But if the doctrine of the Divine Unity destroyed the heathen gods, and so rendered its adherents liable to be called "godless" by their worshippers, no less did the doctrine of the Christian Sacrifice, which abolished at a stroke the whole worship of heathendom, create the keenest antagonism; they who were without gods were said to be without altars; they who never presented themselves at the heathen sacrifices were accounted as outcasts and sacrilegious men who renounced all piety. Yet complete and thorough as the antagonism drawn forth in these two great points of belief and worship, perhaps the third constituent element of the Christian society, its government, was even more calculated to awaken the jealousy and excite the resentment, if not of the various peoples which composed the empire, at least of the Roman rulers. The priests who ministered in the multitudinous temples to the various deities of the Roman world, were as various as the objects of their worship. No common hierarchy held together the priests of Egyptian, Asiatic, Hellenic, Roman gods, and all the intermediate gradations. But far more than this, there was an absence of hierarchy in the particular or national gods of each several country; the priest of Jupiter had nothing to do with the priest of Apollo, the priest of Juno, and the rest. The conception of many gods had introduced unnumbered weaknesses, anomalies, and incongruities into the arrangements of their ministers. When that which was worshipped was divided, the ministers of the several parts became rivals, with this grand result, as it affected the civil power, that it stood in one great mass of solid unity over against different religions, varying in their objects, crossing each other, contradicting each other. Thus it was that the original independence of divine worship had been lost; no one of these various priesthoods could maintain any real opposition to the civil ruler; no one of them presented any body of concordant doctrine which man's mind could approve, or his heart accept. That which ought to be most sacred among men was by internal contradictions become weak and contemptible. How, on the other hand, stood the case of the Christian society as to government?