attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by
cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went
straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and
appropriate instinct. Pagan Rome, too, had its touching
charity-sermons on occasions of great public distress; its
charity-children in long file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina;
its prototype, under patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital
for the sick on the island of Saint Bartholomew. But what pagan
charity was doing tardily, and as if with the painful calculation of
old age, the church was doing, almost without thinking about it, with
all the liberal [113] enterprise of youth, because it was her very
being thus to do. "You fail to realise your own good intentions," she
seems to say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness. She identified herself
with those intentions and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom
and largeness. The gentle Seneca would have reverent burial provided
even for the dead body of a criminal. Yet when a certain woman
collected for interment the insulted remains of Nero, the pagan world
surmised that she must be a Christian: only a Christian would have been
likely to conceive so chivalrous a devotion towards mere wretchedness.
"We refuse to be witnesses even of a homicide commanded by the law,"
boasts the dainty conscience of a Christian apologist, "we take no part
in your cruel sports nor in the spectacles of the amphitheatre, and we
hold that to witness a murder is the same thing as to commit one." And
there was another duty almost forgotten, the sense of which Rousseau
brought back to the degenerate society of a later age. In an
impassioned discourse the sophist Favorinus counsels mothers to suckle
their own infants; and there are Roman epitaphs erected to mothers,
which gratefully record this proof of natural affection as a thing then
unusual. In this matter too, what a sanction, what a provocative to
natural duty, lay in that image discovered to Augustus by the Tiburtine
Sibyl, amid the aurora of a new age, the image of the Divine Mother and
the [114] Child, just then rising upon the world like the dawn!

Christian belief, again, had presented itself as a great inspirer of
chastity. Chastity, in turn, realised in the whole scope of its
conditions, fortified that rehabilitation of peaceful labour, after the
mind, the pattern, of the workman of Galilee, which was another of t