Chapter 19.—Crimes of the Manichæans. 67.  We see then, now, the nature of your three symbols.  These are your customs.  This is the end of your notable precepts, in which there is nothing sure, nothing steadfast, nothing consistent, nothing irreproachable, but all doubtful, or rather undoubtedly and entirely false, all contradictory, abominable, absurd.  In a word, evil practices are detected in your customs so many and so serious, that one wishing to denounce them all, if he were at all able to enlarge, would require at least a separate treatise for each.  Were you to observe these, and to act up to your profession, no childishness, or folly, or absurdity would go beyond yours; and when you praise and teach these things without doing them, you display craft and deceit and malevolence equal to anything that can be described or imagined. 68.  During nine full years that I attended you with great earnestness and assiduity, I could not hear of one of your elect who was not found transgressing these precepts, or at least was not suspected of doing so.  Many were caught at wine and animal food, many at the baths; but this we only heard by report.  Some were proved to have seduced other men’s wives, so that in this case I could not doubt the truth of the charge.  But suppose this, too, a report rather than a fact.  I myself saw, and not I only, but others who have either escaped from that superstition, or will, I hope, yet escape,—we saw, I say, in a square in Carthage, on a road much frequented, not one, but more than three of the elect walking behind us, and accosting some women with such indecent sounds and gestures as to outdo the boldness and insolence of all ordinary rascals.  And it was clear that this was quite habitual, and that they behaved in this way to one another, for no one was deterred by the presence of a com- panion, showing that most of them, if not all, were affected with this evil tendency.  For they did not all come from one house, but lived in quite different places, and quite accidentally left together the place where they had met.  It was a great shock to us, and we lodged a complaint about it.  But who thought of inflicting punishment,—I say not by separation from the church, but even by severe rebuke in proportion to the heinousness of the offence? 69.  All the excuse given for the impunity of those men was that, at that time, when their meetings were forbidden by law, it was feared that the persons suffering punishment might retaliate by giving information.  What then of their assertion that they will always have persecution in this world, for which they suppose that they will be thought the more of? for this is the application they make of the words about the world hating them. 186  And they will have it that truth must be sought for among them, because, in the promise of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, it is said that the world cannot receive Him.187  This is not the place 186 John xv. 18. 187 John xiv. 17. Crimes of the Manichæans. 152 Crimes of the Manichæans.