times to criminal practices. For sometimes so much is brought that it cannot easily be eaten up by a few; and as it is considered sacrilege to give what is left to others, or, at least, to throw it away, you are obliged to eat to excess, from the desire to purify, as you call it, all that is given. Then, when you are full almost to bursting, you cruelly use force in making the boys of your sect eat the rest. So it was charged against some one at Rome that he killed some poor children, by compelling them to eat for this superstitious reason. This I should not believe, did I not know how sinful you consider it to give What this food to those who are not elect, or, at any rate, to throw it away. So the only way is to eat it; and this leads every day to gluttony, and may sometimes lead to murder.

symbol of the hands. And, in the first place, advice of another without himself, or by your abstaining from the slaughter of animals divine illumination in his own mind. And and from injuring plants is shown by Christ the more wisdom the soul has when it leaves to be mere superstition; for, on the ground the body, the more profitable is its departure, that there is no community of rights between as we know both from well-grounded reasonus and brutes and trees, He both sent the ing and from wide-spread belief. Thus to devils into an herd of swine,' and withered cut down a tree is to set free the soul from by His curse a tree in which He had found a body in which it makes no progress in no fruit. The swine assuredly had not wisdom. You-the holy men, I mean-ought sinned, nor had the tree. We are not so to be mainly occupied in cutting down trees, insane as to think that a tree is fruitful or and in leading the souls thus emancipated to barren by its own choice. Nor is it any reply better things by prayers and psalms. Or to say that our Lord wished in these actions can this be done only with the souls which to teach some other truths; for every one you take into your belly, instead of aiding knows that. But assuredly the Son of God them by your understanding? would not commit murder to illustrate truth,— if you call the destruction of a tree or of an animal murder. The signs which Christ wrought in the case of men, with whom we certainly have a community of rights, were in healing, not in killing them. And it would have been the same in the case of beasts and trees, if we had that community with them which you imagine.

55. I think it right to refer here to the authority of Scripture, because we cannot here enter on a profound discussion about the soul of animals, or the kind of life in trees. But as you preserve the right to call the Scriptures corrupted, in case you should find them too strongly opposed to you,—although you have never affirmed the passages about the tree and the herd of swine to be spurious,—still, lest some day you should wish to say this of them too, when you find how much they are against you, I will adhere to my plan, and will ask you, who are so liberal in your promises of evidence and truth, to tell me first what harm is done to a tree, I say not by plucking a leaf or an apple,-for which, however, one of you would be condemned at once as having abused the symbol, if he did it intentionally, and not accidentally, but if you tear it up by the root. For the soul in trees, which, according to you, is a rational soul, is, in your theory, freed from bondage when the tree is cut down,—a bondage, too, where it suffered great misery and got no profit. For it is well known that you, in the words of your founder, threaten as a great, though not the greatest punishment, the change from a man to a tree; and it is not probable that the soul in a tree can grow in wisdom as it does in a man. There is the best reason for not killing a man, in case you should kill one whose wisdom or virtue might be of use to many, or one who might have attained to wisdom, whether by the

56. And you cannot escape the admission that the souls in trees make no progress in wisdom while they are there, when you are asked why no apostle was sent to teach trees as well as men, or why the apostle sent to men did not preach the truth to trees also. Your reply must be, that the souls while in such bodies cannot understand the divine precepts. But this reply lands you in great difficulties; for you declare that these souls can hear your voices and understand what you say, and see bodies and their motions, and even discern thoughts. If this is true, why could they learn nothing from the apostle of light? Why could they not learn even much better than we, since they can see into the mind? Your master, who, as you say, has difficulty in teaching you by speech, might have taught these souls by thought; for they could see his ideas in his mind before he expressed them. But if this is untrue, consider into what errors you have fallen.

