ut
better than men in suffering; and it is always to be remembered that our
blessed Lord held his humanity, not of the stronger, but of the weaker
sex" ("Thoughts on Personal Religion," by Dean Goulburn, vol. ii., p.
99; ed. 1866). What is this but to say, in polite language, that Jesus
was very effeminate? The Christian religion has all the vices of
slavery, and encourages submission to evil instead of resistance to it;
it has in it the pathetic beauty of the meekness of the bruised and
beaten wife still loving the injurer, of the slave forgiving the
slave-driver, but it is a beauty which perpetuates the wrong of which it
is born. Better, far better, both for oppressor and for oppressed, is
resistance to cruelty than submission to it; submission encourages the
wrong-doer where resistance would check him, and Christianity fails in
that it omits to value strong men and true patriots, rebels against
authority which is unjust. Rome taught its citizens to reverence
themselves, to love their country, to maintain freedom: the Roman would
die gladly for his mother-country, and deemed his duty as a citizen the
foremost of his obligations. The love of country, and the sense of
service owed to the State, is the grandest and sublimest virtue of the
Pagan world. All felt it, from the highest to the lowest: at Thermopylae
the Spartans died gladly for the land they covered with their bodies,
faithful unto death to the duty entrusted to them by their country; men
and women equally felt the paramount claim of the State, and mothers
gave their sons to death rather than that they should fail in duty
there. The Roman was taught to value the Republic above its officers; to
resist the highest if he grasped at unfair supremacy; to maintain
inviolate the rights and the liberties of the people. Christianity
undermined all these manly virtues; it preached obedience to "the powers
that be," whether they were good or bad; it upheld the authority of a
Nero as "ordained of God," and pronounced damnation on those who
resisted him; and so it paved the way for the despotism of the Middle
Ages, by crushing out the manhood of the nations, and fashioning them
into Oriental slaves. Little wonder that kings embraced Christianity,
and forced it on their subjects, for it placed the nations bound at
their footstools, and endorsed the tyranny of man with the authority of
God. Throughout the New Testament what word is there of patriotism? The
citizenship is in h