[218] Thus Sir Samuel Dill (_Roman Society_, p. 11) calls attention to the letter of St. Paulinus who, when the Empire was threatened by barbarians, wrote to a Roman soldier that Christianity is incompatible with family life, with citizenship, with patriotism, and that soldiers are doomed to eternal torment. Christians frequently showed no respect for law or its representatives. "Many Christian confessors," says Sir W.M. Ramsay (_The Church in the Roman Empire_, chap. xv), "went to extremes in showing their contempt and hatred for their judges. Their answers to plain questions were evasive and indirect; they lectured Roman dignitaries as if the latter were the criminals and they themselves the judges; and they even used violent reproaches and coarse, insulting gestures." Bouche-Leclercq (_L'Intolerance Religieuse et le Politique_, 1911, especially chap. X) shows how the early Christians insisted on being persecuted. We see much the same attitude to-day among anarchists of the lower class (and also, it may be added, sometimes among suffragettes), who may be regarded as the modern analogues of the early Christians. [219] It may well be, indeed, that in all ages the actual sum of immorality, broadly considered--in public and in private, in thought and in act--undergoes but slight oscillations. But in the nature of its manifestations and in the nature of the manifestations that accompany it, there may be immense fluctuations. Tarde, the distinguished thinker, referring to the "delicious Catholicism" of the days before Luther, asks: "If that amiable Christian evolution had peacefully continued to our days, should we be still more immoral than we are? It is doubtful, but in all probability we should be enjoying the most aesthetic and the least vexatious religion in the world, in which all our science, all our civilization, would have been free to progress" (Tarde, _La Logique Sociale_, p. 198). As has often been pointed out, it was along the lines indicated by Erasmus, rather than along the lines pursued by Luther, that the progress of civilization lay. [220] Nietzsche, _Beyond Good and Evil_, chap. II. A century earlier Godwin had written in his _Political Justice_ (Book VII, chap. VIII): "Men are weak at present because they have always been told they are weak and must not be trusted with themselves. Take them out of their shackles, bid them enquire, reason, and judge, and you will soon find them very different beings. Tell them that they have passions, are occasionally hasty, intemperate, and injurious, but that they must be trusted with themselves. Tell them that the mountains of parchment in which they have been hitherto entrenched, are fit only to impose upon ages of superstition and ignorance, that henceforth we will have no dependence but upon their spontaneous justice; that, if their passions be gigantic, they must rise with gigantic energy to subdue them; that if their decrees be iniquitous, the iniquity shall be all their own." X