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A sect founded about the year 1110 in Languedoc and Provence, by Peter de Bruys, who made the most laudable attempts to reform the abuses and to remove the superstitions that disfigured the beautiful simplicity of the Gospel; though not without a mixture of fanaticism. The following tenets were held by him and his disciples:
1. That no persons whatever were to be baptized before they were come to the full use of their reason.
2. That it was an idle superstition to build churches for the service of God, who will accept of a sincere worship where-ever it is offered; and that, therefore, such churches as had already been erected, were to be pulled down and destroyed.
3. That the crucifixes, as instruments of superstition, deserved the same fate.
4. That the real body and blood of Christ were not exhibited in the eucharist, but were merely represented in that ordinance.
5. That the oblations, prayers, and good words of the living, could be in no respect advantageous to the dead. The founder of this sect, after a laborious ministry of twenty years, was burnt in the year 1130 by an enraged populace set on by the clergy, whose traffic was in danger from the enterprising spirit of this new reformer.