Cony_keyoftruth

x PREFACE
it was the heresy of the early British Church. But it has left few
landmarks, for the rival christology which figured Jesus Christ not
as a man, who by the descent of the Spirit on him was filled with
the Godhead, but as God incarnate from his virgin mother's womb,
advanced steadily, and, like a rising tide, soon swept over the whole
face of Christendom ; everywhere effacing literary and other traces
of the Adoptionist faith, which seems thenceforward to have only
lived on in Languedoc and along the Rhine as the submerged
Christianity of the Cathars, and perhaps also among the Waldenses.
In the Reformation this Catharism comes once more to the surface,
particularly among the so-called Anabaptist and Unitarian Chris-
tians, between whom and the most primitive church The Key of
Truth and the Cathar Ritual of Lyon supply us with two great
connecting links.
How, it may be asked, could such a revolution of religious
opinion as the above sketch implies take place and leave so little
trace behind ? But it has left some traces. The Liber Sententiarum
is the record of the Inquisition of Toulouse from 1307-1323, and
for that short period its 400 closely printed folio pages 1 barely
suffice to chronicle the cruelties perpetrated in the name of the
God of mercy by the clergy of the orthodox or persecuting Church
of Rome. A hundred such volumes would be needed to record
the whole tale of the suppression of the European Cathars. And
if we ask what has become of the literature of these old believers of
Europe, an examination of the lately found eleventh-century IMS.
of the Peregrinalio of St. Sylvia suggests an answer. This precious
codex contained a description of the Feast of the Baptism, the old
Christmas day, as it was celebrated on Jan. 6 in Jerusalem towards
the close of the fourth century. It was the one tell-tale feast, the
one relic of the Adoptionist phase of Christianity which the book
contained ; and the details of its celebration would have had an
exceptional interest for the Christian archaeologist of to-day. But
the particular folio which contained this information, at some
remote period, and probably in the monastery of Monte Casino
where it was written, has been carefully cut out. If such precau-
tions were necessary as late as the twelfth century, what must not
have been destroyed in the fourth and fifth centuries, when the
struggle between the rival christologies raged all over the East
1
I refer to Limborch's edition.