Here we touch what I think one of the greatest wonders that history has to show.  How did the Church do it?  If I may invent or adapt three words, the Christian “out-lived” the pagan, “out-died” him, and “out-thought” him.  He came into the world and lived a great deal better than the pagan; he beat him hollow in living.  Paul’s Epistles to the Corinthians do not indicate a high standard of life at Corinth.  The Corinthians were a very poor sort of Christians.  But another Epistle, written to the Corinthians a generation later, speaks of their passion for being kind to men, and of a broadened and deeper life, in spite of their weaknesses.  Here and there one recognizes failure all along the line—­yes, but the line advances.  The old world had had morals, plenty of morals—­the Stoics overflowed with morals.  But the Christian came into the world, not with a system of morality—­he had rules, indeed—­“which,” asks Tertullian, “is the ampler rule, Thou shalt not commit adultery, or the rule that forbids a single lustful look?”—­but it was not rules so much that he brought into the world as a great passion.  “The Son of God,” he said, “loved me and gave himself for me.  That man—­Jesus Christ loved him, gave himself for him.  He is the friend of my best Friend.  My best Friend loves that man, gave himself for him, died for him.”  How it alters all the relations of life!  Who can kill or rob another man, when he remembers whose hands were nailed to the Cross for that man?  See how it bears on another side of morality.  Tertullian strikes out a great phrase, a new idea altogether, when he speaks of “the victim of the common lust.”  Christ died for her—­how it safeguards her and uplifts her!  Men came into the world full of this passion for Jesus Christ.  They went to the slave and to the temple-woman and told them:  “The Son of God loved you and gave himself for you”; and they believed it, and rose into a new life.  To be redeemed by the Son of God gave the slave a new self-respect, a new manhood.  He astonished people by his truth, his honesty, his cleanness; and there was a new brightness and gaiety about him.  So there was about the woman.  They sang, they overflowed with good temper.  It seemed as if they had been born again.  As Clement of Rome wrote, the Holy Spirit was a glad spirit.  The word used both by him and by St. Augustine is that which gives us the English word “hilarious.”  There was a new gladness and happiness about these people.  “It befits Truth to laugh, because she is glad—­to play with her rivals because she is free from fear,” so said Tertullian.  Of course, there were those who broke down, but Julian the Apostate, in his letters to his heathen priests, is a reluctant witness to the higher character of Christian life.  And it was Jesus who was the secret of it.