Page:Early Christianity in Arabia.djvu/200

188 and hastened by an over-ruling Providence, it is when their diseases are become incurable, and consequently when the only mode of permanently bettering mankind must be by their entire destruction. The infidel will boast exultingly that Christianity brought on the world the barbarism, ignorance, and intolerance which marked the latter days of the empire of Rome, and that the religion of Islam is as equally marked by the stamp of miraculous success and divine authority as that of Christ. But his boasting rests on the misrepresentation of what he is himself either unable or unwilling to understand. The spirit of Christianity was a spirit of peace, not of barbarism but of civilization. Ignorance was produced by war and conquest. With the rise of the Roman power, the fate of literature was decided, although various causes delayed for a time its final fall. The Romans were a people whose genius was formed for war and not for civilization. When the world was conquered, and none other remained accessible to their arms, they gave themselves up not to literature but to luxury, and their patronage of learning was but a spirit of emulation. Christianity was propagated in peace, but it became in its progress mixed and tainted with the manners and sentiments of the various people who received it. Persecution, perhaps, is one of the surest schools of tyranny and intolerance; the disciples of the Gospel underwent a long and arduous preparation in it, and when at length they obtained possession of the reins of power, we see that it had not been without effect.