is
evil, for Adam's chambering with Eve was the forbidden fruit. It is good
for a man not to touch a woman; a man's relations with his own wife are
merely a means of fornication, and marriage and concubinage are
indistinguishable as against the kingdom of God, in which there is no
marrying or giving in marriage. Those only have been redeemed from earth
who were virgins, undefiled with women. The passages of the New
Testament which seem to connive at the married relation were interpreted
by the Cathars as spoken in regard of Christ and the church. The Perfect
must also leave his father and mother, and his children, for a man's
foes are they of his own household. The family must be sacrificed to
the divine kinship. He that loveth father or mother more than Christ is
not worthy of him, nor he that loveth more his son or daughter. The
Perfect takes up his cross and follows after Christ.

Next he must abstain from all flesh diet except fish. He may not even
eat cheese or eggs or milk, for they, like meat, are produced _per viam
generationis seu coitus_. Everything that is sexually begotten is
impure. Fish were supposed to be born in the water without sexual
connexion, and on the basis of this old physiological fallacy the
Cathars equally with the Catholic framed their rule of fasting. And
there was yet another reason why the Perfect should not eat animals, for
a human soul might be doing time in its body. Nor might a Perfect or one
in course of probation kill anything, for the Mosaic commandment applies
to all life. He might not lie nor take an oath, for the precept "Swear
not at all" was, like the rest of the gospel, taken seriously. This was
the chief of their "anarchist doctrines."[3]

The Cathar rites, which remain to us in a manual of the sect, "recall,"
says the Abbe Guiraud, no too favourable a witness, "those of the
primitive church with a truth and precision the more striking the nearer
we go back to the apostolic age." The medieval inquisitor saw in them an
aping of the rites of the Catholic church as he knew them; but they were
really, says the same authority, "archaeological vestiges (i.e.
survivals) of the primitive Christian liturgy. In the bosom of medieval
society they were the last witness to a state of things that the regular
development of Catholic cult had amplified and modified. They resemble
the erratic blocks which lost amid alien soils recall, where we find
them, the geological conditions of earlier