Of the early Christian community many were slaves, and perhaps from three to five per cent paupers. The proportion of women was perhaps as large as it is in the churches of to-day; for it was one of the pagan taunts that to women the preachers preferred above all to address themselves, and rich women members seem to have been relatively numerous. All orders alike believed fervently in evil spirits; and the most constant aspect of their faith was as a protection against demoniacal influence. In the service of the Church of Rome in the third century there were forty-six presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, forty-two acolythes or clerks, and fifty "readers," exorcists, and janitors; and the exorcists were at least as hard-worked as any other members of the staff. On the side of morality, much stress was laid on the sins of the flesh, partly because these were the commonest, partly because the idea of an intellectual ethic had not arisen; and while the Church was liable to gusts of persecution its practice was naturally somewhat strict. Men and women who had joined the body mainly for its alms or its agapæ were not likely to adhere to it in times of trouble; and the very proclamation of an ascetic standard would primarily attract those persons, found in every community, who had a vocation for asceticism. At almost any period, however, such were to be found in the heretical or dissentient groups as well as in the main body, while the testimony of the Pauline epistles is distinct as to the antinomianism of many "apostolic" converts. Some Gnostic sects were stringently ascetic if others were antinomian, the à priori principle lending itself alternately to the doctrines that the spirit must mortify the flesh, and that the deeds of the flesh are nothing to the spirit. Within the main body, the conflicting principles of faith and works, then as later, involved the same divergences of practice. The evidence of Tertullian is emphatic as to the illusoriness of much Christian profession in his day in the churches of Carthage, where zeal was at least as abundant as elsewhere.