the Oriental philosophies and religions, requiring an ascetic
war against the world of sense. The notion that the body is evil,
and the cause of evil, was rife even among the orthodox Fathers;
but they stopped guardedly far short of the extreme to which the
Gnostics carried it, and indignantly rejected all the strange
imaginations which those heretics had devised to explain the
subject of evil in a systematic manner.28 Augustine said, "If we
say all sin comes from the flesh, we make the fleshless devil
sinless!" Hermogenes, some of whose views at least were tinged
with Gnosticism, believed the abyss of hell was formed by the
confluence of matter, and that the devil and all his demons would
at last be utterly resolved into matter.29

The theological system of the Manichaan sect was in some of its
cardinal principles almost identical with those of the Gnostics,
but it was still more imaginative and elaborate.30 It started with
the Persian doctrine of two antagonist deities, one dwelling with
good spirits in a world of light and love, the other with demons
in a realm of darkness and horror. Upon a time the latter,
sallying forth, discovered, far away in the vastness of space, the
world of light. They immediately assailed it. They were conquered
after a terrible struggle and driven back; but they bore with them
captive a multitude of the celestial souls, whom they instantly
mixed with darkness and gross matter. The good God built this
world of mingled light and darkness to afford these imprisoned
souls an opportunity to purge themselves and be restored to him.
In arranging the material substances to form the earth, a mass of
evil fire, with no particle of good in it, was found. It had been
left in their flight by the vanquished princes of darkness. This
was cast out of the world and shut up somewhere in the dark air,
and is the Manichaan hell, presided over by the king of the
demons. If a soul, while in the body, mortify the flesh, observe a
severe ascetic moral discipline, fix its thoughts, affections, and
prayers on God and its native home, it will on leaving the body
return to the celestial light. But if it neglect these duties and
become more deeply entangled in the toils of depraved matter, it
is cast into the awful fire of hell, where the cleansing flames of
torture partially purify it; and then it is born again and put on
a new trial. If after ten successive births twice in each of five
different forms the soul be