Where early Christism had met the cravings alike of ascetics, of mystics, of simple emotionalists, and of poor seekers after a concrete God not hedged around with altars and priests, thus appealing both to heretic Jews and to heretic Gentiles, the later heresies ostensibly appealed as a rule either to ascetics or to dogmatists, and offered nothing to the multitude that it could not find within the Church, shades of dogma apart. Manichæism indeed remained to prove that what was virtually a new religion could rise and persist for centuries in the teeth of Christianity, by methods and appeals very like those of Christism; but it also served to prove that organized and endowed and established Christianity, inspired by an enduring hate, could check and overshadow the rival religion where unorganized paganism, for lack of general animus and systematic official zeal, had failed to subdue Christianity. And the political elimination of nominal Arianism in the West served to prove afresh that orthodoxy finally triumphed in that regard by enlisting on its side not only the instincts of polytheism but the interests of monarchy. It is significant that, driven from the empire, Arianism flourished best in the barbarian world, where for a time some mental freedom might be supposed to subsist. If any rational motive is to be assigned for the zealous adoption of the Athanasian creed by such rulers as Theodosius, it is presumably their perception that the most irrational dogma went best with discipline: that the spirit which presumed to rationalize religion was the less ready for political obedience. On the other hand, the Trinitarian clergy of Spain found their advantage as a hierarchy by bringing round their Arian masters to the orthodox creed. In any case, the triumph of orthodoxy went step for step not only with intellectual dissolution and moral paralysis, but with the disruption of the empire. § 2. The Cost of Orthodoxy