The First Socialist is born in the East. He and His disciples preach a creed so blasphemous, so incompatible with the rights of property, that it becomes a sacred duty, if vested interests are to be preserved, to crucify Him as an encouragement to others. He proclaims, in a word, that all men are equal. It is well for Christianity that He adds the qualification, "In the sight of God," or how could either slave or master believe in anything so contrary to the senses' evidence? Vested interests notwithstanding, the new creed spreads, as any creed so comforting to the great majority, the downtrodden and oppressed, is bound to spread. But, though it preached the acceptable doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Christianity introduced with them sin into the world. All men might be equal in the sight of God, but they were all equally sinners. Humility and self-abasement were to take the place of the old pagan joyousness. To the Christian--to the Early Christian, at any rate--the world ceased to be man's inheritance, as Heaven was that of a congerie of shifting divinities-an inheritance the enjoyment of which was as blameless as it was natural. It was become a place of discipline and education, a hard school designed to prepare him for a glorious future, and one in which only the elect were to share. Everything that did not actively help towards that end was evil; all who did not work towards that end were evil-doers. The pagan and his easy-going paganism were alike accursed and tolerance a sin. The contest between two such schools of thought--however long drawn out--could have but one conclusion. Capricious persecutions, on civil rather than religious grounds, gave the iconoclasts the one remaining impetus needed to snatch the sceptre of the world. Successful, they persecuted in their turn, systematically and with the thoroughness born of conscious virtue. In spite--or because of--such attempts to stamp out pagan and paganism together, the old order still survived in secret long after the known world was officially Christianised. Naturally enough, the Christian could only suppose that such criminal persistence was the direct work of that Evil One whom he first had exploited. Pagan rites were nothing more nor less to him than Devil worship, those who practised them the direct representatives of Satan. Some of the pagan gods had been pressed into the service of Christianity as saints, their festivals as saints' days. Those that remained were classed together, with their ministers and attributes, under the generic heading of Magic, shunned and feared at first, but as the Church more and more stepped into the shoes of the civil power, warred upon without mercy.