e present day, it appears (Edith Sellers, _Cornhill_, August,
1910), there are more disorderly houses in Geneva, in proportion to the
population, than in any other town in Europe.

[216] See e.g. P. Hausmeister, "Zur Analyse der Prostitution," _Geschlect
und Gesellschaft_, 1907, p. 294.

[217] Theodore Schroeder, _"Obscene" Literature and Constitutional Law_,
New York, 1911.

[218] Thus Sir Samuel Dill (_Roman Society_, p. 11) calls attention to the
letter of St. Paulinus who, when the Empire was threatened by
barbarians, wrote to a Roman soldier that Christianity is incompatible
with family life, with citizenship, with patriotism, and that soldiers
are doomed to eternal torment. Christians frequently showed no respect
for law or its representatives. "Many Christian confessors," says Sir
W.M. Ramsay (_The Church in the Roman Empire_, chap. xv), "went to
extremes in showing their contempt and hatred for their judges. Their
answers to plain questions were evasive and indirect; they lectured
Roman dignitaries as if the latter were the criminals and they
themselves the judges; and they even used violent reproaches and coarse,
insulting gestures." Bouche-Leclercq (_L'Intolerance Religieuse et le
Politique_, 1911, especially chap. X) shows how the early Christians
insisted on being persecuted. We see much the same attitude to-day among
anarchists of the lower class (and also, it may be added, sometimes
among suffragettes), who may be regarded as the modern analogues of the
early Christians.

[219] It may well be, indeed, that in all ages the actual sum of
immorality, broadly considered--in public and in private, in thought and
in act--undergoes but slight oscillations. But in the nature of its
manifestations and in the nature of the manifestations that accompany
it, there may be immense fluctuations. Tarde, the distinguished thinker,
referring to the "delicious Catholicism" of the days before Luther,
asks: "If that amiable Christian evolution had peacefully continued to
our days, should we be still more immoral than we are? It is doubtful,
but in all probability we should be enjoying the most aesthetic and the
least vexatious religion in the world, in which all our science, all our
civilization, would have been free to progress" (Tarde, _La Logique
Sociale_, p. 198). As has often been pointed out, it was along the lines
indicated by Erasmus, rather than along the lines pursued by Luther,
that the progress of civilization