over the neck, the twins over the back, and so on with the remainder of the Twelve Signs. They made merely a verbal profession of the doctrine of the Trinity, but they believed, with Sabellius, that the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, were one and the same thing, and that there was no real distinction of persons. They did not reject the Old Testament, like the Manicheans, but they explained everything in it allegorically, and they added many apocryphal books to the canonical ones. They abstained from meat, as an unclean thing, and separated married people, notwithstanding the repugnance manifested by those who were not followers of their sect, and this they did through hatred of procreation; for the flesh, they said, was not the work of God, but of the devil; 'but they used to assemble by night for prayer, and the lights being extinguished, indulged in revolting and promiscuous licentiousness; however, they denied all this when caught, and they taught their followers to practise the doctrine contained in the Latin distich: "Jura perjura, secretum prodere noli"—"Swear away, but never tell the secret." They used to fast on every Sunday, and even on Easter Sunday and Christie as-day, and on these days they used to hide themselves, and not appear at church; their reason for this conduct was their hatred of the flesh, as they believed that Christ was not really born or arose in the flesh, but only in appearance. They used to receive the Eucharist in the church, like other Christians, but they did not consume the species. They were condemned in the Council of Saragossa, by St. Damasus, and in several particular synods. Finally, Priscillian was condemned to death, at the instance of Ithacius, Bishop of Ossobona, in the year 383, by Evodius, appointed Prefect of the Pretorium by the tyrant Maximus[1].
83. St. Augustin[2] speaks of some heretics who lived about this time, and always went barefooted, and taught that all Christians were bound to do likewise[3].
84. Audæus, chief of the Audæans, was born in Mesopotamia, and was at first a man of exemplary life, and a strict observer of ecclesiastical discipline, but afterwards separated from the Church, and became founder of a sect. He celebrated Easter after the Jewish rite, and said that man was like to God corporeally; interpreting, in the plainest literal sense, that passage of Genesis, where the Lord says: "Let us make man in our own image and likeness;" and he and his followers were Antropomorphites. Noel Alexander says that the only error of the Audæans was in separating themselves from the Church, but as for the rest, they never deviated from the faith; but Petavius[4], and others, attribute to them the
