It was Christianity, and Christianity alone that made death so abiding a terror to the European mind. And society once Christianized, the uneducated could find no adequate corrective from the more educated. The baser elements which existed in the Pagan world were eagerly seized upon by the Christian writers and developed to their fullest extent. Some of the Pagan writers had speculated, in a more or less fanciful spirit, on a hell of a thousand years. Christianity stretched it to eternity. Pre-Christianity had reserved the miseries of the after-life for adults. Christian writers paved the floor of hell with infants, "scarce a span long." Plutarch and other Pagan moralists had poured discredit upon the popular notions of a future life. Christianity reaffirmed them with all the exaggerations of a diseased imagination. The Pagans held that death was as normal and as natural as life. Christianity returned to the conception current among savages and depicted death as a penal infliction. The Pagan art of living was superseded by the Christian art of dying. Human ingenuity exhausted itself in depicting the terrors of the future life, and when one remembers the powers of the Church, and the murderous manner in which it exercised them, there is small wonder that under the auspices of the Church the fear of death gained a strength it had never before attained. Small wonder, then, that we still have with us the talk of the comfort that Christianity brings in the face of death. Where the belief in the Christian after-life really exists, the retention of a conviction of the saving power of Christianity is a condition of sanity. Where the belief does not really exist, we are fronted with nothing but a parrot-like repetition of familiar phrases. The Christian talk of comfort is thus, on either count, no more than a product of Christian education. Christianity does not make men brave in the presence of death, that is no more than a popular superstition. What it does is to cover a natural fact with supernatural terrors, and then exploit a frame of mind that it has created. The comfort is only necessary so long as the special belief is present. Remove that belief and death takes its place as one of the inevitable facts of existence, surrounded with all the sadness of a last farewell, but rid of all the terror that has been created by religion.