In regard to Greece and Rome the practice is even worse. The exceptional features of their life are described as normal and general features, and the very abundant literature which has put in its true light the character of Athens and Rome is completely ignored. Special periods of vice under bad emperors (who, in the aggregate, ruled only seventy years out of three hundred and twenty) are spread over the whole of Roman history. The gossip and democratic rhetoric of Juvenal are pressed literally, in spite of the judgment of all serious historians. The works which exhibit the better side of Rome, and the inscriptions which show a very high degree of character and humanitarianism under the Stoics, are wholly suppressed. The balanced verdict of modern historians is scandalously flouted. At all costs it must be shown that Europe needed regeneration, and that Christian morality was far superior to pagan; and so the clergy continue, in spite of protests from some of their own lay scholars (Emil Reich, for instance), to draw a flagrantly untruthful picture of the morals of Greece and Rome. But this misrepresentation is venial in comparison with the misrepresentation of later European history. The clerical story of the moral change that came over Europe when it embraced Christianity is one of the grossest impostures ever laid on the human mind. Even clerics like Dean Milman sufficiently refuted it decades ago, but it flourishes as profitably as ever. From the pulpit of St. Paul's to the tin chapels of Mudville it is one of the most treasured traditions, and perhaps no picture is more familiar to Christian audiences than that of Rome, drunk with its vices, reeling to the foot of the cross and embracing sobriety. It is a calculated clerical myth in every line. The Stoics reformed Rome at a time when the Christians were a mere handful of obscure people, and the magnificent work done and institutions set up by the Stoics were not sustained by the Church. Even in regard to the persecutions the clergy still repeat the legend which modern historians recognise as based on a mass of medieval forgeries. Civilisation sank rapidly until it touched the depth of the early Middle Ages, and, as Milman candidly recognised, the claim that at least virtue increased is the reverse of the truth. The Church did not denounce or abolish slavery: it discouraged education: it abased woman: it set back a thousand years the development of culture. Yet our clerical writers repeat the medieval falsehoods as fluently as if modern history did not exist.