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Updated: May 18, 2025
He acknowledged that in attacking it he had "been barking against the vain imaginations of carnal thoughts." Still, he found great difficulty in getting free of all his Manichean prejudices. The problem of Evil remained inexplicable for him, apart from Manichee teachings. God could not be the author of evil.
It looked like a kind of Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the impious sect perished from among men, all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private devotion.
I wonder, people of Ecbatana, that the thunders of God sleep, and strike him not to the earth as a rebel nay, that the earth cleaveth not beneath him and swalloweth him not up, as once before the rebels Korah, Dathan, and Abiram; and much more in the same mad way, till while I was yet speaking, those lean and hungry followers of his set upon me with violence, crying out against me as a Jew, and stirring up the people, who were nothing unwilling, but fell upon me, and throwing me down, dragged me to a gate of the city, and casting me out as I had been a dead dog, returned themselves like dogs to their vomit that accursed dish of Manichean garbage.
It must be confessed that the theory of two principles, when kept free from the absurdities and impurities which were introduced into the Manichean doctrine, is not unnaturally adopted by men who have no aid from the light of revelation, and who are confounded by the appearance of a world where evil and good are mixed together, or seem to struggle with one another, sometimes the one prevailing, and sometimes the other; and accordingly, in all countries, in the most barbarous nations, as well as among the most refined, we find plain traces of reflecting men having been driven to this solution of the difficulty.
It looked like a kind of Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the impious sect perished from among men, all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private devotion.
But it must be recollected that the advocates of the Manichean doctrine endeavor to guard themselves against the attack by contending, that the conflict between the two principles ends in a kind of compromise, so that neither has it all his own way; there is a mixture of evil admitted by the good principle, because else the whole would beat a standstill; while there is much good admitted by the evil principle, else nothing, either good or evil, would be done.
From words he ascended to definitions, and like all true inquirers began to love the definite, the precise. He wanted a basis to stand upon. He sought certitudes, elemental truths which sophistry could not cover up. Then the Manicheans could no longer satisfy him. He had doubts, difficulties, which no Manichean could explain, not even Dr.
What is this evil leaven that seems to have been mixed in with man's clay at the very beginning, making one almost ready to believe in the old Manichean heresy of a principle of evil operating through nature, everywhere doing battle with the good? And the Lord said unto Satan, "Whence comest thou?"
Manichean hypothesis is by no means so easily refuted. That the power of the Deity was supposed to have limits even in the systems of the most enlightened heathens is unquestionable. They, generally speaking, believed in the eternity of matter, and conceived some of its qualities to be so essentially necessary to its existence that no divine agency could alter them.
In his eyes, the Byzantine idea of art was Manichean; in which we fully coincide, but add, that the idea of the early Italian painters was almost equally so: and that almost all in them that was not Manichean they owe not to their Romanism or their asceticism, but to their healthy layman's common sense, and to the influence of that very classical art which they are said to have been pious enough to despise.
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