Many of these people change their denomination every three or four years, returning to that they first quitted, leaving it again only to enter it anew, and so on as long as they live.

Their leaders set the example, throwing themselves enthusiastically into each new movement only to leave it before long.

They would all alike find it difficult to give an intelligible reason for these changes.

They say that the Spirit guides them, and it would be unfair to disbelieve them, but the historian who should investigate conditions like these would lose his head in the labyrinth unless he made a separate study of each of these Protean movements.

They are surely not worth the trouble.
In a somewhat similar condition was a great part of Christendom under Innocent III.; but while the sects of which I have just spoken move in a very narrow circle of dogmas and ideas, in the thirteenth century every sort of excess followed in rapid succession.