As a matter of historical record, primitive Christians did not succeed, by the exhibition of these unobtrusive virtues, in making themselves either inconspicuous or immune to their persecutors. If anything, indeed, they were all the more actively hounded because of their queer traits. And why? For the simple reason that the typical Christian virtues, being withdrawing reactions, and consequently allied to and confused with the attitudes of secretiveness and dissimulation, led the Roman officials quite reasonably to suspect that the early Christians were dangerous to the state. And it can be substantiated that primitive Christianity was far from being a patriotic movement. In those days, at least, the man who did not retaliate a blow was regarded first with amazement, then with contempt, then fear, and finally with the most diabolical hatred. Such a silent man might know something very important, might have knowledge of a world-wide insurrection ready to break tonight. Tear him to pieces, then; he shall at least not maintain that exasperating smile! How is such a meek man “blessed”? It may be true that our sentiments can partially apologize for a system of ethics based upon the functions of the flexor system alone, yet the sense of proportion which we inherit from the Greeks demands that we strike out on new paths which are not littered with the blunders of the past. We must not forget to say, however, that one reason why these unobtrusive virtues have been given a chief place, not only in official Christianity, but also in Mohammedanism and Buddhism, is because of the simple, even though disquieting, fact that the flexor system is by nature stronger than the extensor system. Man, then, is by endowment more inclined to be humble and secretive than to be bold and frank, since the larger and stronger and more often activated muscles of his body are those which produce withdrawing reactions. That is also why man is prone to introspection, and to cultivate an inner life, and why also, to borrow a phrase of Dr. Morton Prince, he is frequently more interested in his own “mental mud-puddle” than in the external environment. Again, this physiological fact is responsible for each man having his own house, his nest, into which he retreats to escape from the novelties he can no longer adjust to, and where he may “bathe his receptors in comfort-giving stimuli.” And so, one is finally tempted to say that the unobtrusive virtues have obtained such a vogue because they are the only ones which over sixty per cent of mankind can appreciate and will ever really attempt to achieve. Perhaps, also, it is for the same reason that today the word “virtue” signifies almost exclusively _chastity_, a trait of character and an action-pattern which any physician will tell you is dependent for its existence and maintenance upon the contractions of very powerful flexor muscles.