simplicity.  “Woe unto you who despise the humble dwelling and inheritance of your fathers!  Woe unto you who build your palaces with the sweat of others!  Each stone, each brick, of which it is built, is a sin."[4] The name of “poor” (ebion) had become a synonym of “saint,” of “friend of God.”  This was the name that the Galilean disciples of Jesus loved to give themselves; it was for a long time the name of the Judaizing Christians of Batanea and of the Hauran (Nazarenes, Hebrews) who remained faithful to the tongue, as well as to the primitive instructions of Jesus, and who boasted that they possessed amongst themselves the descendants of his family.[5] At the end of the second century, these good sectaries, having remained beyond the reach of the great current which had carried away all the other churches, were treated as heretics (Ebionites), and a pretended heretical leader (Ebion) was invented to explain their name.[6]

[Footnote 1:  See, in particular, Amos ii. 6; Isa. lxiii. 9; Ps. xxv. 9, xxxvii. 11, lxix. 33; and, in general, the Hebrew dictionaries, at the words: 

     [Hebrew:  evion, dal, ani, anav, chasid, ashir, holelim,
     aritz].]

[Footnote 2:  Ch. lxii., lxiii., xcvii., c., civ.]

[Footnote 3:  Enoch, ch. xlvi. 4-8.]

[Footnote 4:  Enoch, xcix. 13, 14.]

[Footnote 5:  Julius Africanus in Eusebius, H.E., i. 7; Eus., De situ et nom. loc. hebr., at the word [Greek:  Choba]; Orig., Contra Celsus, ii. 1, v. 61; Epiph., Adv.  Haer., xxix. 7, 9, xxx. 2, 18.]

[Footnote 6:  See especially Origen, Contra Celsus, ii. 1; De Principiis, iv. 22.  Compare Epiph., Adv.  Haer., xxx. 17.  Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, and the apostolic Constitutions, ignore the existence of such a personage.  The author of the Philosophumena seems to hesitate (vii. 34 and 35, x. 22 and 23.) It is by Tertullian, and especially by Epiphanes, that the fable of one Ebion has been spread.  Besides, all the Fathers are agreed on the etymology, [Greek:  Ebion] = [Greek:  ptochos].]

We may see, in fact, without difficulty, that this exaggerated taste for poverty could not be very lasting.  It was one of those Utopian elements which always mingle in the origin of great movements, and which time rectifies.  Thrown into the centre of human society, Christianity very easily consented to receive rich men into her bosom, just as Buddhism, exclusively monkish in its origin, soon began, as conversions multiplied, to admit the laity.  But the mark of origin is ever preserved.  Although it quickly passed away and became forgotten, Ebionism left a leaven in the whole history of Christian institutions which has not been lost.  The collection of the Logia, or discourses of Jesus, was formed in the Ebionitish centre of Batanea.[1] “Poverty” remained an ideal from which the true followers of