However this may be, there can be little doubt that this is the meaning of the position he assigned to the Hearers.
“If,” he says according to the Mahommedan author, “he who would enter into the religion does not feel strong enough to practise the abstinences before enumerated, let him renounce the attempt. If, however, he is filled with love for the faith, yet cannot conquer desire and greed, let him seek to progress by protecting the faith and the Just, and let him fight against evil actions on the occasions when he can give himself to labour[[1095]], piety, vigilance, prayer and humility. This will fill him with contentment both in this ephemeral world, and in the eternal world to come, and he will put on the body of the second degree in the state which follows after death[[1096]].”
Unless they are greatly belied, some of his later followers looked upon this as a licence to the Hearers to commit such sins as they chose[[1097]] in this life, yet it is evident that this formed no part of Manes’ original teaching. He imposed upon the Hearers, says the Mahommedan tradition, ten commandments, which were: to abstain from prayers offered to idols, from lying, from avarice, from murder, from adultery, from false teaching, from magic, from double dealing, from doubt in religion and from slackness and want of energy in action. They also had to recite certain prayers which will be mentioned in their place, and to fast two days when the Moon is new as when she is full, as also when the Sun enters the sign of Sagittary. A three days’ fast was also obligatory on the first appearance of the Moon after the entry of the Sun into the signs of Capricorn and of Libra. But they were to feast on Sunday, a day which the Perfect, according to the Mahommedans, kept as a fast, their own weekly feast being held on Monday[[1098]].
The attitude of Manes to other religions was also without precedent or parallel. Of the Jews and of their religion he seems to have had a detestation so strong and so deeply rooted that it is difficult not to see in it some connection with political events of which we have lost the record. The war of extermination which Hadrian had been forced to wage against the Jews of Palestine must have been over nearly a century before Manes began to teach; but the Babylonian Jews can hardly have been affected by this, and the story of the king of Adiabene quoted above shows that shortly before the time of Ardeshîr they actively pursued the proselytizing policy which their countrymen in the West had been forced to abandon. In doing so, they doubtless contrived, after their manner, to offend the national prejudices of their hosts, while showing themselves greedy, as ever, of political power[[1099]]. This probably provoked reprisals, and it is quite possible that Manes’ teaching derived some of its strength from the revulsion felt by Ardeshîr’s Aryan subjects to the borrowings from Judaism to be found both in Mithraism and the Avestic literature. But whatever its cause, there can be no doubt about the hatred felt by Manes for the Jewish religion, which is prominent in every tradition of his teaching. The earlier Gnostics, like Marcion, had made the God of the Old Testament a harsh but just and well-meaning tyrant; but Manes would have none of this, and declared that he was a fiend.
“It is the Prince of Darkness,” the Christian tradition makes him say, “who spoke with Moses, the Jews, and their priests. Thus the Christians, the Jews, and the Pagans are involved in the same error when they worship this God. For he led them astray in the lusts that he taught them, since he was not the God of Truth. Whence those who put their hope in that God who spoke with Moses and the Prophets will be bound with him, because they have not put their trust in the God of Truth. For he, the God of the Jews, spoke with them according to their lusts[[1100]].”
In a very different spirit, however, Manes dealt with all the other religions that he knew. He acknowledged the Divine origin of the teachings of Zoroaster, of Buddha, and of Jesus alike, with the reservation that he should himself be regarded as the Paraclete, which here seems to mean nothing more than the Legate or Ambassador, sent by the Good God to complete their teaching. “Mânî, the messenger of the God of Truth to Babylonia[[1101]]” is the title which, as we have seen, he gives himself in the most authentic record of his teaching. He aimed, in short, at establishing a universal religion which should include within its scope the three faiths that between them commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized world, and should acknowledge him as its founder and chief. Had his plans come to fruition in his lifetime, he would have attained an empire over the minds of men far greater and wider than any ever claimed or dreamed of by the most ambitious of the Roman pontiffs.
The full details of the way in which he proposed to establish this new faith we shall probably never know; but discoveries made during the last decade have shown us that his plans were well fitted to their purpose. The successive expeditions of Drs Grünwedel and von Le Coq to Turfan have shown that up to as late as the XIth century A.D., there was still a strong body of Manichaeans probably belonging to the Ouigur nation in Chinese Turkestan, living apparently in complete amity with their Buddhist countrymen[[1102]]. The writings that were there discovered, to which we shall have to refer more in detail later, are mostly written in a script resembling the Estranghelo or Syriac but with an alphabet peculiar to the Manichaean religious documents, and which cannot, one would think, have been adopted by those who used it for any other purpose than that of concealment[[1103]]. Judging from this and the practice of the sect in Europe from the time of Diocletian onward, it seems highly probable that among Buddhists, the Manichaean hearers professed Buddhism, and among Zoroastrians, Zoroastrianism, hoping that thus they might be able to turn their fellows to their way of thinking without openly dissenting from the reigning religion. The persecution that Bahram I instituted against them immediately upon Manes’ execution was perhaps less a reason than a pretext for this.
This is certainly borne out by their proceedings when they found themselves among Christians.
“You ask me if I believe the gospel,” said the Manichaean Prefect, Faustus, in his dispute with St Augustine (himself for nine years before his conversion a Manichaean Hearer). “My obedience to its commands shows that I do. I should rather ask you if you believe it, since you give no proof of your belief. I have left my father, brother, wife and children and all else that the gospel requires; and you ask me if I believe the gospel. Perhaps you do not know what is called the gospel. The gospel is nothing else than the teaching and the precept of Christ. I have parted with all gold and silver. I have left off carrying money in my purse; content with food obtained from day to day; without anxiety for the morrow and without care as to how I shall be fed or wherewithal I shall be clothed; and you ask if I believe the gospel? You see in me the blessings of the gospel; and yet you ask if I believe the gospel. You see me poor, meek, a peacemaker, pure in heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, bearing persecutions and hatred for righteousness’ sake; and do you doubt if I believe in the gospel[[1104]]?”
So, too, Manes in the epistle to Marcellus which, although much altered and corrupted by its Catholic transcribers, is probably a genuine document, is careful to begin in language which seems imitated from the Epistles of St Paul: