As regards the Christist doctrine of sacrificial salvation, it is found that both under Judaism and under paganism higher moral standards had been reached by many thinkers; and Christism, as we have seen, was rather an adhesion to the popular religious ethic, which on this side was of an immemorial antiquity. So, too, many of the greater pagan and Jewish thinkers, while holding to the belief in immortality, had long before transcended the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, and had repelled the conception of a God of wrath; whereas the Christists stressed the conceptions prevalent among average Jews and Gentiles, taking over bodily, in particular, the popular idea of hell-torments, which was as vivid, and as inefficacious, in the ancient world as in the medieval. Worse still, the new faith ultimately introduced the frightful dogma of the damnation of all unbaptized infants, a teaching before undreamt of, and capable only of searing the heart. For the rest, the formal ethic was very much the same in all cults as to the duties of honesty, truthfulness, charity, and chastity; and the practice in all seems to have been alike precarious. Not any more than any of the contemporary religions did Christism offer any such social or political guidance as might conceivably have arrested the political paralysis and decadence of the whole imperial world. On the contrary, the gospels and epistles alike predict a speedy doomsday, and counsel political submission, showing no trace of any other ideal; while at the end of the second century such a teacher as Origen is found coupling the principle of the universal Roman dominion with that of the universal church. To any surviving vestiges of the ideal of self-government, Christian literature was broadly hostile. Inasmuch, too, as the gospel explicitly urged celibacy as a condition of ready salvation (Lk. xx, 35; cp. Mt. xix, 12), it tended to hold at arm's length the mass of normal people and to attract the fanatics and the pretenders to sanctity. In all likelihood, however, such doctrines were stressed only by the more ascetic teachers and sects; the Pauline letters, for instance, finally holding a middle course.