The development of the councils in the third century is a proof at once of the growth of organization in the Church and of the need for it. It is not to be supposed that all orthodox Churchmen looked practically to the main chance; it is clear, on the contrary, that many were moved by the conservative zeal of the Bibliolater of all ages, as the heretics were presumably moved by a spirit of reason; but the bishops must at all times have included many who looked at questions of creed from the standpoint of finance, like so many members of modern political parties; and they would be apt to turn the scale in every serious dispute. Even they, however, with whatever aid from polemical propaganda, could not long have availed to preserve anything like a preponderating main body if the Church were left to itself. The polemical writers, broadly speaking, converted nobody, but merely inflamed those already convinced; and party strife was becoming more and more comprehensive, more furious, more menacing, when the Church was saved from itself by the State. CHAPTER II RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE § 1. Persecutions It was involved in the aggressive attitude of the Christist movement that it should be persecuted by a partly countervailing fanaticism. The original bias of all ancient religion, indeed, in virtue of the simple self-interest of priesthoods, had been to resent and suppress any new worship; and though nowhere else is the course so ferociously enjoined as in the Hebrew sacred books, there are many traces of it in the pagan world. Thus the Dionysiak cult had been violently resisted on its introduction into Greece; and the early Roman law against foreign worships was turned against it, under circumstances plainly exaggerated by Livy, about 187 B.C. Later a religious panic led to the official suppression in Rome of the worships of Isis and Serapis. Empire, however, everywhere involved some measure of official toleration of diverging cults; and as in Babylon and Egypt, so under the Hellenistic and Roman systems, the religions of each of the provinces were more or less assimilated in all. When even early Athens had been constrained to permit the non-aggressive cults of the aliens within her walls, far-reaching empires could do no less. Indeed, the very vogue of Christism depended on the fact that throughout the empire there was taking place a new facility of belief in strange Gods. There can be no more complete mistake than the common assertion that it made its appeal in virtue of the prevalence of "desolating scepticism." On the contrary, rationalism had practically disappeared; and even the Roman pagans most adverse to Christism were friendly to other new cults.