While the Christians viewed with too much exultation the calamities that fell upon the prostrate people,(796) whose cup of bitterness they were destined through long centuries to fill to the brim, the Jews laboured with unwearied hatred to foment by calumnies the passions of the Pagan multitude.(797) On the other hand, the Catholic Christians showed themselves extremely willing to draw down the sword of the persecutor upon the heretical sects. When the Pagans accused the Christians of indulging in orgies of gross licentiousness, the first apologist, while repudiating the charge, was careful to add, of the heretics, “Whether or not these people commit those shameful and fabulous acts, the putting out the lights, indulging in promiscuous intercourse, and eating human flesh, I know not.”(798) In a few years the language of doubt and insinuation was exchanged for that of direct assertion; and, if we may believe St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria, the followers of Carpocrates, the Marcionites, and some other Gnostic sects, habitually indulged, in their secret meetings, in acts of impurity and licentiousness as hideous and as monstrous as can be conceived, and their conduct was one of the causes of the persecution of the orthodox.(799) Even the most extravagant charges of the Pagan populace were reiterated by the Fathers in their accusations of the Gnostics. St. Epiphanius, in the fourth century, assures us that some of their sects were accustomed to kill, to dress with spices, and to eat the children born of their promiscuous intercourse.(800) The heretics, in their turn, gladly accused the Catholics;(801) while the Roman judge, in whose eyes Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and heresy were but slightly differing modifications of one despicable superstition, doubtless found in this interchange of accusations a corroboration of his prejudices.