than to inspire comfort.  All his precepts were conceived in the sour and contracted spirit of mere ritualism.  He insisted upon long fasts; he condemned second marriages; [437:2] he inveighed against all who endeavoured to save themselves by flight in times of persecution; and he asserted that such as had once been guilty of any heinous transgression should never again be admitted to ecclesiastical fellowship.  Whilst he promulgated this stern discipline, he at the same time delivered the most dismal predictions, announcing, among other things, the speedy catastrophe of the Roman Empire.  He also gave out that the Phrygian village where he ministered was to become the New Jerusalem of renovated Christianity.

But the Church was still too strongly impregnated with the free spirit of the gospel to submit to such a prophet as Montanus.  He had, however, powerful advocates, and even a Roman bishop at one time gave him countenance. [437:3] Though his discipline commended itself to the morose and pharisaical, it was rejected by those who rightly understood the mystery of godliness.  Several councils were held to discuss its merits, and it was emphatically condemned. [438:1] The signal failure of some of the Montanist predictions had greatly lowered the credit of the party; Montanus was pronounced a false prophet; and though the sect was supported by Tertullian, the most vigorous writer of the age, it gradually ceased to attract notice. [438:2]

About a century after the appearance of Montanus, another individual, in a more remote part of Asia, acquired great notoriety as a heresiarch.  The doctrine of two First Principles, a good deity and an evil deity, had been long current in the East.  Even in the days of Isaiah we may trace its existence, for there is a most significant allusion to it in one of his prophecies, in which Jehovah is represented as saying—­“I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me.... I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” [438:3] About the fifth century before Christ, the Persian theology had been reformed by Zoroaster, and the subordination of the two Principles to one God, the author of both, had been acknowledged as an article of the established creed.  In the early part of the third century of the Christian era, there was a struggle between the adherents of the old and the new faith of Parsism; and the supporters of the views of Zoroaster had been again successful.  But a considerable party still refused to relinquish the doctrine of the independence of the two Principles; and some of these probably joined themselves to Mani, a Persian by birth, who, in the latter half of the third century, became distinguished as the propagator of a species of mongrel Christianity.  This man, who was born about A.D. 240, possessed genius of a high order.  Though he finished his career when he was only thirty-seven years of age, he had already