In the poverty and struggles they have higher hopes, but when difficulties are surmounted, and they dwell at ease, they mistake or forget their vocation. The adversity and terrible persecution of the Church, coincident with its primitive enthusiasm, did a very great deal to preserve its health and purity; and it was simply natural, and to be expected, that when it emerged into prosperity and popular favour, like Jeshurun in his fatness, it should have rebelled, and instead of serving as it was ordained to do, should have usurped the power to rule. The iconography of early Christianity reflects even more clearly than its literature the various stages of its deterioration. As long as the world was against it, and it was compelled to use such places as the Catacombs for its shelter and worship, its faith was pure, and its life was full of exhilaration and brightness. Its symbolism was thoroughly ideal and spiritual, in sharp and instructive contrast with every Pagan specimen that has been discovered, and with its own subsequently paganised art. It was a symbolism, moreover, only of its hopes, and not of its one object of faith or of worship. It tolerated no symbol in worship save the water of Baptism and the bread and the wine of the Eucharist. It needed, as yet, no crucifix, not even a cross,[383] and it would not allow any image to reveal to the imagination the present but invisible Christ, or to suggest the profound meaning of His atonement. But when it went forth, the admired of the world, into the sunshine, and began to rear the grand basilicas, and people them with the tombs of the martyrs and the enshrined relics of the saints, the very desire to rise led it to fight heathenism with its own weapons, and to copy its splendours.[384] Even before this it was falling back from the simple service of the synagogue to that of the destroyed temple, but now it was found adopting the heathen festivals, or accommodating its own to their dates, and incorporating with its own the more imposing rites of still popular heathen fanes. To “offer the new law’s new oblation” it invented a new ritual and priesthood; and seeing a priesthood must have somewhat to offer, it discovered a new sacrifice in the very sacrament which was the Divine pledge and human thanksgiving for the abrogation of all external sacrifice.[385] Then the government of the Empire became the model of its organisation, and soon it was crowned in a Papacy professing to dominate, as vicegerent for Christ, a world which confessedly it has not yet been able to convert.