On the other hand, if an ancient Roman came back to the world, and saw an American stadium packed with people from top to bottom, he would be not a little puzzled to explain what could have induced so many thousands of persons to have flocked together from afar merely to watch a football match,—to collect in such crowds, endure such a long journey, and such discomfort, just to get a distant view of some youths kicking their legs in the air! It would seem to them a truly insipid and tiresome spectacle. Their tastes ran to a gory struggle, reminiscent of war, to fights between men and animals, blood in bucketfuls. Christianity initiated that education of men’s feelings which has made us gradually turn away our eyes in horror from these atrocious diversions. But how slow and difficult this education has been! It can safely be said not to have reached its climax until after the Revolution. Only the nineteenth century, intent on mitigating and humanising the penal law in every direction, has finally succeeded in abolishing the last of these cruel spectacles, capital punishment. Right up to the end of the eighteenth century, condemned prisoners were executed throughout Europe with much pomp and in the full light of day, in the central squares of the cities, at times and places at which everybody could attend, as if at a public festival. Indeed, executions were invariably attended by an immense public, attracted by cruel curiosity to see a man going to his death. By diminishing the number of death sentences, and by executing culprits in prison yards in the presence of a handful of witnesses, or, as is still done in France, in public, but at dawn, with the public kept at as great a distance as possible, the nineteenth century has put the crown on one of the most far-reaching and wonderful moral transformations of the human mind, a transformation which owes its birth to the words of Christ uttered twenty centuries ago, and has given modern civilisation one notable reason for boasting itself superior to the ancient.