emotion, with less wallowing in the dust and less
delirium.

Be that as it may, we have now seen in outline the kind of religion
which ancient Paganism had become at the time of its final reaction
against Christianity. It is a more or less intelligible whole, and
succeeds better than most religions in combining two great appeals. It
appeals to the philosopher and the thoughtful man as a fairly complete
and rational system of thought, which speculative and enlightened minds
in any age might believe without disgrace. I do not mean that it is
probably true; to me all these overpowering optimisms which, by means of
a few untested _a priori_ postulates, affect triumphantly to disprove
the most obvious facts of life, seem very soon to become meaningless. I
conceive it to be no comfort at all, to a man suffering agonies of
frostbite, to be told by science that cold is merely negative and does
not exist. So far as the statement is true it is irrelevant; so far as
it pretends to be relevant it is false. I only mean that a system like
that of Sallustius is, judged by any standard, high, civilized, and
enlightened.

At the same time this religion appeals to the ignorant and the
humble-minded. It takes from the pious villager no single object of
worship that has turned his thoughts heavenwards. It may explain and
purge; it never condemns or ridicules. In its own eyes that was its
great glory, in the eyes of history perhaps its most fatal weakness.
Christianity, apart from its positive doctrines, had inherited from
Judaism the noble courage of its disbeliefs.

To compare this Paganism in detail with its great rival would be, even
if I possessed the necessary learning, a laborious and unsatisfactory
task. But if a student with very imperfect knowledge may venture a
personal opinion on this obscure subject, it seems to me that we often
look at such problems from a wrong angle. Harnack somewhere, in
discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian
sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main determining cause in
each case was not their comparative reasonableness of doctrine or skill
in controversy--for they practically never converted one another--but
simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth-rate in the
respective populations. On somewhat similar lines it always appears to
me that, historically speaking, the character of Christianity in these
early centuries is to be sought not so much