The writer who in England was the first to take a comparatively scientific view of church organization from the ecclesiastical side, the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, puts in the forefront of his survey "the preliminary assumption that, as matter of historical research, the facts of ecclesiastical history do not differ in kind from the facts of civil history." [346] For those who see in the religion itself a processus of natural social history, this assumption is a matter of course; but the ecclesiastical recognition of the fact is an important step; and the churchman's analysis of the process is doubly serviceable in that he keeps the study avowedly separate from that of the evolution of doctrine. What he could not have supplied on scientific lines without falling into heresy, the rationalist can supply for himself. As our historian recognizes, the Christian movement in the Eastern Empire had from the outset a strong basis in the democratic spirit which it derived alike from Jewish and from Hellenistic example. In the day of universal autocracy, social life lay more and more in the principles of voluntary association; and the first Christian churches were but instances of an impulse seen in operation on all sides. In the Jewish environment, the synagogue; in the Hellenistic the ecclesia or private association, were everywhere in evidence. Greek religious associations--thiasoi, eranoi, orgeones--were but types of the prevailing impetus to find in voluntary organized groups a substitute for the democratic life of the past. [347] Whereas the older associations for the promotion of special worships were limited to male free citizens, the new admitted foreigners, slaves, and women. Besides religious associations there were a multitude of others which had the double aspect of clubs and friendly societies; trade guilds existed "among almost every kind of workmen in almost every town in the empire:" [348] and burial clubs, dining clubs, financial societies, and friendly societies met other social needs. Almost every society, however, had its tutelary divinity, "in the same way as at the present day similar associations on the continent of Europe"--as in England before the Reformation--"invoke the name of a patron saint; and their meetings were sometimes called by a name which was afterwards consecrated to Christian uses--that of a 'sacred synod.'" [349] In many of them "religion was, beyond this, the basis and bond of union.... Then, as now, many men had two religions, that which they professed and that which they believed; for the former there were temples and State officials and public sacrifices; for the latter there were associations; and in these associations, as is shown from extant inscriptions, divinities whom the State ignored had their priests, their chapels, and their ritual." [350]