From the first, the Christian communities made a just boast of the purity of their morals. Their adversaries met them on this ground at great disadvantage. It was notorious that the college of Vestals had been sustained with great difficulty. Latterly, it had been found necessary to supply vacancies with children, and even under these circumstances, the number of Vestals buried alive bore but a very small proportion to the number who had incurred this dread penalty. Nor could it be denied that the chastity of the Roman virgins was, at best, but partial, the purest among them being accustomed to unchaste language and unchaste sights. The Christian congregations, on the contrary, contained numbers of virgins who had devoted themselves to celibacy for the love of Christ. They were modest in their dress, decorous in their manners, chaste in their speech.[145] They refused to attend the theatres; lived frugally and temperately; allowed no dancers at their banquets; used no perfumes, and abstained generally from every practice which could endanger their rigorous continence.[146] Marriage among the Christians was a holy institution, whose sole end was the procreation of children. It was not to be used, as was the case too often among the heathen, as a cloak for immoralities. Christ, they said, permitted marriage, but did not permit luxury.[147] The early fathers imposed severe penitences on fornication, adultery, and other varieties of sensuality. Persecution aided the Church in the great work of purifying public morals, by forcing it to keep in view the Christian distinction between moral and physical guilt. At what time it became usual to condemn Christian virgins to the brothel it is difficult to discover. The practice may have arisen from the hideous custom which enjoined the violation of Roman maidens before execution, if the existence of such a custom can be assumed on the authority of so loose a chronicler as Suetonius.[148] However this be, this horrible refinement of brutality was in use in the time of Marcus Aurelius.[149] Virgins were seized and required to sacrifice to idols. Refusing, they were dragged, often naked, through the streets to a brothel, and there abandoned to the lubricity of the populace. The piety of the early Christians prompted the belief that on many conspicuous occasions the Almighty had interfered to protect his chosen children in this dire calamity.[150] St. Agnes, having refused to sacrifice to Vesta, was said to have been stripped naked by the order of the prefect; but, no sooner had her garments fallen, than her hair grew miraculously, and enveloped her as in a shroud. Dragged to the brothel, a wonderful light shone from her body, and the by-standers, appalled at the sight, instead of offering her violence, fell at her knees, till, at last, the prefect's son, bolder and more reckless than the others, advanced to consummate her sentence, and was struck dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.[151]