minati, sorcerers,
and witches, they would have undermined the Church, never perceiving that
its system or doctrine was, _au fond_, fetish, like their own. Among
these rebels it was long the rule to regard those gods or men who were
specially reviled by their foes or oppressors as calumniated. Even Satan
was to them "the puir deil;" according to the Taborites, an oppressed
elder brother of Christ, or a kind of Man in an Iron Mask kept out of his
rights by Jehovah the XIV. These discontented ones deified all who had
been devilled, found out that Jezebel had been a _femme incomprise_, and
the Scarlet Woman only an interesting highly-coloured variant of the
ancient hoary myth of Mademoiselle or Miss Salina the Innocent. When
Judas was mentioned, they solemnly remarked that there was a great deal
to be said on both sides of _that_ question; while others believed that
Ananias and Sapphira had been badly sat upon, and deserved to be
worshipped as saints of appropriation--a cult, by the way, the secret
observance of which has by no means died out at the present day--several
great men being regarded in Paris as its last great high priests.

The Cainites, as known by that name to the Church, were a Gnostic sect of
the second century, and are first mentioned by Irenaeus, who connects
them with the Valentinians, of whom I thought but yesterday when I saw in
a church a sarcophagus warranted to contain the corpse of St. Valentine.
They believed that Cain derived his existence from the supreme power, but
Abel from the inferior, and that in this respect he was the first of a
line which included Esau, Korah, the dwellers in Sodom and Gomorrah, the
worshippers of Ashtoreth-Mylitta, or the boundless sensualists, the
sorcerers, and witches.

Considering what human nature is, and its instincts to opposition, we can
see that there must have been naturally a sect who regarded Cain as a
misjudged martyr. Abel appeared to them as the prosperous well-to-do
bourgeois, high in favour with the Lord, a man with flocks, while Cain
was a tiller of the ground, a poor peasant out of favour. It must be
admitted that in the Book of Genesis, in the history of the first murder,
we are much reminded of the high priest Chalcas in _La Belle Helene_,
where he exclaims, "_Trop de fleurs_!" and expresses a preference for
cattle. It is the old story of the socialists and anarchists, which is
ever new.

The witches and sorcerers of early times were a wide