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These beliefs survived for a thousand years throughout Christendom: they were held by a great multitude of persecuted sects, from the Albigenses and Cathars to the eastern Paulicians. The catholic church found it necessary to prohibit the circulation of the Old Testament among laymen very largely on account of the polemics of the Cathars against the Hebrew God.
It may not be well known, but it was this Manichean conception of the world that Saint Augustine gave up at his conversion to Christianity. Again and again, it found its way to the surface of Western society. Who has not heard of the Cathars or Albigenses of the Middle Ages? These people were believers in a struggling deity engaged with the powers of evil.
It has added a third Person but we won't go into that." The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein Fellows'. "We won't go into that," he agreed. "No!" "Other religions have told the story in a different way. The Cathars and Gnostics did.
They will then differ from him upon little more than the question whether there is an essential identity in aim and quality between the Christ God and the Veiled Being, who answer to their Creator God. The Cathars, Paulicians, Albigenses and so on held, with the Manichaeans, that the God of Nature, God the Father, was evil. The Christ God was his antagonist. This was the idea of the poet Shelley.
The atmosphere of religion was more somber in the past; and these Cathars would have been shocked by the fine, careless rapture of the modern novelist; but they would have recognized that his view was akin to their own.
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