57. As for your not plucking fruits or pulling up vegetables yourselves, while you get your followers to pluck and pull and bring them to you, that you may confer benefits not only on those who bring the food but on the food which is brought, what thoughtful person can bear to hear this? For, first, it matters not whether you commit a crime yourself, or wish another to commit it for you. You deny that you wish this! How then can relief be given to the divine part contained in lettuce and leeks, unless some one pull them and bring them to the saints to be purified. And again, if you were passing through a field where the right of friendship permitted you to pluck anything you wished, what would you do if you saw a crow on the point of eating a fig? Does not, according to your ideas, the fig itself seem to address you and to beg of you piteously to pluck it yourself and give it burial in a holy belly, where it may be purified and restored, rather than that the crow should swallow it and make it

part of his cursed body, and then hand it you hold that plants have a purer soul than over to bondage and torture in other forms? animals? There is a compensation, we are If this is true, how cruel you are! If not, how silly! What can be more contrary to your opinions than to break the symbol? What can be more unkind to the member of God than to keep it?

told, when part of what is taken from the fields is given to the elect and the saints to be purified. This has already been refuted; and it has, I think, been proved sufficiently that there is no reason for saying that more of the good part is found in vegetables than in flesh. But should any one support himself by selling butcher-meat, and spend the whole profit of his business in purchasing food for your elect, and bring larger supplies for those saints than any peasant or farmer, will be not plead this compensation as a warrant for his killing animals? But there is, we are told, some other mysterious reason; for a cunning man can always find some resource in the

58. This supposes the truth of your false and vain ideas. But you can be shown guilty of plain and positive cruelty flowing from the same error. For were any one lying on the road, his body wasted with disease, weary with journeying, and half-dead from his sufferings, and able only to utter some broken words, and if eating a pear would do him good as an astringent, and were he to beg you to help him as you passed by, and were he to implore you to bring the fruit from a neigh-secrets of nature when addressing unlearned boring tree, with no divine or human prohibition to prevent your doing so, while the man is sure to die for the want of it, you, a Christian man and a saint, will rather pass on and abandon a man thus suffering and entreating, lest the tree should lament the loss of its fruit, and you should be doomed to the punishment threatened by Manichæus for breaking the symbol. Strange customs, and strange harmlessness!

59. Now, as regards killing animals, and the reasons for your opinion, much that has been said will apply also to this. For what harm will be done to the soul of a wolf by killing the wolf, since the wolf, as long as it lives, will be a wolf, and will not listen to any preacher, or give up, in the least, shedding the blood of sheep; and, by killing it, the rational soul, as you think, will be set free from its confinement in the body? But you make this slaughter unlawful even for your followers; for you think it worse than that of trees. And in this there is not much fault to be found with your senses,—that is, your bodily senses. For we see and hear by their cries that animals die with pain, although man disregards this in a beast, with which, as not having a rational soul, we have no community of rights.. But as to your senses in the observation of trees, you must be entirely blind. For not to mention that there are no movements in the wood expressive of pain, what is clearer than that a tree is never better than when it is green and flourishing, gay with flowers, and rich in fruit? And this comes generally and chiefly from pruning. But if it felt the iron, as you suppose, it ought to die of wounds so many, so severe, instead of sprouting at the places, and reviving with such manifest delight.

60. But why do you think it a greater crime to destroy animals than plants, although

people. The story, then, is that the heavenly princes who were taken from the race of darkness and bound, and have a place assigned them in this region by the Creator of the world, have animals on the earth specially belonging to them, each having those coming from his own stock and class; and they hold the slaughterers of those animals guilty, and do not allow them to leave the earth, but harass them as much as they can with pains and torments. What simple man will not be frightened by this, and, seeing nothing in the darkness shrouding these things, will not think that the fact is as described? But I will hold to my purpose, with God's help, to rebut mysterious falsehood by the plainest truth.

Or if you

61. Tell me, then, if animals on land and in water come in regular succession by ordinary generation from this race of princes, since the origin of animal life is traced to the abortive births in that race;--tell me, I say, whether bees and frogs, and many other creatures not sprung from sexual intercourse,' may be killed with impunity. We are told they cannot. So it is not on account of their relation to certain princes that you forbid your followers to kill animals. make a general relationship to all bodies, the princes would be equally concerned about trees, which you do not require your followers to spare. You are brought back to the weak reply, that the injuries done in the case of plants are atoned for by the fruits which your followers bring to your church. For this implies that those who slaughter animals, and sell their flesh in the market, if they are your followers, and if they bring to you vegetables bought with their gains, may think nothing

of the daily slaughter, and are cleared of any sin that may be in it by your repasts.

