Waymarks in Church History Author:William Bright Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ANTE-NICENE SECTARIANISM. (I.) MONTANISM. MONTANISM has not unnaturally been claimed by some moderns as a witness for an " original freedom and spiritual i... more »ndependence, unrestrained by the ecclesiastical or institutional principle which gradually became predominant in the Church. Here," it is said, "you see the real thing, the primitive spirituality and free energy of Christian life, struggling, though too late, to shake off the yoke of a growing sacerdotalism and formalism. Its prophesyings take us back to a period when the Spirit's presence was in truth a guarantee of liberty." Now it is quite true that prophesying had been current, not only in the Apostolic age, but to some extent, in the sub-Apostolic period, or even later, and that the more fervid Christians were still wont to believe in revelations by vision. But they might do so without being Montanistic. Cyprian,in the next century, the champion of ecclesiastical order, believed in such communications from on high, " as vouchsafed not only to himself, but even to the innocent age of children."1 It was not prophesying as such, nor visions as such, which finally led the bishops of Asia to pronounce against Montanus and his two female companions, Maximilla and Priscilla. It was the application of the idea in what was called a " false kind of ecstasy," 2 in prophesyings claiming to " develop " the disciplinary and practical teaching of the Apostles into an indefinite series (for, having begun, it might continue) of rules austerely rigoristic,8 which alarmed and shocked the Churchly mind. Nor was this all; there was no denying either that Montanism was Phrygian, or that it was, so to speak, racy of its soil.4 Phrygia was the centre of the wild and riotous worship, as Dollinger calls it, of Cybele ; and Montanus himself is ...« less