PETROBRUSSIANS, a religious sect, which took its rise in France and the Netherlands about the year 1110. The name is derived from Peter Bruys, a Provençal, who made a most laudable attempt to reform the abuses and remove the superstition which disgraced the beautiful simplicity of the gospel. His followers were numerous, and for twenty years his labour in the ministry was exemplary and unremitting. He was, however, burned in the year 1130, by an enraged populace, said to have been set on by the clergy. The most noted of Bruys's followers was a monk named Henry, from whom the Petrobrussians were also called Henricians. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, wrote a treatise expressly against the Petrobrussians, in the preface to which he reduces their opinions to five heads. They denied that children before the age of reason can be justified by baptism, as it is our own faith that saves by baptism. They held that no churches should be built, an inn being as proper for prayers as a temple, and a stable as an altar; that the cross ought to be pulled down and burned, because we ought to abhor the instrument of our Saviour's passion; that the real body and blood of Christ are not exhibited in the eucharist, but merely represented by figures and symbols; and that sacrifices, alms, prayers, and the like, do not avail the dead. Langlois accuses the Petrobrussians of Manicheism, and says, they maintained two gods, the one good, the other evil; but this is rather an effect of his zeal for the Catholic cause, which led him to blacken its adversaries, than any real sentiment of the Petrobrussians.