indulgence of the
passions; a religion leading by reaction to infidelity; a religion of
magic, and of the vulgar arts, real and pretended, with which magic was
accompanied; a secret religion which dared not face the day; an
itinerant, busy, proselytizing religion, forming an extended confederacy
against the State, resisting its authority and breaking its laws. There
may be some exceptions to this general impression, such as Pliny's
discovery of the innocent and virtuous rule of life adopted by the
Christians of Pontus; but this only proves that Christianity was not in
fact the infamous religion which the heathen thought it; it did not
reverse their general belief to that effect.

Now it must be granted that, in some respects, this view of Christianity
depended on the times, and would alter with their alteration. When there
was no persecution, martyrs could not be obstinate; and when the Church
was raised aloft in high places, it was no longer in caves. Still, I
believe, it continued substantially the same in the judgment of the
world external to it while there was an external world to judge of it.
"They thought it enough," says Julian in the fourth century, of our Lord
and his apostles, "to deceive women, servants, and slaves, and by their
means wives and husbands." "A human fabrication," says he elsewhere,
"put together by wickedness, having nothing divine in it, but making a
perverted use of the fable-loving, childish, irrational part of the
soul, and offering a set of wonders to create belief."

"Miserable men," he says elsewhere, "you refuse to worship the ancile,
yet you worship the wood of the cross, and sign it on your foreheads,
and fix it on your doors. Shall one for this hate the intelligent among
you, or pity the less understanding, who in following you have gone to
such an excess of perdition as to leave the everlasting gods and go over
to a dead Jew?" He speaks of their adding other dead men to him who died
so long ago. "You have filled all places with sepulchres and monuments,
though it is nowhere told you in your religion to haunt the tombs and to
attend upon them." Elsewhere he speaks of their "leaving the gods for
corpses and relics." On the other hand, he attributes the growth of
Christianity to its humanity toward strangers, care in burying the dead,
and pretended religiousness of life. In another place he speaks of their
care of the poor.

Libanius, Julian's preceptor in rhetoric, delivers the same