CHAPTER Ⅲ　THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT

The rapid conquest of the western world by the Church is sometimes used as proof definite that the Christian ideas must have been of divine origin. It is not my business to debate this point, but I would suggest that the villainous conditions under which the majority of the Romans were forced to live had as much to do with the success of the earliest missionaries as the sound common sense of their message.

Thus far I have shown you one side of the Roman picture—the world of the soldiers and statesmen and rich manufacturers and scientists, fortunate folks who lived in delightful and enlightened ease on the slopes of the Lateran Hill or among the valleys and hills of the Campania or somewhere along the bay of Naples.

But they were only part of the story.

Amidst the teeming slums of the suburbs there was little enough evidence of that plentiful prosperity which made the poets rave about the Millennium and inspired orators to compare Octavian to Jupiter.

There, in the endless and dreary rows of overcrowded and reeking tenement houses lived those vast multitudes to whom life was merely an uninterrupted sensation of hunger, sweat and pain. To those men and women, the wonderful tale of a simple carpenter in a little village beyond the sea, who had gained his daily bread by the labor of his own hands, who had loved the poor and downtrodden and who therefore had been killed by his cruel and rapacious enemies, meant something very real and tangible.Yes, they had all of them heard of Mithras and Isis and Astarte. But these Gods were dead, and they had