When I reached home, I was panting for breath. I had lived through
another Sabbath day. [Footnote: If the reader will take the pains to
read Dean Milman's History of Christianity, and his History of Latin
Christianity; also Gibbon's Downfall of the Roman Empire, and
Mosheim's History of Christianity, he will see that we have
exaggerated nothing. The Athanasian and the Arian, the Donatist and
Sabellian, the Nestorian and Alexandrian factions converted the early
centuries into a long reign of terror.]

I feel like covering my face for telling you so grewsome a tale. But
if this were the fourth or the fifth century, instead of the
twentieth, and this were Constantinople, or Alexandria, or Antioch,
instead of Chicago, I would have spent just such a Sunday as I have
described to you. In giving you this concentrated view of human
society in the great capitals of Christendom in the year 400, I have
restrained, rather than spurred, my imagination. Remember, also, that
I have confined my remarks to a specific and short period in history,
and have excluded from my generalization all reference to the
centuries of religious wars which tore Europe limb from limb,--the
wholesale exterminations, the crusades, which represented one of the
maddest spells of misguided and costly zeal which ever struck our
earth, the persecution of the Huguenots, the extermination of the
Albigenses and of the Waldenses,--the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the
Inquisition with its red hand upon the intellect of Europe, the
Anabaptist outrages in Germany, the Smithfield fires in England, the
religious outrages in Scotland, the Puritan excesses in America,--the
reign of witchcraft and superstition throughout the twenty centuries--I
have not touched my picture with any colors borrowed from these
terrible chapters in the history of our unfortunate earth. I have also