in spite of persecution
and contempt. Their plausible and widely extended system had been in
early times connected with the name of Christianity, however
incompatible with its doctrines and its history. After a pretty long
obscurity, the Manichean theory revived with some modification in the
western parts of Armenia, and was propagated in the eighth and ninth
centuries by a sect denominated Paulicians. Their tenets are not to be
collected with absolute certainty from the mouths of their adversaries,
and no apology of their own survives. There seems however to be
sufficient evidence that the Paulicians, though professing to
acknowledge and even to study the apostolical writings, ascribed the
creation of the world to an evil deity, whom they supposed also to be
the author of the Jewish law, and consequently rejected all the Old
Testament. Believing, with the ancient Gnostics, that our Saviour was
clothed on earth with an impassive celestial body, they denied the
reality of his death and resurrection.[741] These errors