therefore to consider these animals, and others that it would be tedious to specify, 62. But if you say that, in order to expiate more unclean than your lice; and yet you the slaughter, the thing must be given as food, think it sinful to kill them, though it would as in the case of fruits and vegetables,-which be foolish not to kill the lice. Perhaps you cannot be done, because the elect do not eat hold the lice cheap because they are small. flesh, and so your followers must not slaughter But if an animal is to be valued by its size, animals, what reply will you give in the case you must prefer a camel to a man. of thorns and weeds, which farmers destroy 64. Here we may use the gradation which in clearing their fields, while they cannot often perplexed us when we were your folbring any food to you from them? How can lowers. For if a flea may be killed on acthere be pardon for such destruction, which count of its small size, so may the fly which gives no nourishment to the saints? Perhaps is bred in beans. And if this, so also may you also put away any sin committed, for the one of a little larger size, for its size at birth benefit of the fruits and vegetables, by eating is even less. Then again, a bee may be some of these. What then if the fields are killed, for its young is no larger than a fly. plundered by locusts, mice, or rats, as we see So on to the young of a locust, and to a often happen? Can your rustic follower kill locust; and then to the young of a mouse, these with impunity, because he sins for the and to a mouse. And, to cut short, it is good of his crops? Here you are at a loss; clear we may come at last to an elephant; so. for you either allow your followers to kill that one who thinks it no sin to kill a flea, animals, which your founder prohibited, or because of its small size, must allow that it you forbid them to be cultivators, which he would be no sin in him to kill this huge made lawful. Indeed, you sometimes go so creature. But I think enough has been said far as to say that an usurer is more harmless of these absurdities. than a cultivator,—you feel so much more for melons than for men. Rather than hurt the melons, you would have a man ruined as a debtor. Is this desirable and praiseworthy justice, or not rather atrocious and damnable 65. Lastly, there is the symbol of the error? Is this commendable compassion, breast, in which your very questionable or not rather detestable barbarity?

CHAP. 18.-OF THE SYMBOL OF THE BREAST,

AND OF THE SHAMEFUL MYSTERIES OF THE
MANICHEANS.

chastity consists. For though you do not forbid sexual intercourse, you, as the apostle long ago said, forbid marriage in the proper sense, although this is the only good excuse for such intercourse. No doubt you will exclaim against this, and will make it a reproach against us that you highly esteem and approve perfect chastity, but do not forbid marriage, because your followers-that is, those in the second grade among you are allowed to have wives. After you have said this with

63. What, again, of your not abstaining yourselves from the slaughter of lice, bugs, and fleas? You think it a sufficient excuse for this to say that these are the dirt of our bodies. But this is clearly untrue of fleas and bugs; for every one knows that these animals do not come from our bodies. Besides, if you abhor sexual intercourse as much as you pretend to do, you should think those animals all the cleaner which come from our bodies without any other genera- great noise and heat, I will quietly ask, Is tion; for although they produce offspring of their own, they are not produced in ordinary generation from us. Again, if we must consider as most filthy the production of living bodies, still worse must be the production of dead bodies. There must be less harm, therefore, in killing a rat, a snake, or a scorpion, which you constantly say come from our dead bodies. But to pass over what is less plain and certain, it is a common opinion regarding bees that they come from the carcases of oxen; so there is no harm in killing them. Or if this too is doubted, every one allows that beetles, at least, are bred in the ball of mud which they make and bury. You ought

it not you who hold that begetting children, by which souls are confined in flesh, is a greater sin than cohabitation? Is it not you who used to counsel us to observe as much as possible the time when a woman, after her purification, is most likely to conceive, and to abstain from cohabitation at that time, lest the soul should be entangled in flesh? This proves that you approve of having a wife, not for the procreation of children, but for the gratification of passion. In marriage, as the marriage law declares, the man and woman come together for the procreation of children. Therefore whoever makes the procreation of children a greater sin than copulation, forbids marriage, and makes the woman not a wife, 1 V. Retract. i. 7, § 6, where Augustin allows that this is doubt-but a mistress, who for some gifts presented

ful, and that many have not even heard of it.

