Note 77 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

A less savage treatment may have made possible the alleged success of Gerhard, bishop of Cambray and Arras, in reconciling to the Church at Arras, in 1025 or 1030, a number of laymen—also said to have been taught by an Italian—who as a body rejected all external worship, setting aside priestly baptism and the sacraments, penance and images, funeral rites, holy oil, church bells, cross-worship, altars, and even churches, and denied the necessity of an order of priests.77 Few of the Protestants of a later age were so thorough-going; but the fact that many of the sect stood to the old Marcionite veto on marriage and the sexual instinct gives to their propaganda its own cast of fanaticism. This last tenet it seemingly was that gave the Paulicians their common Greek name of cathari,78 “the pure,” corrupted or assimilated in Italian to gazzari, whence presumably the German word for heretic, Ketzer.79 Such a doctrine had the double misfortune that if acted on it left the sect without the normal recruitment of members’ children, while if departed from it brought on them the stigma of wanton hypocrisy; and as a matter of fact every movement of the kind, ancient and modern, seems to have contained within it the two extremes of asceticism and licence, the former generating the latter.