We have passed, then, through a twilight age, to find a new civilised empire ruled on the lines of the old, but with a single, albeit much-divided religion, and that the Christian, all others having been extirpated not by persuasion but by governmental force, after the new creed, adapting itself to its economic conditions, had secured for itself and its poor adherents, mainly from superstitious rich women, an amount of endowment such as no cult or priesthood possessed in the days of democracy. This process of endowment itself originated, however, in pagan practice; for in the days of substitution of emotional Eastern cults for the simpler worships of early Hellas, there had grown up a multitude of voluntary societies for special semi-religious, semi-festival purposes--_thiasoi_, _eranoi_, and _orgeones_, all cultivating certain alien sacrifices and mysteries, as those of Dionysos, Adonis, Sabazios, Sarapis, Cotytto, or any other God called "Saviour."[289] These societies, unlike the older Hellenic associations of the same names[290] for the promotion of native worships, were freely open to women, to foreigners, and even to slaves;[291] they were absolutely self-governing; the members subscribed according to their means; and we find them flourishing in large numbers in the age of the Antonines,[292] when the old state cults were already deserted, though still endowed. They represent, as has been said, the reappearance of the democratic spirit and the gregarious instinct in new fields and in lower strata when general and practical democracy has been suppressed. In some such fashion did the Christian Church begin, employing the attractions and the machinery of many rival cults. Its final selection and establishment by the Empire represented in things religious a process analogous to that which had forcibly unified the competing republics of Greece in one inflexible and unprogressive organisation. Nothing but governmental force could have imposed doctrinal unity on the chaos of sects into which Christianity was naturally subdividing; but the power of conferring on the State Church special revenues was an effective means of keeping it practically subordinate.