"In short, the early Christians attempted to live out the story that gave them their humanity-the shape of the lives in which they discovered who the human truly was. It set them free to proclaim the gospel anywhere and everywhere, to disobey the Roman demand to worship, to risk death in a plague, to care for each other in costly ways, to raise children who were not their own, to build hospitals, to establish places of rest for the indigent and homes for orphans, to take time to educate themselves in the reading of scripture, and to do all these things and many, many more-without any obvious earthly reward."