Insofar, finally, as the principle of brotherly love is traditionally held to distinguish Christist teaching and practice from that of either Jews or pagans, there has occurred a fallacy of inference. All the documents go to show that the inculcation and profession of mutual love came currently from mouths which passed with no sense of incongruity to denunciation. In Christian tradition, the John who figured as the preacher of love was without misgiving called a "son of thunder," and reputed to have shown intense malice towards a heretic; and all the early teachers in turn, from Paul to Tertullian, are found alternating between praise of love and display of its contrary, even as Jesus is made by the gospel-framers to vituperate the contemporaries whom he was supposed to have exhorted to love their enemies. Even the duty of forgiveness is in one passage enforced by the threat of future torture at the hands of a Heavenly Father who is thus to imitate the cruelties of human law; whereas rationalistic thinkers among the Greeks a century or two before had grounded the duty on the naturalness of error, urging that wrongdoers should be taught rather than hated. So far were the Christists at any period from attaining the height of feeling kindly towards those outside their creed, that they exhibited an exceptional measure of strife among themselves--this by mere reason of the openings for strife set up by their dogmatic system and the need of unifying it. In times of persecution, doubtless, they were thrown together in feeling, as any other community would be; but here, in the terms of the case, it was the persecution, not the creed, that created the fraternity. Nor can it be said that any contemporary Christian teachers, unless it might be some of the ostracized Gnostics, compare well in point of serenity and self-control with such pagans as the later Stoics. For the rest, the human material indicated in the Pauline accounts of the congregational habit of glossolalia, "speaking with tongues" (a mere hysterical outcry, of which the sounds had no meaning), is clearly neurotic, and must have been liable to all manner of lapses. To say this is but to say that actual Christianity at length became popular in the only possible way--by assimilating ordinary human nature in mass. Had it persistently transcended or coerced average character, it could never have become one of the world-religions. To say, again, that the written doctrine at its best prescribed higher standards than those actually followed by its adherents, is but to claim what can equally be claimed for many other systems, popular and philosophic. The fundamental source of error in this connection is the assumption that mere moral doctrine can regenerate any society independently of a vital change in social and intellectual conditions. In the ancient world, as in the modern, these were the substantial determinants for the mass of men and women.