The primitive Christian association was more than a church in the modern sense. It was a loyal group of like-minded people. It was a state within the state, a social unit dominating the main part of the lives of its members, and not merely a center for worship. It is this aspect of the early religious associations which I wish to stress; for it is the question, whether this phase {189} of the church still exists to justify the church as an institution, into which I wish to enquire. In the vast loneliness of the Roman Empire, men felt the need to draw together in order to escape the dreariness of life. The teeming interests and intense loyalties of the old city-state had disappeared and left men stranded in a cosmopolitan State, ordered from above, in which they had no vital participation; it was too gigantic and formal to touch them in a personal fashion and to kindle those enthusiasms which lift men beyond economic cares. It was well to be a Roman citizen, but such an honor did not suffice for the more homely needs of everyday existence. In the days of Athenian greatness, the individual was lost in the citizen; in the Roman Empire, the citizen was lost in the individual. Man is a social animal--to adapt Aristotle's famous expression--and the inhabitants of the various countries sought to create associations of various sorts to fill this gap caused by the destruction of the old political interests. In other words, men tried to weave a new social tissue of a private type to answer their craving for companionship and for the chance to do something worth doing. Remove the business, artistic, political, trades-union, literary and social interests in their present free and varied form from modern life, and we can gain some idea of the unsatisfactoriness of human life under the Empire for the lower and poorer classes. Monotonous as village life is to-day, it is throbbing with life as compared with the village or tenement district of ancient days. The farmer has his newspaper, the farmer's wife the magazine, and the piano, and the trip to town. Small wonder that these men and women of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds {190} formed clubs and associations in which to escape from a disheartening loneliness and feel themselves members one of another.