and let us die." And the poor said: "There is nothing real but
unhappiness, all else is a dream; let us blaspheme and die."

Is this too black? Is it exaggerated? What do you think of it? Am I a
misanthrope? Allow me to make a reflection.

In reading the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible
to overlook the evil that the Christians, so admirable when in the
desert, did to the State when they were in power. "When I think," said
Montesquieu, "of the profound ignorance into which the Greek clergy
plunged the laity, I am obliged to compare them to the Scythians of whom
Herodotus speaks, who put out the eyes of their slaves in order that
nothing might distract their attention from their work . . . . No
affair of State, no peace, no truce, no negotiations, no marriage could
be transacted by any one but the clergy. The evils of this system were
beyond belief."

Montesquieu might have added: Christianity destroyed the emperors but it
saved the people. It opened to the barbarians the palaces of
Constantinople, but it opened the doors of cottages to the ministering
angels of Christ. It had much to do with the great ones of earth. And
what is more interesting than the death-rattle of an empire corrupt to
the very marrow of its bones, than the sombre galvanism under the
influence of which the skeleton of tyranny danced upon the tombs of
Heliogabalus and Caracalla? How beautiful that mummy of Rome, embalmed
in the perfumes of Nero and swathed in the shroud of Tiberius! It had to
do, my friends the politicians, with finding the poor and giving them
life and peace; it had to do with allowing the worms and tumors to
destroy the monuments of shame, while drawing from the ribs of this mummy
a virgin as beautiful as the mother of the Redeemer, Hope, the friend of