PAIILI'CIANS, an ancient sect of the eastern empire, who, by Catholic writers, are reckoned an offshoot of the Maniehteans (q.v.). According to Peter of Sicily and Photius, the sect originated in Armenia from two brothers; named Paul (from whom it is alleged to have received its name) and John, who flourished in the 4th century. Others trace it to an Armenian named Paul, who lived under Justinian 1i The 1 '1 2an..c.ans were at all times treated with much suspicioh, and repressed with great severity, by the eastern emperors; Constans, Justinian II„ and Leo the Isaurian especially labored to repress them, and indeed, with the exception of Nicephorus Logotheta (802-811), it may be said that all the emperors, with more or less rigor, persecuted them. Their greatest enemy, however, was Theodora (841-85* who, having ordered that they should be compelled to return to the Greek church, had all the recusants cruelly put to the sword or driven into exile. A bloody resistance, and finally an emigration into the Saracen territory, was the consequence; and it is from the Panlician settlers in Bulgaria (Catholic historians) that the Manichatan doctrines which tinged the opinions of most of the mediaeval sects are supposed by Roman Catholic historians to have found their way into the eastern provinces of the western empire. Even so late as the 17th c., according
to Alchheim 238), there was a remnant of this sect existing in Bulgaria.
It is proper, however, to notice that a very different view of the character and. doc trines of the Paulieians has been advocated by such modern writers on ecclesiastical history as Gieseler and Neander, according to whom they had their origin from one Constantine of Mananalis (near Samosata), an Armenian, who had received a present of two volumes—one containing the four gospels, and the other the epistles of Paul—and who afterwards assumed the name of Paul, in testimony of his great veneration for that aposlle. The distinctive characters of his doctrine and that of his followers were the rejection of the worship of the Virgin, the saints, and the cross, the denial of the material presence of Christ in the euelmrist, and the assertion of a right freely to search the Scriptures; and the charge of Manichaeism was falsely brought against them by their persecutors.