About the middle of the second century there was inaugurated in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire a movement which noisily claimed to be pure and undefiled Christianity; and for two centuries this movement bade dangerous defiance to the solidifying structure of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Montanism was ascetic, prophetic, and chiliastic in its nature. It was not a subtle philosophy like Gnosticism, the contemporaneous plague of the Catholic Fathers. Hence, despite the desperate efforts of the acute logical mind of Tertullian, it could not be vindikated as a refined, esoteric interpretation of Christian doctrine; and it did not succeed, as Gnosticism did, in securing substantial recognition in the system of some of the greatest of the constructive theologians of the third and fourth centuries, notably the Alexandrians. Montanism remained an open foe which it was necessary to keep out of the church, while Gnosticism was the insidious poison which it was necessary to purge out of the church. Consequently, Montanism has been of minor import in the history of ecclesiastical dogma. Until the evolutionary theory of the nineteenth century gave impulse to the study of origins, revealing the formation of the Catholic church as a very travailing historical process, the Montanist movement failed of respectable treatment at the hands of the ecclesiastical historians. But that lack has been abundantly supplied within the last two generations. The sections treating of Montanism in the Ecclesiastical Histories of Neander, Baur, Ritschl, and Schaff, with the special treatises of Schwegler, de Sayres, Stroehlin, and Bonnwetsch, have given us as complete a presentation of the movement as the scantiness of the sources will allow. It is not the purpose of this essay to deal primarily with either the sources or the history of the Montanistic heresy. They are of interest here only for the purpose of orientation in the doctrine of the imme-392 x Eusebius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae, IV, 27; V, 16-18; Epiphanius, Haereses, XLVIII, I ff.; Hippolytus, Philosophoumena, VIII, Ig. The last-named author says that the Montanists claimed to "learn more from the writings of these prophets than from the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospels; and above all the Apostles and every divine gift they set the words of these women." On the statements defaming Montanus' character in Saint Jerome (Epistola, 133), Apollonius (in Euseb., Hist. Eccl., V, 18), and the anonymous writer in Euseb., Hist. Eccl., V, I6, it is enough to quote Renan's words: "Ce sont 1k les calomnies ordinaires qui ne manquent jamais sous la plume des 6crivains orthodoxes quand il s'agit de noircir les dissidents."-Marc Aurale, p. 214. 2 "Behold the man is like a lyre, and I strike upon him like a plectrum; the man sleeps, but I wake. Behold the Lord, that stirreth to ecstasy the hearts of men."-Montanist oracle in Epiphan., Haer., XLVIII, 4. According to the account of the anonymous writer cited by Eusebius (Hist. Eccl., V, I6) Montanus is seized by the Spirit, like the prophets o...
