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.

In point of fact, Christian doctrine, as propounded by Paul, is not at
all so honourable to woman as that which German soundness of heart has
established. With Paul[13] the _sole_ reason for marriage is, that a
man may gratify instinct without sin. He teaches, that _but_ for this
object it would be better not to marry. He wishes that all were in