were false: "if you cannot do
it, you ought not to believe it of others. For a Christian is a man as
well as you" (Ibid). Yet, when Tertullian became a Montanist, he
declared that these very crimes _were_ committed at the Agapae, so that
he spoke falsely either in the one case or in the other. "It was
sometimes faintly insinuated, and sometimes boldly asserted, that the
same bloody sacrifices and the same incestuous festivals, which were so
falsely ascribed to the orthodox believers, were in reality celebrated
by the Marcionites, by the Carpocratians, and by several other sects of
the Gnostics.... Accusations of a similar kind were retorted upon the
Church by the schismatics who had departed from its communion; and it
was confessed on all sides that the most scandalous licentiousness of
manners prevailed among great numbers of those who affected the name of
Christians. A Pagan magistrate, who possessed neither leisure nor
abilities to discern the almost imperceptible line which divides the
orthodox faith from heretical depravity, might easily have imagined that
their mutual animosity had extorted the discovery of their common guilt"
("Decline and Fall," Gibbon, vol. ii., pp. 204, 205). It was fortunate,
the historian concludes, that some of the magistrates reported that they
discovered no such criminality. It is, be it noted, simultaneously with
the promulgation of these charges that the persecution of the Christians
takes place; during the first century very little is heard of such, and
there is very little persecution [see ante, pp. 209-213]. In the
following century the charges are frequent, and so are the persecutions.

To these strong arguments may be added the acknowledgment in 1. Cor.
xi., 17, 22, of disorder and drunkenness at these Agapae; the habit of
speaking of the communion feast as "the Christian _mysteries_," a habit
still kept up in the Anglican prayer-book; the fact that they took place
_at night_, under cover of darkness, a custom for which there was not
the smallest reason, unless the service were of a nature so
objectionable as to bring it under the ban of the tolerant Roman law;
and lastly, the use of the cross, and the sign of the cross, the central
Christian emblem, and one that, especially in connection with the
mysteries, is of no dubious signification. Thus, in the twilight in
which they were veiled in those early days, the Christians appear to us
as a sect of very different character to that b