Demopheles.  I am glad you reminded me of it.  Migration was the source of the evil; Christianity the dam on which it broke.  It was chiefly by Christianity that the raw, wild hordes which came flooding in were controlled and tamed.  The savage man must first of all learn to kneel, to venerate, to obey; after that he can be civilized.  This was done in Ireland by St. Patrick, in Germany by Winifred the Saxon, who was a genuine Boniface.  It was migration of peoples, the last advance of Asiatic races towards Europe, followed only by the fruitless attempts of those under Attila, Zenghis Khan, and Timur, and as a comic afterpiece, by the gipsies,—­it was this movement which swept away the humanity of the ancients.  Christianity was precisely the principle which set itself to work against this savagery; just as later, through the whole of the Middle Age, the Church and its hierarchy were most necessary to set limits to the savage barbarism of those masters of violence, the princes and knights:  it was what broke up the icefloes in that mighty deluge.  Still, the chief aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life pleasant as to render us worthy of a better.  It looks away over this span of time, over this fleeting dream, and seeks to lead us to eternal welfare.  Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a sense unknown in Europe till its advent; as I have shown you, by putting the morality and religion of the ancients side by side with those of Christendom.

Philalethes.  You are quite right as regards theory:  but look at the practice!  In comparison with the ages of Christianity the ancient world was unquestionably less cruel than the Middle Age, with its deaths by exquisite torture, its innumerable burnings at the stake.  The ancients, further, were very enduring, laid great stress on justice, frequently sacrificed themselves for their country, showed such traces of every kind of magnanimity, and such genuine manliness, that to this day an acquaintance with their thoughts and actions is called the study of Humanity.  The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place; and among the ancients there is nothing analogous to this, nothing that can be compared with it; for the slaves of the ancients, the familia, the vernae, were a contented race, and faithfully devoted to their masters’ service, and as different from the miserable negroes of the sugar plantations, which are a disgrace to humanity, as their two colors are distinct.  Those special moral delinquencies for which we reproach the ancients, and which are perhaps less uncommon now-a-days than appears on the surface to be the case, are trifles compared with the Christian enormities I have mentioned.  Can you then, all considered, maintain that mankind has been really made morally better by Christianity?