This admirable plan may be considered the germ of the countless associations by which the church has in all ages earned the gratitude of mankind by giving to Christianity its truest practical exposition. It combined a refuge for the desolate with a most efficient organization for spreading the faith and administering charity; and there was no thought of marring its utility by rendering it simply an instrument for exaggerating and propagating asceticism. St. Paul, indeed, expressly commands the younger ones to marry and bring up children;[188] and he could little have anticipated the time when this order of widows, so venerable in its origin and labors, would, by the caprice of ascetic progress, come to be regarded as degraded in comparison with the virgin spouses of Christ, who selfishly endeavored to purchase their own salvation by shunning all the duties imposed on them by the Creator.[189] Nor could he have imagined that, after eighteen centuries, enthusiastic theologians would seriously argue that Christ and his Apostles had founded regular religious orders, bound by the three customary vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.[190] In the early church, as has been already shown, all vows of continence and dedication to the service of God were a matter of simple volition, not only as to their inception, but also as to their duration. The male or female devotee was at liberty to return to the world and to marry at any time;[191] although during the purer periods of persecution, such conduct was doubtless visited with disapprobation and was attended with loss of reputation. As, moreover, there was no actual segregation from the world and no sundering of family ties, there was no necessity for special rules of discipline. When, under the Decian persecution, Paul the Thebæan, and shortly afterwards St. Antony, retired to the desert in order to satisfy a craving for ascetic mortification which could only be satiated by solitude, and thus unconsciously founded the vast society of Egyptian cenobites, they gave rise to what at length became a new necessity.[192] The associations which gradually formed themselves required some government, and the institution of monachism became too important a portion of the church, both in numbers and influence, to remain long without rules of discipline to regulate its piety and to direct its powers. As yet, however, a portion of the church, adhering to ancient tradition, looked reprovingly on these exaggerated pietistic vagaries. Lactantius, for instance, in a passage written subsequent to the conversion of Constantine, earnestly denounces the life of a hermit as that of a beast rather than of a man, and urges that the bonds of human society ought not to be broken, since man cannot exist without his fellows.[193]