"It seems," said Hester, "that a very definite amount of good has been achieved by Christianity, in giving an impetus to the spirit of the masses to claim intellectual rights by the recognition of man's spiritual equality before God; and to strip off illegitimate uses of power from the sense of justice thus evolved. It has also placed our sex on a footing permitted by no other religion--this is much, very much; but here it seems to stop, and these are but indirect results. Religion professes to inculcate higher motives than the improvement of earthly position, desirable as this may be. Men are now selfish in their avowed principle, and this, I think, must ultimately destroy all that has been achieved. Self-gratification as a motive, and the only motive recognized, must lead back to want of discipline, and from that the step to barbarism is easy. Only under the Christian dispensation has labor been honored; in all other civilizations, slaves, captives of the sword and spear, have performed by compulsion the work of tilling the soil and so forth; and yet men now seek to avoid labor, the real labor of producing, as if they still thought it fit for slaves only; any other kind of occupation is preferred, as more noble. If this is the result of eighteen hundred years of Christian teaching, I own it puzzles me. Where are the direct results of unselfishness and of corporal sacrifice for the attainment of spiritual good, that books teach us to expect?" "These are very painful facts," said the abbé, "which distress the heart of many a Catholic priest; but with reference to their influence on faith, I think a little reflection will explain most of the phenomena without prejudice to such souls as are earnestly seeking truth. We must remember that there was a time when whole nations suddenly assumed the name of Christians under the influence of the ruling powers. {40} The majority of these people were not only ignorant, but many did not care to learn high spiritual truths; the conversion was necessarily partial, even that which was genuine. But because all divine truth is positive and co-relative to natural truth, some degree of enlightenment followed even in the natural order; and worldly minds, who had no affinity for spiritual revelations laid hold, notwithstanding this, of the types that presented spiritual truths, and, finding they bore an earthly signification also (as all real enlightenment does, the body being the mate for the soul), they seized on the lower meaning, and hence the civilization of that ilk. This is not wrong, but it is defective; as far as it is moral, it is the material expression of a spiritual idea; but it does not touch the first step of the ladder by which we rise to God--it is the lesser influence of a principle comprehending affinities of an infinitely higher character." "But this does not explain the corruption in high places."