THE CHALLENGE OF CHRISTIANITY. Into a Roman world that had already passed the zenith of its greatness came this new Christian faith, challenging almost everything for which the Roman world had stood. In place of Roman citizenship and service to the State as the purpose of life, the Christians set up the importance of the life to come. Instead of pleasure and happiness and the satisfaction of the senses as personal ends, the Christians preached denial of all these things for the greater joy of a future life. In a society built on a huge basis of slavery and filled with social classes, the Christians proclaimed the equality of all men before God. To a nation in which family life had become corrupt, infidelity and divorce common, and infanticide a prevailing practice, the Christians proclaimed the sacredness of the marriage tie and the family life, and the exposure of infants as simple murder. In place of the subjection of the individual to the State, the Christians demanded the subjection of the individual only to God. In place of a union of State and religion, the Christians demanded the complete separation of the two and the subordination of the State to the Church. Unlike all other religions that Rome had absorbed, the Christians refused to be accepted on any other than exclusive terms. The worship of all other gods the Christians held to be sinful idol-worship, a deadly sin in the eyes of God, and they were willing to give up their lives rather than perform the simplest rite of what they termed pagan worship (R. 28). To the deified Emperor the Christians naturally could not bend the knee (Rs. 30 b, 31 a-b, 34). At first the new faith attracted but little attention from anybody of education or influence. Its converts were few during the first century, and these largely from among the lowest social classes in the Empire. Workmen and slaves, and women rather than men, constituted the large majority of the early converts to the new faith. The character of its missionaries [8] also was against it, and its challenge of almost all that characterized the higher social and governmental life of Rome was certain to make its progress difficult, and in time to awaken powerful opposition [9] to it. Yet, notwithstanding all these obstacles, its progress was relatively rapid.