“If you eugenists only knew the dreadful crop of dragon’s teeth that you are scattering today upon the fertile soil of the unthinking mind! Because we, fortunately, live in the millennial lull of a transitional age, you think that human nature has changed; that the fury of the Crusades will never be renewed in fantastic social wars, and the madness of religious fratricide in the madness of Science become Faith. All the old evils are lying low, lurking in the minds of men, ready to spring forth in all their ancient fury when the wise and illogical compromises, evolved through centuries of experience, have been discarded. I sometimes think that Holy Russia has man’s future in her charge. For without Christianity the moral nature of man will be where it has been in ages past. Social and economic readjustments leave it unchanged.” “A religion of slaves, of the weak and incompetent,” said Lazaroff loudly. “You think, then, that human passions have become emulsified by education? What a delusion!” “Unquestionably. Permit me to refer to myself as an example of the crass materialist. For I do not believe in anything but matter. Matter is soul, as Hæckel proves. Yet, I am not on that account a man of base impulses. I do not want to wound, to kill, to steal, to torture—” “Are you quite sure you know yourself, Herman?” “But I utterly reject the efficacy of your Christianity, except in this low order of civilization. It is a dead faith, with its foolish miracles, its preposterous and unscientific dualism.” “And I say,” cried Sir Spofforth, rising out of his chair, “that it is precisely the Christian norm, the unattainable ideal of Christ, working in the human heart, that has freed civilization from cruelty and shame. Why, look backward before Christ lived, and forward: don’t you see that we are actually indwelling in Him, according to His promise? Think of the Christians burned as living torches in Nero’s time, and read the writings of contemporary Romans, men of disciplined lives and a mentality as great as ours. Read Pliny, Tacitus, Seneca; read of the hopelessness of life when Rome was at her highest, and see if this stirred them. Picture Marcus Aurelius, the noble Stoic, presiding over the amphitheater. Study the manners and morals of Athens when her light burned most brightly. Contrast a thousand years of man’s abasement, and try to set the Inquisition against that.