104 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



expectation of the return of Christ, the destruc- 

 tion of the world by fire, and the resurrection of 

 the body — a notion which can only be enter- 

 tained by sensual people ! What an arrogant 

 notion of the Christians that the world is created 

 for them only, and that at the end of the world 

 they alone will continue to live in new bodies, 

 while everybody else will be burned in the fire ! 

 Such a religion is truly only fit for the ignorant, 

 to whom the Christians for the most part are 

 confined ; whoever expects to find credence for 

 such things must look for it among artisans and 

 slaves, women and children, sinful and wicked 

 people, and must exclude all the learned and edu- 

 cated from his community. 



But perverse as all this may be, it might be 

 more easily tolerated if the Christians were only 

 following the faith of their forefathers, if they 

 had the excuse of its being their national reli- 

 gion. As it is impossible that all the various 

 nations should worship the Deity in the same 

 way, it is best that every one should worship in 

 the way to which he has been accustomed, and 

 which is acceptable to the tutelar genii of his 

 country. This is the case with the Jews, absurd 

 as the national pride is with which they look 

 down upon all other religions and think their 

 own the only true one. But the Christians have 

 not even this excuse. Originally apostates from 

 Judaism, they are now a medley of renegades 

 from other nations, and are split up into innu- 

 merable parties among themselves. And with 

 this the reproach is connected with which Celsus 

 closes his controversy with the Christians — their 

 indifference to the Roman state and its welfare. 

 They will not have anything to do with public 

 worship, and neither do they concern themselves 

 with the public interest. The enmity to the hu- 

 man race with which Tacitus reproaches them 

 meets us again here under the mote definite form 

 of want of patriotism. 



This polemical treatise of Celsus clearly shows 

 why the better-educated classes among his Greek 

 and Roman contemporaries would, as a rule, 

 have nothing to do with the Christian religion, 

 even when they were somewhat better acquainted 

 with it. They could not take to it because it 

 originated in a sphere, and presupposed a way 

 of thinking, entirely different from their own. 

 Christianity was a religion for the weary and 

 heavy-laden : to him who was ill-treated and set 

 at naught in this world compensation was prom- 

 ised in another; to him who was oppressed by a 

 feeling of moral weakness and guilt it offered to 

 restore peace of mind by the gospel of recon- 



ciliation, to raise him into a liberty and joy in 

 moral aspiration hitherto unknown. But those 

 things which had been the delight of the Greek 

 and the pride of the Roman, it counted as the 

 glories of thi3 world, on the ruins of which the 

 kingdom of God was to be established. The 

 more deeply a man was grounded in the culture 

 of the classic nations, the more uncongenial must 

 these views have been to him ; the more he val- 

 ued his culture, the less was he disposed to 

 exchange it for the faith and worship of the bar- 

 barians of Palestine. While on the other hand 

 the fewer of these good things had fallen to a 

 man's lot, and the more he belonged to the 

 pariahs of ancient and aristocratic civilization, 

 the more strongly must he have been attracted 

 to a faith which made him at once a member on 

 equal terms with the rest, who in part shared 

 with him the highest good at once in their moral 

 and religious life, and in part held out a sure 

 hope of it in future. Such a one would easily 

 get over those points in the new teaching which 

 were repugnant to the educated. Large as might 

 be the demands made by the Jewish-Christian 

 supernaturalism on the faith of its votaries, in 

 comparison with the mythology of the popular 

 religion, Christian dogmatics bore so rational a 

 stamp, and the change from polytheism to mono- 

 theism was in itself so great an advance, that the 

 most dogmatic Christian, the man most credu- 

 lous of miracles, could at once look down, as a 

 person of superior enlightenment, upon heathen 

 superstitions. He, on the contrary, who had 

 been led by philosophy to renounce this super- 

 stition, did not require Christianity to aid him in 

 doing so, and it could not, therefore, gain him 

 over in that way ; while all the doctrines which 

 owed their origin to Jewish revelation as such, 

 or were a sequel to it, would inevitably be re- 

 pugnant to a disciple of Plato or Aristotle, of 

 Epicurus or Zeno, and would only excite ridicule 

 or be subjected to serious refutation. If we con- 

 sider further the undisguised aversion and hos- 

 tility of the Christians to the heathen government, 

 and how they withdrew as far as possible from 

 all cooperation with it, it becomes the more intel- 

 ligible that it was just the more educated portion 

 of the population, the men of political insight, 

 who perceived a danger in Christianity to which 

 the lower classes, minors in a political sense, 

 were partly indifferent and partly blind, and that 

 far-seeing governments, imbued with the politi- 

 cal instincts of Rome, should try to check the 

 spread of a religion which must sap the vital 

 forces of the existing order of things. 



