It was indeed a singular thing to hear, the usual conversation of those young people about religious questions upon which the greatest minds of subsequent ages have spent their force without exhausting them; but it should be remembered that everything like exact science was then in its infancy: all that was actually known of medicine, chemistry, geology, geometry, geography, botany, and even of mathematics, could be very quickly learned; and around this narrow limit of ascertained truth spread a boundless wilderness of vagrant speculation, in which the seeker after learning might wander a whole lifetime without ever being able to add one single valuable fact to the stock of knowledge; so that religion, whether Christianity or paganism, was universally regarded as the one thing that might most profitably be learned and known; and education, even from infancy, consisted in acquiring the knowledge of it: and this education was among the heathen chiefly objective, handling the visible, tangible symbols of a superstition which possessed only the most meager elements of subjective truth and power, except, perhaps, for the higher priests who had been initiated into mysteries unknown to the common people; while among the Christians the process was almost reversed. Christianity had no objective life, except in the person of Jesus Christ; and the subjective power which it possessed upon both intellect and consciousness had no assignable limits, inasmuch as it seemed to make the martyrs almost insensible to physical pain, and yet could produce a moral sensitiveness so acute that to be conscious of willful deception might work the death of the body, as in the case of Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to Peter about the consecration of their property to holy uses. This education among the Egyptians, especially among females of the higher classes, was chiefly oral, but among the Christians the young were taught both orally and by the written text.