Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/153

Rh was established. The most abundant source of virtue which the sympathetic contact of a sublime perception has made to well up in the heart of man, was opened. The lofty conception of Jesus, scarcely comprehended by his disciples, sustained considerable diminution.

Nevertheless, Christianity prevailed from the first, and prevailed without limit above all other existing forms of faith. Those forms which did not aspire to any absolute worth, which had no solid organization, and which responded to nothing moral, made but feeble resistance. Some efforts made to reform them, in accordance with the new requirements of mankind, and to introduce into them an element of earnestness and morality,—the attempt of Julian, for instance,—completely failed. The Empire, which believed, not without reason, that its very element was threatened by the growth of a new power—the Church—resisted at first most energetically: it finished by adopting the faith