ean mind, remained so long unproductive, still religious
organisation deserves our gratitude equally for keeping these great
treasures for happier times. They survived, as trees stripped by winter
of their leaves survive through frost and storm, to give new blossoms in
a new spring.

This much on the intellectual side; but how can we describe the moral
transformation which the new faith brought to pass? Men who had hitherto
only regarded gods as beings to be entreated to avert ill or bestow
blessing, now learnt the nobler emotion of devout love for a divinity of
supreme power and beneficence. The new faith, besides kindling love for
God, inflamed the kindred sentiment of love for men, all of whom it
declared to be the children of God, one vast family with a common
father. Julian himself bore witness to the fidelity with which the
Christians, whose faith he hated or despised, tended the sick and fed
the poor, not only of their own association, but those also who were
without the fold. The horrible practice of exposing new-born infants,
which outraged nature, and yet did not touch the heart nor the
understanding of a Numa, an Aristotle, a Confucius, was first proscribed
by the holy religion of Christ. If shame and misery still sometimes, in
the hearts of poor outcast mothers, overpower the horror which
Christianity first inspired, it is still the same religion which has
opened sheltering places for the unhappy victims of such a practice, and
provided means for rearing foundlings into useful citizens.

Christian teaching, by reviving the principles of sensibility within the
breast, may be said 'to have in some sort unveiled human nature to
herself.' If the cruelty of old manners has abated, do we not owe the
improvement to such courageous priests as Ambrose, who refused admission
into the church to Theodosius, because in punishing a guilty city he had
hearkened to the voice rather of wrath than of justice; or as that Pope
who insisted that Lewis the Seventh should expiate by a rigorous penance
the sack and burning of Vitry.[33] It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an
Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games;
it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the
apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the
asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
How much dearer to us than the splendid monuments of antique taste,
power, and grea