Views Vs. Tables

Are views used for securiry reasons, such as restricting access to certain columns/rows or is there performance advantages to using views. There is disagreement in my dept.

I created the following view PAYACTIVE:

Select * FROM PAYMENTS WHERE STATUS = 'ACTIVE'

The PAYACTIVE view contains 260 rows. The PAYMENTS table contains over 2 million rows. I executed the following commands:

Select * FROM PAYACTIVE

Select * FROM PAYMENTS WHERE STATUS = 'ACTIVE'

They seem to take the exact same amount of time. In other words, selecting from the view seemed to not help performance. Am I conducting a valid test?