The Christian came to the helpless and hopeless, whom men despised, and of whom men despaired, with a message of the love and tenderness of God, and he brought it home by a new type of love and tenderness of his own. Kindness to friends the world knew; gentleness, too, for the sake of philosophic calm; clemency and other more or less self-contained virtues. The "third race" had other ideas--in all their virtues there was the note of "going out of oneself," the unconsciousness which Jesus loved--an instinctive habit of negating self (_aparnesasthai heauton_), which does not mean medieval asceticism, nor the dingy modern virtue of self-denial. There was no sentimentalism in it; it was the spirit of Jesus spiritualizing and transforming and extending the natural instinct of brotherliness by making it theocentric. Christians for a century or two never thought of _ataraxia_ or apathy, and, though Clement of Alexandria plays with them, he tries to give them a new turn. Fortunately the Gospels were more read than the _Stromateis_ and "Christian apathy" never succeeded. The heathen recognized sympathy as a Christian characteristic--"How these {162} Christians love each other!" they said. Lucian bears the same testimony to the mutual care and helpfulness of Christians. "You see," wrote Lucian, "these poor creatures have persuaded themselves that they are immortal for all time and will live for ever, which explains why they despise death and voluntarily give themselves up, as a general rule; and then their original law-giver persuaded them that they are all brothers, from the moment that they cross over and deny the gods of Greece and worship their sophist who was gibbeted, and live after his laws. All this they accept, with the result that they despise all worldly goods alike and count them common property." In a later century Julian, perhaps following Maximin Daza, whom he copied in trying to organize heathenism into a new catholic church, urged benevolence on his fellow-pagans, if they wished to compete with the Christians. It was the only thing, he felt, that could revive paganism, and his appeal met with no response. "Infinite love in ordinary intercourse" is the Christian life, and it must come from within or nowhere. No organization can produce it, and, however much we may have to discount Christian charity in some directions as sometimes mechanical, the new spirit of brotherhood in the world presupposed a great change in the hearts of men.