us what we now understand as Nonconformity; since the devotees at the various shrines neither deny one another's gods, nor call in question in pronounced ways the current ideas concerning them. Only in cases like that of Socrates, who enunciated a conception of supernatural agents diverging widely from the popular conception of them, do we see in early societies Nonconformity properly so-called.
What we have here to deal with under this name occurs chiefly in societies which are substantially, if not literally, monotheistic; and in which there exists nominally, if not really, a tolerably uniform creed administered by a consolidated hierarchy.
Even as thus restricted, Nonconformity comprehends phenomena widely unlike in their natures; and that we may understand it, we must exclude much that is allied with it only by outward form and circumstance. Though in most cases a separating sect espouses some unauthorized version of the accepted creed; and though the nature of the espoused version is occasionally not without its significance; yet the thing specially to be noted is the attitude assumed toward ecclesiastical government. Though there is always some exercise of individual judgment; yet in early stages this is shown merely in the choice of one authority as superior to another. Only in late stages does there come an exercise of individual judgment which goes to the extent of denying ecclesiastical authority in general.
The growth of this later attitude we shall see on comparing some of the successive stages.
Ancient forms of dissent habitually stand for the authority of the past over the present; and since tradition usually brings from more barbarous ages accounts of more barbarous modes of propitiation, ancient forms of dissent are habitually revivals of practices more ascetic than those of the current religion. It was shown in § 620, that the primitive monachism originated in this way; and as Christianity, with the higher moral precepts on which it insisted, joined renunciation of ordinary life and its aims (said to be derived from the Essenes), there tended to be thereafter a continual re-genesis of dissenting sects characterized in common by austerities.
Kinds of dissent differing from these and differing from modern kinds of dissent, arose during those times in which the early church was spreading and becoming organized. For before ecclesiastical government had established itself and acquired sacredness, resistance to each new encroachment made by it, naturally led to divisions. Between the time when the authority dwelt in the Christian congregations themselves, and the time when the authority was centred in the pope, there necessarily went successive usurpations of authority, each of which gave occasion for protest. Hence, such sects, arising in the third century and onward to the seventh century, as the Noetians, Novatians, Meletians, Aerians, Donatists, Joannites, Haesitantes, Timotheans, and Athingani.
