All that Christianity had yielded under the form of moral betterment was an increasing glorification of chastity and celibacy, with some restraint on infanticide. When the western empire is on the verge of destruction, Rome being already sacked, we find Jerome expanding in an insane exultation over the news that a young Roman lady had taken the vow of virginity, an event to which he ascribes cosmic importance. The mother of such a virgin, he declares, becomes ipso facto "the mother-in-law of God." As always happens where sexual virtue is identified with abstinence, vice was excessive. Chrysostom in the East, and Salvian in Gaul, testify that alike in licence and in cruelty the Christianized State at the beginning of the fifth century was the worsened copy of the pagan world of four centuries before. The Greek Basil and the Italian Ambrose alike bear witness to the survival in the Christian Church of all the excesses of the old Bacchanalia. Even the tradition that in the reign of Honorius (404) the horrible gladiatorial games were abolished, is admitted by Christian scholarship to be false. It may be that a humane monk did lose his life in trying to stop them; but there is clear proof that the games subsisted in Christian Gaul at a later date, though even humane pagans had called for their abolition, and their cost was a heavy burden on the falling revenue. Centuries before the time of Honorius, Apollonius of Tyana was credited with causing them to be abolished at Athens. Not till the Gothic conquest did the games cease in the West; nor did the piety of Honorius and his advisers withhold them from treacherous massacres, and from enacting the punishment of burning alive for frauds on the fisc. And the wrong of wrongs was left not only untouched but unchallenged. Slavery remained, and the average lot of the slave was no better than in the Rome of Horace. Christian matrons in the East were as cruel mistresses as those of the West in the days before Nero. That Christian credences counted for little in setting up even the species of virtue most esteemed may be gathered from the Confessions of Augustine. By his own account, what first drew him in his youth to moral reflection and conduct was not the pious teaching of his mother but the writing of Cicero; he was scrupulous as a Manichæan before he became orthodox; and his charges of hypocrisy against some Manichæans merely place the heretical sect on a level with the orthodox. As regarded the weightier matters of morals there could be no vital reform, because there was at work neither an intellectual force nor a self-saving pressure from the wronged orders of society. The ethic which led Origen to make himself a eunuch was not a force for betterment.