but from the rapid spread of monasticism and eremitism in this period.  The prevalence of this world-weariness of course needs explanation, and the cause is rather obscure.  It does not seem to be connected with unfavourable external conditions, but rather with a racial exhaustion akin to senile decay in the individual.  But there is no real analogy between the life of an individual and that of a nation, and it would be very rash to insist on the hypothesis of racial decay, which perhaps has no biological basis.

The influence of Christianity on population is very difficult to estimate.  Nothing is more unscientific than to collect the ethical precepts and practices of nations which profess the Christian religion, and to label them as ‘the results of Christianity.’  The historian of religion would indeed be faced by a strange task if he were compelled to trace the moral ideals of Simeon Stylites and of Howard the philanthropist, of Francis of Assisi and Oliver Cromwell, of Thomas Aquinas and Thomas a Becket, to a common source.  The only ethical and social principles which can properly be called Christian are those which can be proved to have their root in the teaching and example of the Founder of Christianity.  But the Gospel of Christ was a product of Jewish soil.  It is historically connected with the Jewish prophetic tradition, which it carried to its fullest development and presented in an universalised and spiritualised form.  Its social teaching consists chiefly of general principles which have to be applied to conditions unlike those contemplated by its first disciples, who were under the influence of the apocalyptic expectations prevalent at the time.  Jewish morality was in its origin the morality of a tribe of nomad Bedouins; and we have seen that infant life is held sacred by these peoples.  Marriage is regarded as a duty, and childlessness as a misfortune or a disgrace.  The forward look, characteristic of the Hebrews from the first, made every Jew desirous to leave descendants who might witness happier times, and one of whom might even be the promised Deliverer of his people.  No Hebrew of either sex was allowed to be a servant of vice; abnormal practices, though screened by Canaanite religion, were far less common than in Greece or Italy.  To this wholesome morality Christianity added the doctrines of the value, in the sight of God, of every human life, and of the sanctity of the body as the ‘temple of God.’  To the Pagans, the continence of the Christians was, next to their affection for each other, their most remarkable characteristic.  From the first, the new religion set itself firmly against infanticide and abortion, and won one of its most signal moral triumphs in driving underground and greatly diminishing homosexual vice.  Its encouragement of celibacy, especially for those who followed the ‘religious’ vocation, was an offset to its healthy influence on family life, and ultimately, as Galton has shown, worked great mischief by sterilising for centuries many of the gentlest and noblest in each generation; but this tendency was adventitious to Christianity, and would never have taken root on Palestinian soil.  The cult of virginity has lasted on, with much else that belongs to the later Hellenistic age, in Catholicism.