Manichaeism before the Manichaeans, and its Revival in Christianity

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...to the excellent author, in his most elegant discourse on the Retractions of the Fathers, reprinted with his Academic First Fruits, page 112 and following; likewise to Johann Schmid in his Dissertation on the Recantations of the Learned, Leipzig, 1697; to Paganino Gaudenzi An Italian polymath and professor known for his vast reading and critique of literature. in The Midwife of Literature, Dissertation X, page 86 and following; and to Almeloveen Theodoor Jansson van Almeloveen, a Dutch physician and classical scholar. on page 97 of his work On New-Ancient Inventions.

Just as this commonality of erring should seem surprising to no one who has seen the source and spring of common error; so too, I believe, it will seem a wondrous thing to many that such errors exist which have touched the minds of almost everyone, and, having been received by the consensus of nearly everyone, have taken on no small appearance of truth.

Indeed, certain wise men, who were engaged in collecting errors of this kind, have ensured that we doubt this less. Specifically, Thomas Browne, the famous English physician—whom Lipenius in the Philosophical Library, page 474b, and König in the Library of the Old and New, page 139, confused with his namesake original: "ὁμωνύμῳ" (homōnymō) — the author is correcting a bibliographical error where the famous doctor Sir Thomas Browne was confused with Robert Browne, the founder of the "Brownist" religious sect., the leader of the Brownist sect—in his Inquiries into Common Errors original: "Inquisitionibus in vulgi errores" — referring to the Latin edition of Browne's famous 1646 work, Pseudodoxia Epidemica., and Laurent Joubert in his book written in French On Popular Errors, about which the distinguished Pierre Bayle Author of the influential "Historical and Critical Dictionary," a cornerstone of early Enlightenment thought. deserves to be read in Volume II of his Historical-Critical Dictionary, page 1654.

I myself do not require the work of either man, as I am persuaded of the truth of the matter by two clear examples of errors, which the annals of history testify have spread throughout all antiquity and also more recent memory. The first...