242 CHRISTIAN SUPERSTITIONS. 



a new and noisy form of superstition. Experience 

 has amply proved that minds of the highest order are 

 sometimes unable to shake off the ideas which they 

 imbibed when they were children ; but to those of 

 whom we speak Christianity was offered when their 

 powers of reflection were matured, and it was naturally 

 rejected with contempt. They knew that the pagan 

 gods did not exist. Was it likely that they would sit 

 at the feet of those who still believed in them ? They 

 had long ago abandoned the religious legends of their 

 own country ; they had shaken off the spell which 

 Homer, with his splendid poetry, had laid upon their 

 minds. Was it likely that they would believe in the 

 old Arab traditions, or in these tales of a god who 

 took upon him the semblance of a Jew, and suffered 

 death upon the gallows for the redemption of man- 

 kind ? They had obtained, by means of intellectual 

 research, a partial perception of the great truth, that 

 events result from secondary laws. Was it likely that 

 they would join a crew of devotees who prayed to God 

 to make the wind blow this way or that way, to give 

 them a dinner, or to cure them of a pain 1 When the 

 Tiber overflowed its banks, the Pagans declared that it 

 was owing to the wrath of the gods against the Chris- 

 tians : the Christians retorted that it was owing to the 

 wrath of God against the idolaters. To a man like 

 Pliny, who studied the phenomena with his note- 

 book in his hand, where was the difference between 

 the two ? 



In the Greek world Christianity became a system 

 of metaphysics as abstract and abstruse as any son of 

 Hellas could desire. But in the Latin world it was 

 never the religion of a scholar and a gentleman. It was 

 the creed of the uneducated people who flung them- 



