At the beginning of this age, the heretical as well as the non-heretical Ebionism may be regarded as virtually suppressed, although some scanty remnants of it might yet be found. The most brilliant period of Gnosticism, too, when the most serious danger from Paganism within the Christian pale in the form of Hellenic and Syro-Chaldaic Theosophy and Mysteriosophy threatened the church, was already past. But in Manichæism (§ 29) there appeared, during the second half of the third century, a new peril of a no less threatening kind, inspired by Parseeism and Buddhism, which, however, the church on the ground of the solid foundations already laid was able to resist with powerful weapons. On the other hand the Pagan element within the church asserted itself more and more decidedly (§ 39, 6) by means of the intrusion of magico-theurgical superstition into the catholic doctrine of the efficacy of the church sacraments and sacramental acts (§ 58). But now also, with Marcus Aurelius, Paganism outside of Christianity as embodied in the Roman state, begins the war of extermination against the church that was ever more and more extending her boundaries. Such manifestation of hostility, however, was not able to subdue the church, but rather led, under and through Constantine the Great, to the Christianizing of the state and the establishment of the church. During the same time the episcopal and synodal-hierarchical organization of the church was more fully developed by the introduction of an order of Metropolitans, and then in the following period it reached its climax in the oligarchical Pentarchy of Patriarchs (§ 46, 1), and in the institution of œcumenical Synods (§ 43, 2). By the condemnation and expulsion of Montanism, in which the inner development of the Post-Apostolic Age reached its special and distinctive conclusion, the endeavour to naturalize Christianity among the social customs of the worldly life was certainly legitimized by the church, and could now be unrestrictedly carried out in a wider and more comprehensive way. In the Trinitarian controversies, too, in which several prominent theologians engaged, the first step was taken in that œcumenical-ecclesiastical elaboration of doctrine which occupied and dominated the whole of the following period (§§ 49-52).