That there were yet other sources of membership for the early Church, apart from direct conversion, is to be gathered from the allegorical writing known as the Pastor of Hermas, which is known to have been one of the most popular books in the whole Christian literature of the second century. This work, apparently written in Italy, never once mentions the name Jesus or the name Christ, and never quotes from any book in either Testament, nor alludes to a crucifixion or a eucharist; but speaks of One God, a Holy Spirit, and a Son of God who underwent labours and sufferings; of a "Church" which appears to mean the community of all good men; and of bishops and apostles and presbyters. It is intelligible only as standing for some species of pre-Jesuist propaganda very loosely related to Judaism, inasmuch as it appears to cite some apocryphal Jewish work, yet utters no Judaic doctrine. Its sole specified rite is baptism; and its moral teaching barely recognizes the idea of vicarious sacrifice. Such a work must have had its public before the Jesuist movement took sectarian or dogmatic form; and its popularity in the early Church must have come of the inclusion of its earlier following. When the Church attained definite organization and a dogmatic system the book was naturally discarded as having none of the specific qualities of a Christian document. A "Church" such as is ambiguously set forth in the Pastor may conceivably have been set up by one of the movements of Samaritan Christism already mentioned, or by that connected with the name of the Jew Elxai, who is recorded to have written of "Christ" without making it clear whether he referred to the gospel Jesus. As among the Elcesaites, so in the Pastor, the "Son" is conceived as of gigantic stature. On any view, being neither Christian nor anti-Christian, but simply pre-Christian, yet turned to Christian uses, the book strengthens the surmise that a number of the so-called heresies of the early Church were in reality survivals of earlier movements which the Church had absorbed, perhaps during times of persecution. The "heresy" of Simon Magus was certainly such a pre-Christian cult; that of Dositheus appears to be in the same case; and the ideas of the Pastor conform to no canonical version of the Christian creed. § 7. Growth of the Christ Myth