in the doctrines which it
professed, nearly all of which had their roots and their close parallels
in older Hellenistic or Hebrew thought, but in the organization on which
it rested. For my own part, when I try to understand Christianity as a
mass of doctrines, Gnostic, Trinitarian, Monophysite, Arian and the
rest, I get no further. When I try to realize it as a sort of
semi-secret society for mutual help with a mystical religious basis,
resting first on the proletariates of Antioch and the great commercial
and manufacturing towns of the Levant, then spreading by instinctive
sympathy to similar classes in Rome and the West, and rising in
influence, like certain other mystical cults, by the special appeal it
made to women, the various historical puzzles begin to fall into place.
Among other things this explains the strange subterranean power by which
the emperor Diocletian was baffled, and to which the pretender
Constantine had to capitulate; it explains its humanity, its intense
feeling of brotherhood within its own bounds, its incessant care for the
poor, and also its comparative indifference to the virtues which are
specially incumbent on a governing class, such as statesmanship,
moderation, truthfulness, active courage, learning, culture, and public
spirit. Of course, such indifference was only comparative. After the
time of Constantine the governing classes come into the fold, bringing
with them their normal qualities, and thereafter it is Paganism, not
Christianity, that must uphold the flag of a desperate fidelity in the
face of a hostile world--a task to which, naturally enough, Paganism was
not equal. But I never wished to pit the two systems against one
another. The battle is over, and it is poor work to jeer at the wounded
and the dead. If we read the literature of the time, especially some
records of the martyrs under Diocletian, we shall at first perhaps
imagine that, apart from some startling exceptions, the conquered party
were all vicious and hateful, the conquerors, all wise and saintly.
Then, looking a little deeper, we shall see that this great controversy
does not stand altogether by itself. As in other wars, each side had its
wise men and its foolish, its good men and its evil. Like other
conquerors these conquerors were often treacherous and brutal; like
other vanquished these vanquished have been tried at the bar of history
without benefit of counsel, have been condemned in their absence and
died wi