to her is joined to the man to gratify his all, if he were at all able to enlarge, would passion. Where there is a wife there must require at least a separate treatise for each. be marriage. But there is no marriage where Were you to observe these, and to act up to motherhood is not in view; therefore neither your profession, no childishness, or folly, or is there a wife. In this way you forbid absurdity would go beyond yours; and when marriage. Nor can you defend yourselves you praise and teach these things without successfully from this charge, long ago brought doing them, you display craft and deceit and against you prophetically by the Holy Spirit. malevolence equal to anything that can be 66. Moreover, when you are so eager in described or imagined. your desire to prevent the soul from being 68. During nine full years that I attended confined in flesh by conjugal intercourse, and you with great earnestness and assiduity, I so eager in asserting that the soul is set free could not hear of one of your elect who was from seed by the food of the saints, do you not found transgressing these precepts, or at not sanction, unhappy beings, the suspicion least was not suspected of doing so. Many entertained about you? For why should it were caught at wine and animal food, many be true regarding corn and beans and lentils at the baths; but this we only heard by report. and other seeds, that when you eat them you Some were proved to have seduced other men's wish to set free the soul, and not true of the wives, so that in this case I could not doubt seeds of animals? For what you say of the the truth of the charge. But suppose this, flesh of a dead animal, that it is unclean too, a report rather than a fact. I myself because there is no soul in it, cannot be said saw, and not I only, but others who have of the seed of the animal; for you hold that either escaped from that superstition, or will, it keeps confined the soul which will appear I hope, yet escape, we saw, I say, in a in the offspring, and you avow that the soul square in Carthage, on a road much freof Manichæus himself is thus confined. And quented, not one, but more than three of the as your followers cannot bring these seeds to elect walking behind us, and accosting some you for purification, who will not suspect that women with such indecent sounds and gestures you make this purification secretly among as to outdo the boldness and insolence of all yourselves, and hide it from your followers, ordinary rascals. And it was clear that this in case they should leave you?1 If you do was quite habitual, and that they behaved in not these things, as it is to be hoped you do this way to one another, for no one was not, still you see how open to suspicion your deterred by the presence of a companion,— superstition is, and how impossible it is to showing that most of them, if not all, were blame men for thinking what your own pro- affected with this evil tendency. For they fession suggests, when you maintain that did not all come from one house, but lived in you set free souls from bodies and from senses quite different places, and quite accidentally by eating and drinking. I wish to say no left together the place where they had met. more about this: you see yourselves what It was a great shock to us, and we lodged a room there is here for denunciation. But as complaint about it. But who thought of inthe matter is one rather to repress than to flicting punishment,-I say not by separation invite remark, and also as throughout my dis- from the church, but even by severe rebuke course my purpose appears of exaggerating in proportion to the heinousness of the ofnothing, and of keeping to bare facts and fence? arguments, we shall pass on to other matters.

CHAP. 19.--CRIMES OF THE MANICHEANS.

67. We see then, now, the nature of your three symbols. These are your customs. This is the end of your notable precepts, in which there is nothing sure, nothing steadfast, nothing consistent, nothing irreproachable, but all doubtful, or rather undoubtedly and entirely false, all contradictory, abominable, absurd. In a word, evil practices are detected in your customs so many and so serious, that one wishing to denounce them

[Compare what is said about the disgusting ceremonial of Pope Leo X. (Serm. V. de Jejuniis, X. Mens.). These charges were probably unfounded, though they are not altogether out of harmony with the Manichæan principles.-A. H. N.]

Ischas by Cyril of Jerusalem (Cat. vi.), Augustin (Haeres, xlvi.),

69. All the excuse given for the impunity of those men was that, at that time, when their meetings were forbidden by law, it was feared that the persons suffering punishment might retaliate by giving information. What then of their assertion that they will always have persecution in this world, for which they suppose that they will be thought the more of? for this is the application they make of the words about the world hating them. And they will have it that truth must be sought for among them, because, in the promise of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, it is said that the world cannot receive Him. 3 This is not the

place to discuss this question. But clearly,