The other charges against Callistus show a general policy of liberality. He decreed that a bishop who was convicted of mortal sin was not necessarily to be deposed: he permitted men who had been twice or thrice married to become deacons or priests: he directed that "men in orders" must not be disturbed if they married. Some writers think that, in the latter case, he was referring only to men in minor orders, but that would not have been a daring innovation. Hippolytus, in fact, makes his policy and his character clearer by telling us, indignantly, how Callistus searched the Scriptures for proof that the Church must be wide enough to embrace both saints and sinners. There had been clean and unclean animals in the ark: Christ had said that the tares must grow up with the wheat: and so on. His reputation for liberality spread so far in the Church that, while Tertullian grumbled in Africa, a quaint Syrian charlatan named Alcibiades was attracted from the East to Rome. He brought a mystic work, given to him by two angels of the imposing height of ninety-six miles each, and he proclaimed that his new form of baptism absolved even from certain gross sins which he very freely and suggestively described. The Church grew during these years of peace, of able organization, and of humanization. Callistus "made a _basilica_ beyond the Tiber"--the _Liber Pontificalis_ says--and there is an interesting passage in the _Historia Augusta_ which seems to refer to this first Christian chapel at Rome. The biographer of Alexander Severus says (c. xliii.) that the Emperor wished to give the Christians the right to have public chapels, but his officials protested that "the temples would be deserted--all Rome would become Christian." This is obviously a piece of later Christian fiction. In a more plausible paragraph, however, Lampridius tells us that the Christians occupied a "public place," to which the innkeepers laid claim, and the Emperor decided that "it was better for God to be worshipped there in some form than for the innkeepers to have it." It is probable enough that this inn is the _taverna meritoria_ (wine shop and restaurant) referred to by Dio Cassius[22]: among the portents which accompanied the struggles of Octavian a stream of oil had burst forth in this hostel in the Transtiberina. We know from Orosius[23] that the Christians claimed the occurrence in later years as a presage of the coming of Christ. The age, if not the disputed ownership, of the place suggests a dilapidated, if not deserted, building; and if we may in one detail trust that interesting romance, the _Acta S. Callisti_, we have a picture of the Christians of the third century meeting at last, under their enterprising Bishop, in the upper or dining room of this humble old inn in the despised Transtiberina. This was the high-water mark of a century and a half of progress.