of Paganism from Teutonic Europe.  There is nothing in all this to distinguish the outward history of Christianity from that of Mohammedism.  Barbarous tribes, now and then, venerating the superiority of our knowledge, adopt our religion:  so have Pagan nations in Africa voluntarily become Mussulmans.  But neither we nor they can appeal to any case, where an old State-religion has yielded without warlike compulsion to the force of heavenly truth,—­“charm we never so wisely.”  The whole influence which Christianity exerts over the world at large depends on the political history of modern Europe.  The Christianity of Asia and Abyssinia is perhaps as pure and as respectable in this nineteenth century as it was in the fourth and fifth, yet no good or great deeds come forth out of it, of such a kind that Christian disputants dare to appeal to them with triumph.  The politico-religious and very peculiar history of European Christendom has alone elevated the modern world; and as Gibbon remarks, this whole history has directly depended on the fate of the great battles of Tours between the Moors and the Franks.  The defeat of Mohammedism by Christendom certainly has not been effected by spiritual weapons.  The soldier and the statesman have done to the full as much as the priest to secure Europe for Christianity, and win a Christendom of which Christians can be proud.  As for the Christendom of Asia, the apologists of Christianity simply ignore it.  With these facts, how can it be pretended that the external history of Christianity points to an exclusively divine origin?

The author of the “Eclipse of Faith” has derided me for despatching in two paragraphs what occupied Gibbon’s whole fifteenth chapter; but this author, here as always, misrepresents me.  Gibbon is exhibiting and developing the deep-seated causes of the spread of Christianity before Constantine, and he by no means exhausts the subject.  I am comparing the ostensible and notorious facts concerning the outward conquest of Christianity with those of other religions.  To account for the early growth of any religion, Christian, Mussulman, or Mormonite, is always difficult.

III.  The moral advantages which we owe to Christianity have been exaggerated by the same party spirit, as if there were in them anything miraculous.

1.  We are told that Christianity is the decisive influence which has raised womankind:  this does not appear to be true.  The old Roman matron was, relatively to her husband,[12] morally as high as in modern Italy:  nor is there any ground for supposing that modern women have advantage over the ancient in Spain and Portugal, where Germanic have been counteracted by Moorish influences.  The relative position of the sexes in Homeric Greece exhibits nothing materially different from the present day.  In Armenia and Syria perhaps Christianity has done the service of extinguishing polygamy:  this is creditable, though nowise miraculous.  Judaism also unlearnt polygamy, and made an unbidden improvement upon Moses.  In short, only in countries where Germanic sentiment has taken root, do we see marks of any elevation of the female sex superior to that of Pagan antiquity; and as this elevation of the German woman in her deepest Paganism was already striking to Tacitus and his contemporaries, it is highly unreasonable to claim it as an achievement of Christianity.