[Phases of Faith by Francis William Newman]@TWC D-Link book
Phases of Faith

CHAPTER VIII
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Their diet was of fruits and herbs; they shrank with abhorrence from animal food." Mani met with fierce hostility from West and East alike; and at last was entrapped by the Persian king Baharam, and "was flayed alive.

His skin, stuffed with straw, was placed over the gate of the city of Shahpoor." Such a death was as cruel and as ignominious as that of crucifixion; yet his doctrines "expired not with their author.

In the East and in the West they spread with the utmost rapidity....

The extent of its success may be calculated by the implacable hostility of other religions to the doctrines of Mani; _the causes of that success are more difficult to conjecture_." Every reason, which, as far as I know, has ever been given, why it should be hard for early Christianity to spread, avail equally as reasons against the spread of Manichaeism.

The state of the East, which admitted the latter without miracle, admitted the former also.
It nevertheless is pertinent to add, that the recent history of Mormonism, compared with that of Christianity and of Manichaeism, may suggest that the martyr-death of the founder of a religion is a positive aid to its after-success.
[Footnote 1: See Strauss on the Infancy of Jesus.] [Footnote 2: My "Eclectic" reviewer (who is among the least orthodox and the least uncandid) hence deduces, that I have confounded the two questions, "Does the Bible contain errors in human science ?" and, "Is its purely spiritual teaching true ?" It is quite wonderful to me, how educated men can so totally overlook what I have so plainly and so often written.


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