ds itself, and that they
did not come troubling the state, either by disobeying her rulers or by
attacking her old deities, dead and buried beneath their own still
standing altars.

Such were the two religions with which, in Gaul, nascent Christianity had
to contend. Compared with them it was, to all appearance, very small and
very weak; but it was provided with the most efficient weapons for
fighting and beating them, for it had exactly the moral forces which they
lacked. Christianity, instead of being, like Druidism, a religion
exclusively national and hostile to all that was foreign, proclaimed a
universal religion, free from all local and national partiality,
addressing itself to all men in the name of the same God, and offering to
all the same salvation. It is one of the strangest and most significant
facts in history, that the religion most universally human, most
dissociated from every consideration but that of the rights and
well-being of the human race in its entirety--that such a religion, be
it repeated, should have come forth from the womb of the most exclusive,
most rigorously and obstinately national religion that ever appeared in
the world, that is, Judaism. Such, nevertheless, was the birth of
Christianity; and this wonderful contrast between the essence and the
earthly origin of Christianity was without doubt one of its most
powerful attractions and most efficacious means of success.

Against Paganism Christianity was armed with moral forces not a whit less
great. Confronting mythological traditions and poetical or philosophical
allegories, appeared a religion truly religious, concerned solely with
the relations of mankind to God and with their eternal future. To the
pagan indifference of the Roman world the Christians opposed the profound
conviction of their faith, and not only their firmness in defending it
against all powers and all dangers, but also their ardent passion for
propagating it without any motive but the yearning to make their fellows
share in its benefits and its hopes. They confronted, nay, they welcomed
martyrdom, at one time to maintain their own Christianity, at another to
make others Christians around them; propagandism was for them a duty
almost as imperative as fidelity. And it was not in memory of old and
obsolete mythologies, but in the name of recent deeds and persons, in
obedience to laws proceeding from God, One and Universal, in fulfilment
and continuation of a cont