It is easy to imagine what efforts were doubtless made to extend the rule and to render it as imperative throughout the East as it was becoming in the West, when we read the extravagant laudations of virginity uttered about this time by St. John Chrysostom, who lent the sanction of his great name and authority to the assertion that it is as superior to marriage as heaven is to earth, or as angels are to men.[159] Strenuous as these efforts may have been, however, they have left no permanent record, and their effect was short-lived. Within thirty years of the time when Jerome quoted the example of the eastern churches as an argument against Vigilantius, Socrates chronicles as a novelty the introduction into Thessalia of compulsory separation between married priests and their wives, which he says was commanded by Heliodorus, Bishop of Trica, apparently to compensate for the amatory character of the “Æthiopica,” written in his youth. The same rule, Socrates informs us, was observed in Greece, Macedonia, and Thessalonica, but throughout the rest of the East he asserts that such separation was purely voluntary, and even that many bishops had no scruple in maintaining ordinary intercourse with their wives[160]—a statement easy to be believed in view of the complaints of St. Isidor of Pelusium, about the same time, that the rules of the church enjoining chastity received little respect among the priesthood.[161] The influence of Jerome, Chrysostom, and other eminent churchmen, the example of the West, and the efforts of the Origenians in favor of philosophic asceticism, doubtless had a powerful effect during the first years of the fifth century in extending the custom, but they failed in the endeavor to render it universal and obligatory, and the testimony of Socrates shows how soon even those provinces which adopted it in Jerome’s time returned to the previous practice of leaving the matter to the election of the individual. The East thus preserved the traditions of earlier times, as recorded in the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons, prohibiting marriage in orders and the ordination of digami, but imposing no compulsory separation on those who had been married previous to ordination.