Very early in its career the leaders of the infant Church must have realized two things—firstly, that those who, like the Gnostics, were passionately interested in philosophical and mystical interpretations of the life of Christ, not only differed very widely among themselves, but also often paid little attention to that personal life of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, whose sweetness was beginning to bind men together with marvellous new ties; secondly, that the simple and ignorant people to whom, according to the Gospels, Jesus addressed Himself almost exclusively, would be quite incapable of grasping these interpretations. If Christianity was to spread, it must be simplified. For these reasons the leading spirits gradually set their faces more and more rigidly against those long and laboriously evolved ideas which had actually created the language of the Gospels. And no doubt there were other reasons too: the most shocking immorality was rampant everywhere, and in those days opinion and behaviour were more closely bound up with one another. Moreover, in all but the strongest natures an extreme love of moral purity is often accompanied by an extreme love of exerting authority. Therefore incredibly industrious Fathers busied themselves in editing and selecting from the literature and traditions of a hundred semi-Christian sects. Doctrines which had taken a very strong hold on many imaginations were accepted, given the orthodox stamp, and incorporated in the canon; others were rejected, and, being pursued at first with a mixture of genuine logic, misrepresentation, and invective, and, as the Church grew stronger, with active persecution, gradually vanished away or dwindled down to obscure apocryphal manuscripts, some of which have only been partially translated within the last twenty-five years. Thus, for more than ten centuries, creeds and dogmas, to the accompaniment of immense intellectual and physical struggles, were petrified into ever clearer and harder forms. Christianity became identified with Catholic doctrine, and, soon after the Church’s authority was backed by that of the Roman Empire, any other form of it might be punished by death amid excruciating tortures. The stigma which still attaches to the ordinary Greek word for ‘choosing’ (_heresy_) is a fair indication of the zeal with which the early Popes and Bishops set about expunging from the consciousness of Christendom all memory of its history and all understanding of its external connections; while their success may be judged from the fact that as late as the last century an Englishman of public position who should have openly interpreted the Old Testament as Origen, for instance, interpreted it in the third century, would have incurred serious disabilities.