But as the Episcopate was a tree growing upon one root, so the faith on which it lived was one sap. Yet to what danger of isolation, especially in those first times, were small communities of Christians in so many several cities exposed. The Sees, it is true, were not crystallised units, but associated in provinces under Metropolitans. Yet their bishops did not possess the civil liberty of meeting when they chose. Upon the whole action of the Church there was a perpetual constraint from without. The two forces which held the Church together were the Episcopate viewed as one body, and the directing, controlling, regulating authority of St. Peter's See at its centre. Yet not once in the well-nigh three hundred years could the Episcopate meet in universal councils, and the action of the Roman Church, an action which of all others within the bosom of the Christian society the Roman State would regard with the most jealousy, could only be exercised with a due respect to that jealousy, and in conjunction with that large measure of autonomy which the condition of a compressed and often-persecuted society, sprinkled over a vast number of provinces, imposed. One of the most effective means for maintaining unity and overcoming error was the regular meeting of Councils. In ante-Nicene times these took place in various provinces of the Church, but did not extend to the whole Church. The first Western General Council was held at Arles in 314, and it needed the permission of the Emperor Constantine to take place. Before the peace of the Church its various provinces stand out in groups, under the presiding influence of the greater Sees. Thus, Alexandria unites all the Churches of Egypt and Libya, and the great See of Antioch serves as a centre for the numerous Sees of the East. Ephesus collects the churches of Asia Minor, and Carthage those of Africa. A certain local spirit and certain tendencies of thought would grow up. Perhaps a certain school of teaching may be said to characterise each of these groups. Even the natural temperament[170] of the African, the Egyptian, the Asiatic, and the Oriental character, receiving the one seed of Christian doctrine, would show itself in their several developments. The correction of such local tendencies lay in the free and unfettered intercourse and relation with St. Peter's See; but it was this precisely which the above-noted circumstances of the times rendered difficult. For all these reasons we may look upon the period stretching from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council as one whole, in which the contest between the faith of the Church and the various forms of emergent or antagonistic error was carried on under trials which tested to the utmost her inherent vigour.