"They have given you satisfaction, I hope."
Any thing but that, I replied; they do not, as I said before, touch my principal difficulties: and even as to the success of the system when once elaborated,—his reasons are either a mere restatement of the difficulty to be solved, or aggravate it indefinitely.
"You are hard to please," he replied.
I said I was, except by solid arguments. But does Gibbon offer them?
I asked.
He tells us, for example, that the virtues, energy, and zeal of the early Church was a main instrument of the success of Christianity; whereas it is the very origination of the early Church, with all these efficacious endowments, that we want to account for: it is as though he had told me that we might account for the success of Christianity from the fact that it had succeed to such an extent as to render its further success very probable! As for the rest of his secondary causes, they are difficulties in its way rather than auxiliaries. He asks me to believe that the intolerance of Christianity—by which it refused all alliance with other religions, and insisted in reigning alone or not at all, by which it spat contempt on the whole rabble of the Pantheon—was likely to facilitate its reception among nations, whose pride and whose pleasure alike it was to encourage civilities and compliments between their Gods, each of whom was on gracious visiting terms with its neighbors! He asks me, in effect, to believe that the austerity of the Christians tended to give them favor in the eves of an accommodating and jovial Heathenism; that the severity of manners by which they reproved it, and which to their contemporaries must have appeared (as we know from the Apologists it did) much as Puritan grimace to the court of Charles II., was somehow attractive! That the scruples with which they recoiled from all usages and customs which could be associated with the elegant pomp of Pagan worship, and the suspicion with which, as having been linked with idolatry, they looked on every emanation of that spirit of beauty which reigned over the exterior life of Paganism, would operate as a charm in their favor! That their studied absence from all scenes social hilarity, their grave looks on festal days, their garlanded heads, their simple attire, their utter estrangement from the Graces, which in truth were the legitimate Gods in Greece, and the true mothers of whole family of Olympus, would be likely to conciliate towards the Gospel the favorable dispositions classic antiquity! I have not so read history, nor learnt human nature. Again, he asks me to believe that the immortality which Christianity promised Heathen—such an immortality —was another of things which tended to give it success;—on the one hand, a menace of retribution, not for flagrant crimes only, which Heathenism itself punished, nor for the lax manners which the easy spirit of Paganism had made venial but for spiritual vices, of which it took account, some of which it had even consecrated virtues; and, on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy, or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless seductions. Yet it is to such things as auxiliaries that Gibbon refers me for the success of Christianity. Verily it is not without reason that he is called a master of irony!
My friend fairly acknowledged the difficulties of the subject, but said he could not believe in the truth of Christianity.
I repaired to another infidel acquaintance. "It is a perplexing, a very perplexing controversy, no doubts," was his reply; "but every thing tends to show that Christianity resembles in its principal features all those other religions which you admit to be false. All have their prodigies and miracles,—their revelations and Inspirations,—their fragments of truth and their masses of nonsense. They are all to be rejected together."
I again puzzled for a long time over this aspect of the case. At last I said to him,—This seems a curious way of disposing of the evidence for Christianity; for if there be any true religion, it is likely, as in all other cases, that the counterfeits will have some features in common with it. It would follow, also, that there can be no true philosophy; since, while there are scores of philosophies, only one can be true. But I have another difficulty: on comparing Christianity with other systems, I find vital differences, both as regards theory and fact. As regards theory, I find an insuperable difficulty, not merely in imagining how Jews, Greeks, or Romans, any or all of them, should have been the originators of Christianity, but how human nature should have been fool enough to originate it at all! For I am asked to believe that man, such as I know him through all history, such as he appears in so many forms of religion which have been his undoubted and most worthy fabrication, did, whether fraudulently or not, whether designedly or unconsciously, frame a religion which is in striking contrast with all his ordinary handiwork of this sort! This religion enjoins the austerest morality; human religions generally enjoin a very lax one:—this demands the most refined purity, even of the thoughts and desires; other religions usually attach to external and ceremonial observances greater weight than to morality itself;—this is singularly simple in its rites; they for the most part consist of little else;—this exhibits a singular silence and abstinence in relation to the future and invisible; they amply indulge the imagination and fancy, and are full of delineations calculated to gratify man's most natural curiosity;—this takes under its special patronage those virtues which man is least likely to love or cultivate, and which men in general regard as pusillanimous infirmities, if not vices; they patronize the must energetic passions,—the passions which made the demigods and heroes of antiquity. I am not saying which is the belief in these respects; I am only saying that human nature appears more true to itself in the last. And so notorious is all this, that the corruptions of Christianity, as years rolled on, have ever been to assimilate it to the other religions of the earth; to abate its spirituality; to relax its austere code of morals; to commute its proper claims for external observances; to encumber its ritual with an infinity of ceremonies; and, above all, to uncover the future and invisible, on which it left a veil, and add a purgatory into the bargain! Thus, whether contrasted with other religions or with its corrupted self, Christianity does not seem a religion which human nature would be pleased to invent.
Again, is it like the other religious products of human nature, in daring to aspire to universal dominion, and that too founded on moral power alone? Never, till Christianity appeared, had such an imagination ever entered the mind of man! Other religions were national affairs; their gods never dreamed of such an enterprise as that of subduing all nations. They were naturally contented with the country that gave them birth, and the homage of the race that worshipped them. They were, when not themselves assailed, very tolerant, and did the civil thing by all other gods of all other nations, and were even content to expire with great propriety (they usually did so) with the political extinction of the race of their votaries! Christianity alone adopts a different tone,—"Go ye, and preach the Gospel to all nations."—and declares, not only that it will reign, but that none other shall. It will not endure a rival; it will not consent to have a statue with the mob of the Pantheon. Whether this ambition—call it pride and folly, if you will, as you well may if the thing be merely human—was likely to suggest itself to man, considering the local and national character of other religions, and the apparent hopelessness of any such enterprise, I have my doubts. Arrogance it may be; but it is not such arrogance as is very natural to man.
These, I said, were amongst a few of the things in which I must say I thought the theory of Christianity very unlike that of any religion human nature was likely to invent.