the old idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers,
had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained
under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the
vulgar eyes. The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly
called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and
there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They
owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled them to do
this; this was what brought on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred
of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a
moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not
from any notions of the understanding, but from the inward conscience,
that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres
are united, which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in
every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to
a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing moral from their
disciples: only they forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters,
before they had had a regular intellectual training. The witnesses of
reason and conscience were sufficient guides for all men, and at them
the many might well stop short. The teacher only needed to proceed
further, not into a higher region, but into a lower one, namely, into
the region of the logical understanding, and there make deductions from,
and illustrations of, those higher truths which he held in common with
every slave, and held on the same ground as they.

And the consequence of this method of philosophising was patent. They
were enabled to produce, in the lives of millions, generation after
generation, a more immense moral improvement than the world had ever
seen before. Their disciples did actually become righteous and good
men, just in proportion as they were true to the lessons they learnt.