ever anti-Christianity had a chance to show its beauty, it was when
it was at its supreme strength, and when Christianity was a babe in
the manger; and these are only suggestions of the hell it dug for man
at Rome. You say that it was not what skepticism is at the present
day, and I acknowledge that it is so. Why? Because nineteen centuries
have rolled like waves of light between, and Christ has improved it
in spite of itself. Never had the world so good a chance to see what
almost absolute skepticism and unbelief could and would do for the
liberty of the human soul as then. But when the thrones of Rome were
occupied with men who held the same opinion of the Bible as he does
today, what was the freedom of the race?

The scene all comes back. Here is a little, obscure set of poor people
who follow the words and life of the son of a carpenter. They are
powerful in nothing that Rome calls power. But Rome says that they
shall not think that way. Celsus, from whom our less scholarly
skepticism is ready to borrow arguments, was not enough for the new
thought in the arena of debate, and they cried for another arena. Let
us remember that unbelief, in its purity at that date, was so offended
at nothing as at the fact that the Church said: "Christian justice
makes all equal who bear the name of man," and that Paul said: "There
is neither bond nor free, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Nothing
so offended the representative of free thought in that period as
the fact that a rich Roman, in the time of Trajan, having become a
Christian, presented freedom to his 1,250 slaves on an Easter day.
And, in all that time, when poor Christians with the funds of the
Church were privately buying the freedom of slaves, I do not find
that a base liberalism believed in liberty. Neither did it believe in
freedom of thought. It is the blossom of egotism; it has nothing to
which it bows; it beholds no majesty to which it can look up. It is
sublime self-conceit, and it has no hesitancy in telling the whole
human race that at its grandest moments it has been wrong. This
egotism dared to become active in Rome, and it asked the Christians,
in the person of the Emperor, to worship him, and to strew incense
about him. "I will honor the Emperor," said Theophilus, "not by
worshiping him, but by praying for him." Such men as that infidelity
kindly put to death. Around their quivering limbs the infidelity of
that day made the fagots to flame, and it taught