hts reached by the Christian converts.

That was the point to which Augustine directed his vast genius and his
unrivalled logic. He admitted that arts might civilize, and that the
elaborate mythology which he ridiculed was interesting to the people,
and was, as a creation of the poets, ingenious and beautiful; but he
showed that it did not reveal a future state, that it did not promise
eternal happiness, that it did not restrain men from those sins which
human laws could not punish, and that it did not exalt the soul to lofty
communion with the Deity, or kindle a truly spiritual life, and
therefore was worthless as a religion, imbecile to save, and only to be
classed with those myths which delight an ignorant or sensuous people,
and with those rites which are shrouded in mystery and gloom. Nor did
he, in his matchless argument against the gods of Greece and Rome, take
for his attack those deities whose rites were most degrading and
senseless, and which the thinking world despised, but the most lofty
forms of pagan religion, such as were accepted by moralists and
philosophers like Seneca and Plato. And thus he reached the intelligence
of the age, and gave a final blow to all the gods of antiquity.

It would be instructive to show that the religion of Greece, as embraced
by the people, did not prevent or even condemn those social evils that
are the greatest blot on enlightened civilization. It did not
discourage slavery, the direst evil which ever afflicted humanity; it
did not elevate woman to her true position at home or in public; it
ridiculed those passive virtues that are declared and commended in the
Sermon on the Mount; it did not pronounce against the wickedness of war,
or the vanity of military glory; it did not dignify home, or the virtues
of the family circle; it did not declare the folly of riches, or show
that the love of money is a root of all evil. It made sensual pleasure
and outward prosperity the great aims of successful ambition, and hid
with an impenetrable screen from the eyes of men the fatal results of a
worldly life, so that suicide itself came to be viewed as a justifiable
way to avoid evils that are hard to be borne; in short, it was a
religion which, though joyous, was without hope, and with innumerable
deities was without God in the world,--which was no religion at all, but
a fable, a delusion, and a superstition, as Paul argued before the
assembled intellect of the most fastidious and cultivat