The early Christians of the mother church at Jerusalem subscribed to the Mosaic law, and the first fifteen bishops of Jerusalem were all circumcised Jews.  But the Gentile church rejected the intolerable weight of Mosaic ceremonies, and at length refused to their more scrupulous brethren the same toleration which at first they had humbly solicited for their own practise.  After the ruin of the temple of the city, and of the public religion of the Jews, the Nazarenes, as the Christian Jews of Jerusalem were called, retired to the little town of Pella, from whence they could make easy and frequent pilgrimages to the Holy City.  When the Emperor Hadrian forbade the Jewish people from approaching the precincts of the city, the Nazarenes escaped from the common proscription by disavowing the Mosaic law.  A small remnant, however, still combined the Mosaic ceremonies with the Christian faith, and existed, until the fourth century, under the name of Ebeonites.

The immortality of the soul had been held by a few sages of Greece and Rome, who were unwilling to confound themselves with the beasts of the field, or to suppose that a being for whose dignity they entertained the most sincere admiration could be limited to a spot of earth, and to a few years of duration.  But reason could not justify the specious and noble principles of the disciples of Plato.

To the Christians alone the authority of Christ gave a certainty of a future life, and when the promise of eternal happiness was proposed to mankind on condition of adopting the faith, and of observing the precepts of the Gospel, it is no wonder that so advantageous an offer should have been accepted by great numbers of every religion, of every rank, and of every province in the Roman Empire.  The immediate expectation of the second coming of Christ, and the reign of the Son of God with His saints for a thousand years, strengthened the ancient Christians against all trials and sufferings.

The supernatural gifts which even in this life were ascribed to the Christians above the rest of mankind must have conduced to their own comfort, and very frequently to the conviction of infidels.  The gift of tongues, of vision, and of prophecy, the power of expelling demons, of healing the sick, and of raising the dead, were prodigies claimed by the Christian Church at the time of the apostles and their first disciples.

Repentance for their past sins, and the laudable desire of supporting the reputation of the society in which they were engaged, rendered the lives of the primitive Christians much purer and more austere than those of their pagan contemporaries or their degenerate successors.  They were insistent in their condemnation of pleasure and luxury, and, in their search after purity, were induced to approve reluctantly that institution of marriage which they were compelled to tolerate.  A state of celibacy was regarded as the nearest approach to the divine perfection, and there were in the primitive church a great number of persons devoted to the profession of perpetual chastity.