And if we look still farther back, and seek for examples of true _Christism_, in ages when Buddhism had hardly superseded Brahmanism in India, and the name of Jesus was only to be pronounced three centuries later, what do we find? Which of the holy pillars of the Church has ever elevated himself to the level of religious tolerance and noble simplicity of character of some heathen? Compare, for instance, the Hindu Asoka, who lived 300 B.C., and the Carthaginian St. Augustine, who flourished three centuries after Christ. According to Max Müller, this is what is found engraved on the rocks of Girnar, Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri: “Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the ascetics _of all creeds_ might reside in all places. All these ascetics profess alike the command which people should exercise over themselves, and the purity of the soul. _But people have different opinions and different inclinations._” And here is what Augustine wrote after his baptism: “Wondrous depth of thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; yes ... an awfulness of honor, and a trembling of love. Thy enemies [read Pagans] thereof I _hate_ vehemently; Oh, _that thou wouldst slay them_ with thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies to it; for _so do I love to have them slain_.”[44] Wonderful spirit of Christianity; and that from a Manichean converted to the religion of one who even on his cross prayed for his enemies! Who the enemies of the “Lord” were, according to the Christians, is not difficult to surmise; the few inside the Augustinian fold were His new children and favorites, who had supplanted in His affections the sons of Israel, His “chosen people.” The rest of mankind were His natural foes. The teeming multitudes of heathendom were proper food for the flames of hell; the handful within the Church communion, “heirs of salvation.” But if such a proscriptive policy was just, and its enforcement was “sweet savor” in the nostrils of the “Lord,” why not scorn also the Pagan rites and philosophy? Why draw so deep from the wells of wisdom, dug and filled up to brim by the same heathen? Or did the fathers, in their desire to imitate the chosen people whose time-worn shoes they were trying to fit upon their feet, contemplate the reënaction of the spoliation-scene of the _Exodus_? Did they propose, in fleeing from heathendom as the Jews did from Egypt, to carry off the valuables of its religious allegories, as the “chosen ones” did the gold and silver ornaments?