“And simply because a moral code is the sum-total of the prejudices of the community, there cannot possibly exist two rival codes at the same time and in the same place. I could illustrate this truth by a great number of examples, but none of them could be more to the point than that of the Emperor Julian, with whose works I have lately been making myself somewhat familiar. Julian, who fought on the side of the Pagan gods with such staunchness and magnanimity—Julian, who was a sun-worshipper, yet professed all the moral sentiments of the Christians. Like them, he scorned the pleasures of the flesh and vaunted the efficacy of fasting, because it brings a man into union with the divine. Like them, he upheld the doctrine of atonement and believed in the purifying effect of suffering. He had himself initiated, too, into mysteries which satisfied his keen desire for purity, renunciation and divine love, quite as efficaciously as the mysteries of the Christian religion. In a word, his neo-paganism was, morally speaking, own brother to the rising cult of Christianity. And what is there surprising in that? The two creeds were the twin children of Rome and of the East. They both corresponded to the same human habits, to the same deep instincts in the Asiatic and Latin worlds. Their souls were alike, though in name and phraseology they differed from each other. This difference was enough to make them deadly enemies, for it is about mere words that men usually quarrel. It is for the sake of words that they most willingly kill and are killed. Historians are in the habit of asking anxiously what would have become of civilisation, if the philosopher-emperor had conquered the Galilean by winning a victory that he had rightly earned by his constancy and moderation. It is no easy game thus to reconstruct history. Yet it seems clear enough that in this case, polytheism, which had already by the reign of Julian been reduced to a species of monotheism, would have submitted to the new mental habits of the time and would have assumed precisely the same moral form that one sees it taking under Christianity. Look at all the great revolutionary leaders and tell me if there is a single one who showed himself in any way an original thinker, as far as morality is concerned. Robespierre’s ideas of righteousness were to the end those in which he had been trained by the priests of Arras. “You are a free-thinker, Monsieur Mazure, and you think that man’s object on this planet ought to be to get the maximum amount of happiness out of it. M. de Terremondre, who is a Catholic, believes, on the contrary, that we are all here in a place of expiation in order that we may gain eternal life through suffering. Yet, notwithstanding the contradiction in your creeds, you have both practically the same moral code, because morality is independent of creeds.”