self-respect. "The heroes of Paganism exemplified the heroism of
enterprise. Patriotism, chivalrous deeds of valour, high-souled
aspirations after glory, stern justice taking its course in their hands,
while natural feeling was held in abeyance--this was the line in which
they shone. Our blessed Lord illustrated all virtues indeed, but most
especially the passive ones. His heroism took its colouring from
endurance. Women, though inferior to men in enterprise, usually come out
better than men in suffering; and it is always to be remembered that our
blessed Lord held his humanity, not of the stronger, but of the weaker
sex" ("Thoughts on Personal Religion," by Dean Goulburn, vol. ii., p.
99; ed. 1866). What is this but to say, in polite language, that Jesus
was very effeminate? The Christian religion has all the vices of
slavery, and encourages submission to evil instead of resistance to it;
it has in it the pathetic beauty of the meekness of the bruised and
beaten wife still loving the injurer, of the slave forgiving the
slave-driver, but it is a beauty which perpetuates the wrong of which it
is born. Better, far better, both for oppressor and for oppressed, is
resistance to cruelty than submission to it; submission encourages the
wrong-doer where resistance would check him, and Christianity fails in
that it omits to value strong men and true patriots, rebels against
authority which is unjust. Rome taught its citizens to reverence
themselves, to love their country, to maintain freedom: the Roman would
die gladly for his mother-country, and deemed his duty as a citizen the
foremost of his obligations. The love of country, and the sense of
service owed to the State, is the grandest and sublimest virtue of the
Pagan world. All felt it, from the highest to the lowest: at Thermopylae
the Spartans died gladly for the land they covered with their bodies,
faithful unto death to the duty entrusted to them by their country; men
and women equally felt the paramount claim of the State, and mothers
gave their sons to death rather than that they should fail in duty