The cause of this misconception is, however, clear enough. Half a century ago, the general public was without guide or leader in such matters, nor had they any materials on which to form opinions of their own. The classical education which was all that the majority of men then got, carefully left all such matters as the origins of Christianity on one side. The treatises of the Fathers of the Church, for the most part written in late and inelegant Greek, were held to be too corrupting to the style of scholars reared on the texts of the purest period to be attempted by any but professional theologians, by whom indeed they were often very imperfectly understood. Nor was much to be gathered from the profane historians of the early Christian centuries, who maintained such an obstinate silence with regard to Christianity as to give rise to the theory that they must have conspired to ignore the new religion of the lower classes as something too barbarous for ears polite[2]. Moreover, the ruling maxim of education, especially of English education until the end of the XIXth century, was that it was better to know one thing thoroughly than to acquire a smattering of a great many, and that a scholar was better served by an intimate knowledge of second aorists than by any wide extent of reading; while the comparative method of study was still confined to sciences of analysis like anatomy and philology[3]. Above all, what has been called the catastrophic view of the Christian religion was still in fashion. Although our spiritual pastors and masters were never tired of reminding us that God’s ways were not as our ways, they invariably talked and wrote on the assumption that they were, and thought an Omnipotent Creator with eternity before Him must needs behave like a schoolboy in control of gunpowder for the first time. Hence “the remarkable victory” which, in the words of Gibbon, the Christian faith obtained over “the established religions of the earth” was in the view of the orthodox chiefly due to the miraculous powers placed at the disposal of the primitive Church, and it was considered impious to look further for the cause of the despotic rule which in a comparatively brief space of time it succeeded in establishing over the minds of men.