Such, broadly, was the development in the East, where the virtual suppression or expulsion of Arianism by Theodosius and his successors showed what persistent persecution could do when carried on by both penal and economic means, through a hierarchy who knew how and where to strike, and had their hearts in the work. Arianism was not destroyed; indeed all of the great heresies of the first five centuries--Marcionism, Montanism, Arianism, Manichæism, Monophysitism, to say nothing of the Nestorian Church in Asia--are found subsisting in the eastern empire in the seventh century, despite both disendowment and cruel persecution, thus in effect proving that had Christianity been simply left alone, neither helped nor attacked by the State, it would have been dissolved in a score of warring sects by the fifth century. The Manichæans were as inflexible as ever were any of the Christists; and as against the convictions of the heretics in general the moral failure of the orthodox Church was absolute. By executing Priscillian in the fourth century it simply inflamed his following, which was strong in Spain two hundred years later. But though the endowed clergy could not convert or exterminate the others, they could keep them poor and ostracized, and wield against them the subsidized mob as well as the whole machinery of the State. Against such oppression the heretics could not compete as the early Jesuists had done against the careless course of paganism, with its isolated priests, so much more often indifferent than fanatical.