Now, against all this, the Christians set their faces sternly, and the result was to make them regarded as anti-patriotic and anti-social. Their success among the lower classes had been rapid. Christianity levelled all distinctions: it welcomed the master and his slave, the outcast and the pure: it treated woman as the spiritual equal of man: it held out to each the hope of a future life. Thus far, all was to the good, although the old Mithraic religion had done well-nigh as much. But Christianity held aloof from the common social life, putting itself out of touch with the manifold activity of Rome. It sought to apply certain maxims of Jesus literally; it discouraged marriage, it brought disunion into family life; it counselled avoidance of service in the army or acceptance of any public office. This general attitude was wholly due to the belief that with the return of Jesus, the end of the world was at hand. For Jesus had foretold his second coming, and the earliest epistles of the apostles bade the faithful prepare for it. Here there was no continuing city; citizenship was in heaven, for the kingdom of Christ was not of this world. Therefore to give thought to the earthly and fleeting was folly and impiety, for who would care to heap up wealth, to strive for place or to pursue pleasure, or to search after what men called "wisdom," when these imperilled the soul, and blocked the way to heaven? The prejudice created by this belief, expressed in such direct action as refusal to worship the guardian gods and the "genius" of the Emperor, was deepened by ugly, although baseless, rumours as to the cruel and immoral things done by the Christians at their secret meetings. And so it came to pass that Tacitus spoke of Christianity in the terms quoted; that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (who refers to it only once in his Meditations) dismissed it with a scornful phrase; that the common people called it atheistic; and that, finally, it became a proscribed and persecuted religion.