It is one of the ironies of history that the passion for extinguishing immorality by law and administration should have arisen in what used to be called Christendom. For Christianity is precisely the most brilliant proof the world has ever seen of the truth that immorality cannot so be suppressed. From the standpoint of classic Rome Christianity was an aggressive attack on Roman morality from every side. It was not so only in appearance, but in reality, as modern historians fully recognize.[218] Merely as a new religion Christianity would have been received with calm indifference, even with a certain welcome, as other new religions were received. But Christianity denied the supremacy of the State, carried on an anti-military propaganda in the army, openly flouted established social conventions, loosened family life, preached and practised asceticism to an age that was already painfully aware that, above all things, it needed men. The fatal though doubtless inevitable step was taken of attempting to suppress the potent poison of this manifold immorality by force. The triumph of Christianity was largely due to the fine qualities which were brought out by that annealing process, and the splendid prestige which the process itself assured. Yet the method of warfare which it had so brilliantly proved to be worthless was speedily adopted by Christianity itself, and is even yet, at intervals, spasmodically applied. That these attempts should have such results as we see is not surprising when we remember that even movements, at the outset, mainly inspired by moral energy, rather than by faith in moral legislation, when that energy becomes reckless, violent and intolerant, lead in the end to results altogether opposed to the aims of those who initiated them. It was thus that Luther has permanently fortified the position of the Popes whom he assailed, and that the Reformation produced the Counter-Reformation, a movement as formidable and as enduring as that which it countered. When Luther appeared all that was rigid and inhuman in the Church was slowly dissolving, certainly not without an inevitable sediment of immorality, yet the solution was in the highest degree favourable to the development of the freer and larger conceptions of life, the expansion of science and art and philosophy, which at that moment was pre-eminently necessary for the progress of civilisation, and, indirectly, therefore, for the progress of morals.[219] The violence of the Reformation not only resulted in a new tyranny for its own adherents--calling in turn for fresh reformations by Puritans, Quakers, Deists, and Freethinkers--but it re-established, and even to-day continues to support, that very tyranny of the old Church against which it was a protest.