If ever anti-Christianity had a chance to show its beauty, it was when it was at its supreme strength, and when Christianity was a babe in the manger; and these are only suggestions of the hell it dug for man at Rome.  You say that it was not what skepticism is at the present day, and I acknowledge that it is so.  Why?  Because nineteen centuries have rolled like waves of light between, and Christ has improved it in spite of itself.  Never had the world so good a chance to see what almost absolute skepticism and unbelief could and would do for the liberty of the human soul as then.  But when the thrones of Rome were occupied with men who held the same opinion of the Bible as he does today, what was the freedom of the race?

The scene all comes back.  Here is a little, obscure set of poor people who follow the words and life of the son of a carpenter.  They are powerful in nothing that Rome calls power.  But Rome says that they shall not think that way.  Celsus, from whom our less scholarly skepticism is ready to borrow arguments, was not enough for the new thought in the arena of debate, and they cried for another arena.  Let us remember that unbelief, in its purity at that date, was so offended at nothing as at the fact that the Church said:  “Christian justice makes all equal who bear the name of man,” and that Paul said:  “There is neither bond nor free, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”  Nothing so offended the representative of free thought in that period as the fact that a rich Roman, in the time of Trajan, having become a Christian, presented freedom to his 1,250 slaves on an Easter day.  And, in all that time, when poor Christians with the funds of the Church were privately buying the freedom of slaves, I do not find that a base liberalism believed in liberty.  Neither did it believe in freedom of thought.  It is the blossom of egotism; it has nothing to which it bows; it beholds no majesty to which it can look up.  It is sublime self-conceit, and it has no hesitancy in telling the whole human race that at its grandest moments it has been wrong.  This egotism dared to become active in Rome, and it asked the Christians, in the person of the Emperor, to worship him, and to strew incense about him.  “I will honor the Emperor,” said Theophilus, “not by worshiping him, but by praying for him.”  Such men as that infidelity kindly put to death.  Around their quivering limbs the infidelity of that day made the fagots to flame, and it taught the red tongues of cruel death to creep about their smoking bodies.

Men who believed that the Bible’s influence was what infidelity says it is, made the funeral pyre for Polycarp, the populace bringing fuel for the fire, and while the flames made a glory of their lambent glare, he cried out:  “Six and eighty years have I served him and he has done me nothing but good, and how could I curse him, my Lord and Savior.  If you would know what I am, I tell you frankly, I am a Christian.”  He did his own thinking,