In revenge for the victories of the Christians, the pagans accused them of committing the grossest immoralities. For many centuries the early Christian congregations met under circumstances of great difficulty, in secret hiding-places, in catacombs. Their religious rites were performed mysteriously. Lights were often extinguished to foil the object of spies and informers. These peculiarities served as the pretext for many obvious calumnies. It was commonly believed, even by men of the calibre of Tacitus, that the Christian rites bore strong resemblances to those rites of Isis which, at an early period of Roman history, had created such alarm and horror at Rome. Nor were these calumnies confined to the heathen. In the third and fourth centuries, when sectarian rivalries menaced the destruction of the Church, similar accusations were freely bandied. That they were wholly unfounded in every case seems difficult to believe, in the face of the clear statements of such writers as Epiphanes. What the precise doctrines of the various sects called Adamites, Cainites, Nicolaites, and some subdivisions of Gnostics, may have been, it were perhaps superfluous now to inquire; but it seems not unreasonable to suppose that, in some instances, men of depraved instincts may have availed themselves of the cloak of Christianity to conceal the gratification of sensual habits; or, on the other hand, that minds in a state of religious exaltation may have stumbled upon impurities in the search for the state of nature. In comparatively late times we have seen, in America as well as Savoy, a few persons of weak minds give way to religious enthusiasm in a manner that warred with public decency. Similar aberrations may have been more frequent during the seething era which preceded the establishment of Christianity, and prostitution, in some shape or other, may have again become a religious rite in certain deluded or knavish sects. Nor was it unnatural, unjust though it certainly was, for the heathen to charge Christianity at large with the vices of those of its followers who worshiped in a state of nudity, and accompanied prayer with promiscuous intercourse.[156]