IX AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY 315 



certain topics, the bonds of human society will 

 dissolve and mankind lapse into savagery. There 

 are several answers to this assertion. One is that 

 the bonds of human society were formed without 

 the aid of their theology; and, in the opinion of 

 not a few competent judges, have been weakened 

 rather than strengthened by a good deal of it. 

 Greek science, Greek art, the ethics of old Israel, 

 the social organisation of old Rome, contrived to 

 come into being, without the help of any one who 

 believed in a single distinctive article of the 

 simplest of the Christian creeds. The science, 

 the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and 

 social theories, of the modern world have grown 

 out of those of Greece and Rome not by favour 

 of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings 

 of early Christianity, to which science, art, and 

 any serious occupation with the things of this 

 world, were alike despicable. 



Again, all that is best in the ethics of the 

 modern world, in so far as it has not grown out 

 of Greek thought, or Barbarian manhood, is the 

 direct development of the ethics of old Israel. 

 There is no code of legislation, ancient or modern, 

 at once so just and so merciful, so tender to the 

 weak and poor, as the Jewish law ; and, if the 

 Gospels are to be trusted, Jesus of Nazareth 

 himself declared that he taught nothing but that 

 which lay implicitly, or explicitly, in the religious 

 and ethical system of his people. 



