If there has ever been a time when organised Christianity was a concrete embodiment of the pure principles of the Gospel, we must look for it in the era of the persecutions, when the Church had already gained coherence and discipline and a corporate self-consciousness, and was still preserved from the corrupting influence of secularity by the danger which attended the profession of an illicit creed. A vivid picture of the Christian communities at this period has been given by Dobschuetz, whose learning and impartiality are unimpeachable. The Church at this time demanded from its followers an unreserved confession, even when this meant death. It was a brotherhood within which there was no privileged class. Men and women, the free and the slave, had an equal share in it. It abolished the fundamental Greek distinction of civilised and barbarian. It looked with contempt on none. Its great organisation was spread by purely voluntary means, till it gained a firm footing throughout the Empire and beyond it. To a large extent it was an association for mutual aid. Wherever anyone was in need, help was at hand. The tangible advantages of belonging to such a guild were so great that the Church had to enforce labour on all who could work, as a condition of sharing in the benefits of membership. Social distinctions, such as those of rich and poor, master and slave, were not abolished, but they had lost their sting, because genuine affection, loyalty and sympathy neutralised these inequalities. Great importance was laid on truth, integrity in business, and sexual purity. A complete rupture with pagan standards of morality was insisted on from new members. The human body must be kept holy, as the temple of God. Revenge was forbidden, and injustice was endured with meekness and pardon. This is no imaginary picture. In that brief golden age of the Church, such were indeed the characteristics of the Christian society. In the opinion of Dobschuetz the moral condition of the Church in the second century was much higher than among St. Paul's converts in the first. The paucity of references to sins of the flesh, and to fraud, is to be accounted for by the actual rarity of such offences. For a short time, then, the artificial selection effected by the persecutions kept the Church pure; and from the happy pictures which we can reconstruct of this period we can judge what a really Christian society would be like.