Amiable, in its own nature, and full of a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often had its advantage of characters such as that.

The geniality of Antoninus Pius, like the geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the church, as being in truth no alien from that old mother earth, to expand and thrive for a season as by natural process.

And that charmed period under the Antonines, extending to the later years of the [120] reign of Aurelius (beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical history!), contains, as one of its motives of interest, the earliest development of Christian ritual under the presidence of the church of Rome.
Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of Hermas, "the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty: only her hair was that of an aged woman.

And at the last she was joyous, and seated upon a throne--seated upon a throne, because her position is a strong one." The subterranean worship of the church belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was illegal for her to worship at all.

But, hiding herself for awhile as conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more than ordinary risk, her natural freedom.