those which Christianity brought.

The continence which the Church inculcated was not otherwise new. The
Persians had imposed it on girls consecrated to the worship of the Sun. It
was observed by the priests of Osiris. It was the cardinal virtue of the
Pythagoreans. It was exacted of Hellenic hierophants. Gaul had her
druidesses and Rome her vestals. Celibacy existed, therefore, before
Christianity did. But it was exceptional in addition to being not very
rigorously enforced. Vesta was a mother. All the vestals that faltered
were not buried alive. There was gossip, though it be but legend, of the
druidesses, of the muses as well. Immaculacy was the ideal condition of
the ideal gods. Zeus materially engendered material divinities that
presided over forces and forms. But, without concurrence, there issued
armed and adult from his brain the wise and immaculate Pallas.

Like her and the muses, genius was assumed to be ascetic also. Socrates
thought otherwise. His punishment was Xantippe, and not a line to his
credit. A married Homer is an anomaly which imagination cannot comfortably
conjure. A married Plato is another. Philosophers and poets generally were
single. Lucretius, Vergil, and the triumvirs of love were unmarried. In
the epoch in which they appeared Rome was aristocratically indisposed to
matrimony. To its pomps there was a dislike so pronounced that Augustus
introduced coercive laws. Hypocrite though he were, he foresaw the dangers
otherwise resulting. It was these that asceticism evoked.

The better part of the tenets of the early Church--sobriety, stoicism,
the theory of future reward and punishment, pagan philosophy professed.
Adherents could, therefore, have been readily recruited. But the doctrine
of asceticism and, with it, the abnegation of whatever Rome loved,
angered, creating first calumny, then persecution.

Infanticide at the time was very common. To accuse the Christians of it
would have meant nothing. They were charged instead with eating the
children that they killed. That being insufficient they were further
charged with the united abominations of OEdipus and Thyestes.[29]

Thereafter, if the Tiber mounted or the Nile did not, if it rained too
heavily or not enough, were there famine, earthquakes, pests, the fault
was theirs. Then, through the streets, a cry resounded, _Christianos ad
leonem!_--to the arena with them. At any consular delay the mob had its
torches and tortures. Persecution augu