as 'distinguished only by their Scriptural names, by the modest title of fellow-pilgrims, by the austerity of their lives, their zeal and knowledge, and the credit of some extraordinary gift of the Holy Spirit.',

The Paulicians not only objected to the extravagant superstitions and corruptions of the Catholic Church, but held those Scriptural doctrines from which its members had awfully departed, by taking、 heed to the commandments of men, and forsaking the lively oracles of God. They held the doctrine of salvation through the merits of Christ alone; they renounced all idea of good works being meritorious in procuring life eternal; they worshipped one God in Christ Jesus; rejecting the mediation of saints, and refusing to pray to them, or to honour their relics and those of martyrs, which in that superstitious age were highly esteemed; they objected to the worship of images; and in short to all those unscriptural and superstitious practices which had been adopted by the Roman Church.

As they thus opposed that corrupt church they were of course denounced as heretics, and persecuted as such. The Greek Emperors issued an edict denouncing their principles, and condemning them to capital punishment for maintaining them; their books were burnt, and the Catholic writer who relates the circumstance, and adds that whoever was found guilty of concealing them was put to death and his estates confiscated, styles these

sanguinary persecutors, the divine and orthodox Emperors,' and speaks of their having added to their other excellent deeds this virtue,' that they pursued with unrelenting zeal those who, holding the doctrines of the Bible in opposition to those of popery, "resisted unto blood, striving against

sin."

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In order more effectually to uproot this growing heresy, an officer was sent to Colonia, a place in the neighbourhood of Pontus, mentioned in Scripture as distinguished for piety, where the leader of the Paulicians had fixed his abode, with orders to put him to death. This officer, whose name was Simeon, performed his commission in a manner worthy of the spirit by which it was dictated. I will relate the account of the death of Constantine, or Sylvanus, as given by the historian Gibbon, to whom I so often refer. By a refinement of cruelty, Simeon placed the unfortunate Sylvanus before a line of his disciples, who were commanded as the price of their own pardon, and the proof of their repentance, to massacre their spiritual father. They turned aside from the impious office, the stones dropt from their filial hands, and of the whole number only one executioner could be found; a new David, as he is styled by the Catholics, who overthrew this giant of heresy.'

With how much more justice he might be compared to Judas than to David, I shall not determine, but we have happy proof that this

man found place for repentance. After the death of Sylvanus, he continued to betray and destroy the pastors of his persecuted flock, but at length, like Saul of Tarsus, he was arrested in his course of guilt, and shown the value of the faith he destroyed. The conduct of the suffering Paulicians was an evidence to the truth of their religion, which spoke more powerfully than the loudest eloquence; Justus their betrayer and persecutor was struck by these evidences of a high and holy principle of action; and the same divine grace which influenced them being imparted to him, he repented of his sin before God, and before men he evidenced his sincerity by dying a martyr to the faith he had blasphemed and persecuted; affording in his conversion a testimony that the grace of God is "not according to works," but of his own sovereign mercy in Christ Jesus.

It has been often said, that the blood of the martyrs proved the seed of the church; and in the case of these people it was eminently so, for the doctrine for the Paulicians spread widely, and through their means the seeds of reformation, says Gibbon, were scattered throughout the West.

It is to be regretted that their doctrines are imperfectly understood, the medium by which they have been conveyed to us, being through their enemies, the Roman Catholic historians. As they cannot plead for themselves,' says the same elegant but infidel historian above quoted, our candid

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criticism will magnify the good, and abate or suspect the evil that is represented by their adversaries.' But the sneer of the professedly candid historian, universally directed against the spirit of true Christianity whenever manifested in the doctrines or lives of its professors, is perhaps more likely to do injury to the memory of the Paulicians, than the slanders and detractions of their enemies.

Amid all these misrepresentations, slanders, or invidious remarks, I think we can gather enough to warrant us in ranking the Paulicians among those, who in the darkest ages of Christianity, bore evidence to the existence of a spiritual church upon earth.

Among their teachers one named Sergius is allowed, even by their calumniators, to "adorn the doctrine of Christ Jesus; and their exemplary conduct under their cruel sufferings, bears very satisfactory testimony that this people had learnt to count it all joy, to suffer shame, reproach, and death itself in the cause of Him whom they called Master and Lord. During one hundred and fifty years these witnesses for the truth were continually exposed to persecution.

The most inveterate of their persecutors was, I am sorry to say, a woman, the Empress Theodora; the inquisitors employed by her are said to have destroyed in various ways, a hundred thousand persons, suspected or convicted of holding the Paulician doctrines ! They were not ambitious of martyrdom,' says the historian,

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'but in a calamitous period of an hundred and fifty years their patience endured whatever zeal could inflict; and from the blood and ashes of the first victims a succession of teachers and congregations repeatedly arose.' At length the persecuted Paulicians took arms in their own defence, and are represented by historians as contending for above a century for their religion and liberties.

Mr. Gibbon, who seldom loses an opportunity of making an invidious remark on the conduct of Christian professors, sneers at their allying themselves with the Saracens, whom he styles 'enemies of the empire and the Gospel.' But it is not to be supposed that this body of people, still styling themselves by their original name, continued always to maintain the same Gospel simplicity and Christian character which distinguished them, when they were first induced by pure and holy principles to stand forward as Confessors of Christ crucified. It is not imagined that the body of the Paulician sect, large as it became, remained always pure; that their faith was always equally steadfast, and their patience equally great; but if as a body they lost their primitive virtues, we are not from this circumstance to argue as if they had never stood higher in Christian virtue. As well might we say that the seven churches of Asia never knew the unadulterated faith of Jesus, or that the Church of Rome never was a pure, uncorrupt, and scriptural one,