risen to eminence among his countrymen, and attracted the notice of several successive sovereigns.  He is said to have been a skilful physician, an accomplished painter, and an excellent astronomer, as well as an acute metaphysician.  Like Montanus, he laid claim to a divine commission, and alleged that he was the Paraclete who was promised to guide into all truth.  He maintained that there are two First Principles of all things, light and darkness:  God, in the kingdom of light, and the devil, in the kingdom of darkness, have existed from eternity.  Mani thus accounted for the phenomena of the world around us—­“Over the kingdom of light,” said this heresiarch, “ruled God the Father, eternal in His sacred race, glorious in His might, the truth by His very essence....  But the Father himself, glorious in His majesty; incomprehensible in His greatness, has united with Himself blessed and glorious Aeons, in number and greatness surpassing estimation.” [439:1] He taught that Christ appeared to liberate the light from the darkness, and that he himself was now deputed to reveal the mysteries of the universe, and to assist men in recovering their freedom.  He rejected a great portion of the canon of Scripture, and substituted certain writings of his own, which his followers were to receive as of divine authority.  His disciples, called Manichees or Manichaeans, assumed the name of a Church, and were divided into two classes, the Elect and the Hearers.  The Elect, who were comparatively few, were the sacred order.  They alone were made acquainted with the mysteries, or more recondite doctrines, of the sect; they practised extreme abstinence; they subsisted chiefly upon olives; [439:2] and they lived in celibacy.  They were not to kill, or even wound, an animal; neither were they to pull up a vegetable, or pluck a flower.  The Hearers were permitted to share in the business and pleasures of the world, but they were taught only the elements of the system.  After death, according to Mani, souls do not pass immediately into the world of light.  They must first undergo a two-fold purification; one, by water in the moon; another, by fire in the sun.

Mani had provoked the enmity of the Magians; and, at their instigation, he was consigned, about A.D. 277, by order of the Persian monarch, to a cruel and ignominious death.  But the sect which he had organized did not die along with him.  His system was well fitted to please the Oriental fancy; its promise of a higher wisdom to those who obtained admission into the class of the Elect encouraged the credulity of the auditors; and, to such as had not carefully studied the Christian revelation, its hypothesis of a Good and of an Evil Deity accounted rather plausibly for the mingled good and evil of our present existence.  The Manichaeans were exposed to much suffering in the country where they first appeared; and, as a sect of Persian origin, they were oppressed by the Roman government; but they were not extinguished by persecution, and, far down in the middle ages, they still occasionally figure in the drama of history.