So far as the gospels can be taken to throw light on Christian beginnings, the cult grew up under conditions similar to those above described. Some of "the poor" in Jewry as elsewhere felt themselves in a manner outside the established worship; and though declamation against the rich had long been popular, the names given to the legendary disciples suggest that there too the new cults were in large measure promoted by aliens. The accounts of the founder as mixing much with "tax-gatherers and sinners" tell of the presence of such in the sect; and there too the constant presence of women stood for a sense either of feminine dissatisfaction with the bareness of the official worship, or of the need for a personal recognition which Judaism did not give to the subordinate sex. It does not appear that slaves were similarly welcomed in the Jewish stage of the movement; portions of the gospels even make Jesus appeal to the ideals of the slave-owner [16]; and nowhere is the slave himself sympathetically brought to the front. But it is clear that when the cult entered on a Gentile development it admitted slaves like the religious societies of the Greeks; and in the first Gentile period the members appear to have paid their way and managed their own affairs in the democratic Greek fashion. The determining political condition everywhere was the social sway of the empire, keeping all men impotent in the higher public affairs. Exclusion from public life, broadly speaking, had been the cause of the special addiction of the women, the slaves, and the unenfranchised foreigners of the Greek cities and of Rome to private cults and communions. Under the empire, all the lay classes alike were excluded from public power; and new interests must be found to take the place of the old. Within the pale of the Roman "peace," those interests were summed up for the majority in athletics, the theatre and the circus on the one hand; and on the other in the field of religious practices. Hopes of betterment, and despair after vain revolt, were alike fuel for the religious spirit; since the hope turned to vaticination, and the despair crept for shelter to the mysteries that promised a better life beyond the grave. But the prevailing lot of men had become one of unwarlike submission; the material refinements of civilization had bred in the cities a new sensitiveness, indeed a new neurosis; vice itself set up reactions of asceticism; and over all there brooded the pessimism of the prostrate East, the mood of men downcast, consciously the puppets of an uncontrollable earthly destiny, and wistful for a higher vision and rule. § 2. Jewish Orthodoxy