according to St. John on the head of the candidate, invoking the Holy Spirit, and chanting the Lord's Prayer. Like the Euchites, they attached great value to prayer, which they regarded as the essence of religion in opposition to the Catholic view of the sacrifice of the mass. Here they were Protestant of the Protestants. For as with baptism, so with the Lord's Supper, they repudiated the material elements in the sacrament, and in this respect anticipated the Quakers.
Too much must not be made of these statements in detail. We possess no service book of the Bogomiles, and we have to view them through the coloured glasses of prejudiced antagonism. Still, much of what is attributed to them reads like a revival, or perhaps even a survival, of second century Ophite Gnosticism; and the very antiquity of these notions makes it likely that they were really held by the Bogomiles more or less as described. We can hardly suppose that such old-world fancies would be raked up out of the rubbish heap of a past nearly one thousand years old in order to be gratuitously attributed to them. Therefore it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the Bogomiles must have adopted some system of dualism. On the other hand, there are Armenian scholars who have recently studied the subject, and come to the conclusion that they are not Marcionite. Now we saw that The Key of Truth makes it quite certain that the Paulicians were not Marcionite. Yet both have been so regarded in the past. In the Greek historians they are both called Manichæans. That is Anna Comnena's title for all these bodies of heretics—a convenient title because odious. Since we now know that the Paulicians were grossly libelled, we may suspect that the Bogomiles were also more or less seriously maligned. Their dualism was probably less pronounced than has been supposed. Yet, inasmuch as we cannot deny to them something of the kind, we should scarcely class them with the Paulicians. A prominent Paulinist, a physician named Basilius, has been commonly regarded as the leader of the Bogomiles of his day; but
