believers. “They assemble together, listen together, pray together; indeed when heathen come, they cast what is holy to the dogs, and the pearls, which to be sure are not in fact pearls, to the swine.”4 The gathering for worship in the early church was not a public but a closed assembly, while the celebration of the Eucharist was reserved for the saints with the utmost strictness. Why? Some have explained this as part of the disciplina arcani in which the “initiated” were obliged to conceal the