Just as the theological dogma of the ethical value of religious opinions has made correct belief theoretically the saving virtue in Church ethics, so has the personality of Jesus, his teachings and his self-sacrificing life as mirrored in the gospel records, made love and service of others, in multitudes of souls, practically the supreme and controlling motive of life. It was the emphasis placed by primitive Christianity on this virtue, and the persuasion to its practice afforded by the example of the Master, that for the first two centuries of the new era--until the emphasis became changed from right living to right opinion--lent to the moral life in the Christian communities of the Empire such sincerity, purity, and elevation as have marked no other period in the history of the Church. But orthodox theology has never allowed that charity, though combined with perfect uprightness of life and expressed in noblest acts of self-abnegating service of humanity, is a saving virtue unless associated with correctness of religious belief and the outgrowth of it. This opposition in the bosom of the Church itself between theological and natural morality has created a great dualism in the moral history of all the Christian centuries, like the dualism in ancient Hebrew history caused by the opposition between the morality of ritualism and the morality of prophetism. [Sidenote: The body of secondary virtues] Alongside the primary Christian virtue, whether this be regarded as correct belief or as charity, were grouped a cluster of secondary virtues, such as humility, meekness, gentleness, compassion for weakness, resignation, and renunciation of the world. What is especially noteworthy respecting this body of moral qualities making up the Christian ideal of excellence is that all these were virtues which in general were undervalued or held in positive disesteem by the Greeks and Romans.[636] Indeed it was made a matter of reproach to the early Christians by the pagan opponents of Christianity, that its virtues were all servile virtues--the virtues of the slave. It was undoubtedly this character of the new ideal which caused it, in the primal age of Christianity, to make such strong appeal to the common people, to the despised and lowly, to the broken and humble in spirit, in the aristocratically graded society of the ancient world. [Sidenote: Creation of specific types through modifications of the general ideal] The Christian ideal of excellence has fulfilled itself in many ways; that is, different types have arisen through the shifting in rank of the virtues constituting the ideal, through the incorporation of pagan elements, through racial influence, and through the reaction upon the ideal of the changing intellectual, political, and economic environment.