Christians, pagan, that is, merely human, virtues were vices, and
infants who died unbaptized passed the rest of time in creeping on the
floor of hell. The intolerance arising from such views could not but
differ in kind and intensity from anything that the world had yet
witnessed.

Besides the logic of its doctrines, the character of its Sacred Book
must also be held partly accountable for the intolerant principles of
the Christian Church. It was unfortunate that the early Christians had
included in their Scripture the Jewish writings which reflect the ideas
of a low stage of civilization and are full of savagery. It would be
difficult to say how much harm has been done, in corrupting the morals
of men, by the precepts and examples of inhumanity, violence, and
bigotry which the reverent reader of the Old Testament, implicitly
believing in its inspiration, is bound to approve. It furnished an
armoury for the theory of

[54] persecution. The truth is that Sacred Books are an obstacle to
moral and intellectual progress, because they consecrate the ideas of a
given epoch, and its customs, as divinely appointed. Christianity, by
adopting books of a long past age, placed in the path of human
development a particularly nasty stumbling-block. It may occur to one to
wonder how history might have been altered —altered it surely would have
been—if the Christians had cut Jehovah out of their programme and,
content with the New Testament, had rejected the inspiration of the Old.

Under Constantine the Great and his successors, edict after edict
fulminated against the worship of the old pagan gods and against
heretical Christian sects. Julian the Apostate, who in his brief reign
(A.D. 361–3) sought to revive the old order of things, proclaimed