Note 46 — HISTORICAL REVIEW OF BOSNIA.

As an example of the doctrinal identity of the Bogomilian and Albigensian creeds, I may be allowed to recall a few main features of the heresy about Toulouse as they struck the Roman Inquisitors in 1178. The heretics, we are told, declared that there were two Principles: one Good Spirit, who had created invisible things alone, and only those that were not susceptible of change and corruption; the other Evil, who had created the sky, earth, man, and all things visible. That the sacramental bread and wine were not transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. That they rejected priests, monks, bishops, and sacerdotalism generally. That churches were an abomination to them. That the laying on of hands, and that, on adults, was the only true baptism. As to marriage—‘virum cum uxore non posse salvari si alter alteri debitum reddat.’ That beggars deserved no alms. That they made use of the vernacular in their prayers: they were so ignorant of Latin ‘that they could not speak a couple of words.’ ‘It was necessary,’ says the Cardinal of St. Chrysogonus, ‘to condescend to their ignorance, and to speak of the sacraments of the Church, though this was sufficiently absurd, in the vulgar tongue.’ Their preachers seem to have styled themselves, in the figurative language common to the Bogomiles as well, ‘Angels of Light.’ The Abbot of Clairvaux states that one of them, doubtless in the same figurative sense, called himself John the Baptist. This man, their chief leader, was an aged man, who presided at the nocturnal prayer-meetings of the sectaries, clad in a tunic or dalmatic. See Roger of Hoveden’s Chronicle, (Prof. Stubbs’s edition, in the Rolls Series, vol. ii. p. 153, &c.)