On the intellectual side, ancient Christianity is on the whole at its strongest in the West, just before the fall of the western empire, as if the last mental energies of the Roman world had there found a channel. Augustine passed on to the middle ages a body of polemic theology sufficiently vivacious to constitute a Christian classic; and in him at last the Latin church had produced a personality comparable to Origen. Jerome, on the other hand, could compare with Origen as a scholar, and like him he laid bases for the scholarship of a later and reviving age. But the total achievement of Christianity on behalf of ancient civilization had amounted to nothing. By spreading the dogma that error of belief, whether as paganism or as heresy, doomed men to eternal torment, it negated the very basis of human brotherhood, and gave a new dominion to hate, individual and corporate. It made neither good rulers nor a sound society. Valentinian must have been made tolerant in state affairs by the spirit of pagan policy: as a man he was so abnormally cruel that had he been a pagan the historians would have compared him to Nero. That a year after Julian's death there should be on the throne a Christian emperor who caused offenders to be thrown to wild bears in his own presence is a memorable item in Christian history. Of his Arian brother Valens it is told that he caused to be burned at sea a shipload of eighty ecclesiastics who had come to him as a deputation. This may be an orthodox fiction; but such fictions are themselves signal proofs of demoralizing malignity; as is the orthodox suppression of the story of how the Arian bishop Deogratius at Carthage succoured the captives brought by the Vandals from the sack of Rome--one of the rare records of magnanimous humanity in the history of the age.