Middle Age, the Church and its hierarchy were most necessary to set
limits to the savage barbarism of those masters of violence, the princes
and knights: it was what broke up the icefloes in that mighty deluge.
Still, the chief aim of Christianity is not so much to make this life
pleasant as to render us worthy of a better. It looks away over this
span of time, over this fleeting dream, and seeks to lead us to eternal
welfare. Its tendency is ethical in the highest sense of the word, a
sense unknown in Europe till its advent; as I have shown you, by putting
the morality and religion of the ancients side by side with those of
Christendom.

_Philalethes_. You are quite right as regards theory: but look at the
practice! In comparison with the ages of Christianity the ancient world
was unquestionably less cruel than the Middle Age, with its deaths by
exquisite torture, its innumerable burnings at the stake. The ancients,
further, were very enduring, laid great stress on justice, frequently
sacrificed themselves for their country, showed such traces of every
kind of magnanimity, and such genuine manliness, that to this day an
acquaintance with their thoughts and actions is called the study of
Humanity. The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries,
crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the
introduction of African slaves in their place; and among the ancients
there is nothing analogous to this, nothing that can be compared with
it; for the slaves of the ancients, the _familia_, the _vernae_, were a
contented race, and faithfully devoted to their masters' service, and as
different from the miserable negroes of the sugar plantations, which are
a disgrace to humanity, as their two colors are distinct. Those special
moral delinquencies for which we reproach the ancients, and which are
perhaps less uncommon now-a-days than appears on the surface to be the
case, are trifles compared with the Christian enormities I have