efforts that were requisite to drive them out and to punish them, had led to a temporary neglect of science, and in consequence to a certain decrease in the general propagation of knowledge; the Church immediately began to raise her head again and Faith to be revived, a revival partly of a poetical nature, in keeping with the spirit of the times.  On the other hand, in the more than thirty years’ peace that followed, leisure and prosperity promoted the building up of science and the spread of knowledge in an exceptional degree, so that the result was what I have said, the dissolution and threatened fall of religion.  Perhaps the time which has been so often predicted is not far distant, when religion will depart from European humanity, like a nurse whose care the child has outgrown; it is now placed in the hands of a tutor for instruction.  For without doubt doctrines of belief that are based only on authority, miracles, and revelation are only of use and suitable to the childhood of humanity.  That a race, which all physical and historical data confirm as having been in existence only about a hundred times the life of a man sixty years old, is still in its first childhood is a fact that every one will admit.

Demop.  If instead of prophesying with undisguised pleasure the downfall of Christianity, you would only consider how infinitely indebted European humanity is to it, and to the religion which, after the lapse of some time, followed Christianity from its old home in the East!  Europe received from it a drift which had hitherto been unknown to it—­it learnt the fundamental truth that life cannot be an end-in-itself, but that the true end of our existence lies beyond it.  The Greeks and Romans had placed this end absolutely in life itself, so that, in this sense, they may most certainly be called blind heathens.  Correspondingly, all their virtues consist in what is serviceable to the public, in what is useful; and Aristotle says quite naively, “Those virtues must necessarily be the greatest which are the most useful to others” ([Greek:  anankae de megistas einai aretas tas tois allois chraesimotatas], Rhetor.  I. c. 9).  This is why the ancients considered love for one’s country the greatest virtue, although it is a very doubtful one, as it is made up of narrowness, prejudice, vanity, and an enlightened self-interest.  Preceding the passage that has just been quoted, Aristotle enumerates all the virtues in order to explain them individually.  They are Justice, Courage, Moderation, Magnificence ([Greek:  megaloprepeia]), Magnanimity, Liberality, Gentleness, Reasonableness, and Wisdom.  How different from the Christian virtues!  Even Plato, without comparison the most transcendental philosopher of pre-Christian antiquity, knows no higher virtue than Justice; he alone recommends it unconditionally and for its own sake, while all the other philosophers make a happy life—­vita beata—­the aim of all virtue; and it is acquired through the medium of moral behaviour.  Christianity released European humanity from its superficial and crude absorption in an ephemeral, uncertain, and hollow existence.