sweep away like smoke _altars of blood_, and temples and idols and mysteries, and profane festivals, and the impure odours of victims, and everywhere to raise _unbloody altars_[81] in the country of Romans, Persians, Scythians, Moors, and Indians, beyond the limits of our own world. For even the British Islands, lying in the ocean beyond our own sea, have felt the power of this word; for there too churches and altars have been erected. The word then uttered by Him has been planted in all men's souls, is current in all their mouths. The world, which was overgrown with thorns, has been cleared of them, is become pure arable soil, has received into it the seeds of piety. It would be a proof of exceeding greatness, an evidence of divine power, if nobody offered resistance, in the midst of peace and in the absence of opponents, for so vast a portion of the earth to be changed in a mass from a long inveterate bad habit, and to assume another habit far more difficult. It was not merely custom which offered resistance, but pleasure which held possession, two tyrannous things. For men were persuaded to reject what they had inherited from a long succession of ancestors, from philosophers, and from orators; and not only so, but what was most difficult, to receive a new habit of life, in which the hardest point of all was, that it carried with it much endurance. For it led away from luxury to fasting, from the love of money to poverty, from impurity to temperance, from anger to meekness, from enviousness to kindliness, from the broad and wide way to the narrow and straight and rugged way; and this too the very men who had been nurtured in the former. For it did not take men of another world and another habit of life, but the very men who, through their utter corruption, were softer than mire in their old habit of life; on these it enjoined to tread the narrow and straight way, in all its roughness and sharpness, and they listened. How many? Not two, or ten, or twenty, or a hundred, but the vast majority of a world-wide population. And by whom did the persuasion come? By eleven men without literature, without station, ineloquent, ignoble, poor, who had no country, nor abundance of resources, nor bodily strength, nor distinguished reputation, nor renown of ancestors, nor strength of words, nor skill in rhetoric, nor eminence of knowledge; fishermen, tentmakers, foreigners. For they had not even the same language as those they persuaded, but that strange and outlandish Hebrew tongue. Through them He built this Church, which stretches from one end of the earth to the other.