Christianity, unlike Buddhism, came very early into collision with the most advanced civilisation and highest culture of the world, while Buddhism for centuries encountered only the religions of inferior peoples. The only equal or superior civilisation which it met was that of China, and there, though tolerated and even patronised from the first, it seems for centuries to have been regarded as an exotic. Natives of India, like the Jews in the Roman Empire, were allowed to build Buddhist temples, but only in the fourth century A.D. did Chinese people begin extensively to be converted to the Buddhist religion. As it rose into favour its conflicts with the Confucianists began, and the issue of its varied fortunes has been, that though indirectly it has greatly influenced, it has only subdued a section of the Chinese people.[342] While other inferior races came quickly under its influence, the most civilised of Eastern peoples resisted it, and have at most only been leavened by it.[343] Christianity had also its easy conquests, as when some northern tribes were converted in a day by the baptism of their chiefs; but its principal struggle with the historic Paganism of aristocratic Rome was fierce and obdurate. There the position, as in the case of Hinduism to-day, was not carried by assault, but by slow and almost imperceptible approaches. The Church at Rome for two centuries was more a Greek than a Latin one. The names of its bishops were Greek, and the Catacomb inscriptions sufficiently indicate that Greek was the language of its members. Slowly and indirectly, however, it gained the hold upon ancient thought and custom, operating like an alterative in the system, supplanting what was good, by simply taking possession of it and inspiring it with a new life, while that which was decaying and waxing old gradually vanished away.