persuading the orthodox to ban the ministry to women. Tertullian, while still an orthodox propagandist, snarled at this subversion of Church order: 'The impudence of the heretics’ women! They dare to teach, to dispute, to carry out exorcisms, perform cures - perhaps they even baptize. . . . Of course, nowhere is promotion easier than in a camp of rebels: the mere fact of being there is meritorious!’ In his tract On Baptism and the Veiling of Virgins, he emphatically denied that women could exercise any ministerial functions. There were two lines of attack on the Montanists. On the one hand, they were accused of excessive austerity; thus Hippolytus, putting the orthodox case in his Refutation omnium haeresium: ‘They introduced novelties in the shape of special fasts and ceremonies, and diets of radishes which they adopted on the inspired advice of their womenfolk.' But Montanus was also attacked for handling large sums of money, for moving about in an ostentatious manner and for paying stipends to his chief followers. Some of the orthodox smears on him are manifest inventions. Eusebius repeats a tale that Montanus and his chief woman-prophet died as a result of a suicide pact, but he indicates that this is fiction. Many of the accusations leveled merely suggest that the Montanists were behaving like the Church, were in fact the Church in large areas - thus they raised money, and paid their clergy and so forth. The best indication of the moral worthiness of the movement is that Tertullian, the scourge of heretics, eventually joined it. He could not continue to endorse an orthodoxy which denied any independent role to the Spirit and insisted that all communication with the deity should be through the regular ecclesiastical channels. So profound was his conviction of the reality of direct spiritual intervention that he accepted aspects of it he had hitherto regarded as quite repugnant; especially after he had witnessed their efficacy. Thus, as a Montanist, he wrote in De Anima at the end of his life: 'We have now among us a sister who has been granted gifts of revelations, which she experiences in church during the Sunday services through ecstatic vision in the Spirit.’ Tertullian's case gives us a precious, in some ways unique, glimpse into the workings of the early Church. Here was a great Church statesman, a man of impeccable rectitude and burning faith, embracing heresy. His adherence thus completely undermines the orthodox attacks on the morals and public behavior of the Montanists, sets a stamp of ethical approval, at any rate, on the movement. The Montanists were evidently sincere, holy and probably humble and abstemious people. But that we know this Is due to accident, or rather to the conscious decision of orthodox authority to preserve Tertullian as a personality and a theological writer. Normally he would have been allowed to sink into oblivion, or have survived as a caricatured fragment. But he was not only the first, but one of the most outstanding Latin theologians; the bulk of his work constitutes a tremendous affirmation of the Christian faith. It was exciting to read then, as indeed it still is now. Tertullian was too precious to be sacrificed to orthodox uniformity. Though the first Protestant, he was saved by his art. The Church continued to reproduce and use his works, or the bulk of them, and thus, incidentally, confirms the good faith of the Montanists. As a rule, however, those who disputed with what later became, or already was, the orthodox tradition, have been buried under a mountain of ecclesiastical Billingsgate. Odium theologicum was not a Christian innovation. It was part of the Judaic heritage, along with the concept of heresy and the anathema. As we have seen, the bland, irenic tone of the Acts, picturing the early Church as a collegiate body of fairminded senators, moving peaceably to collective decisions, belies the reality we find in Paul. Harsh words among the brothers in Christ made their appearance early and thereafter there was a steady inflation in the exchange of abuse. In the second century, discussion with heretics yielded to polemic and the magnitude of the orthodox accusations and the scurrility of the abuse, usually corresponded to the success of the movement. With the growth of polemic, it became necessary to attack the morals as well as the doctrine of the divergent. In fact the theory soon developed that doctrinal error inevitably induced moral decay. Thus orthodox polemicists could invent and believe accusations in good faith. Montanist officials were accused of gluttony and avarice simply because they received salaries. The orthodox Apollonius accused Alexander, 29