[muawiyah]

It's easy enough to forget about the non-gnostic hermits in Egypt and North Africa in the early days.

Some of them were certainly serious men ~ and a lot of them were simply churches with one member, and him not all that reliable.

That aspect of Christianity disappeared after the islamic conquest of North Africa.

That's most of a thousand years before Protestantism came along.

Here's where I remind everyone that all the early Protestants had been either Orthodox or Roman Catholic Christians. This stuff didn't just appear out of the mists. Neither did those early hermits.

[newberger]

Even the hermits in the early days of monasticism came together as part of the church on Sunday.