On the other hand, it may be argued that the Church in receiving such recruits lost much of that simplicity of doctrine and practice to which it had hitherto owed her rapid and unvarying success. The Gnostics brought with them into their new faith the use of pictures and statues, of incense, and of all the paraphernalia of the worship of the heathen gods. Baptism which, among the Jewish community in which Christianity was born, was an extremely simple rite, to be performed by anybody and entirely symbolical in its character[75], became an elaborate ceremony which borrowed the name as well as many of the adjuncts of initiation into the Mysteries. So, too, the Agape (love-feast) or common meal, which in pre-Christian times was, as we have seen, common to all Greek religious associations unconnected with the State, was transformed by the Gnostics into a rite surrounded by the same provisions for secrecy and symbolizing the same kind of sacrifice as those which formed the central point of the mystic drama at Eleusis and elsewhere. Both these sacraments, as they now came to be called, were thought to be invested with a magical efficacy, and to demand for their proper celebration a priesthood as exclusive as, and a great deal more ambitious than, that of Eleusis or Alexandria. The daring speculations of the Gnostics as to the nature of the godhead and the origin of the world also forced upon the Catholics the necessity of formulating her views on these points and making adhesion to them a test of membership[76]. To do so was possibly to choose the smaller of two evils, yet it can hardly be denied that the result of the differences of opinion thus aroused was to deluge the world with blood and to stay the progress of human knowledge for more than a thousand years[77]. It is said that if Gnosticism had not been forcibly suppressed, as it was directly the Christian priesthood obtained a share in the government of the State, Christianity would have been nothing but a battle-ground for warring sects, and must have perished from its own internal dissensions. It may be so; but it is at least as possible that, if left unmolested, many of the wilder sects would soon have withered away from their own absurdity, and that none of the others would have been able to endure for long. In this respect also, the history of the post-Reformation sects offers an interesting parallel.