Aristotle and Plato are still founded on for the purposes of higher education in Christian countries; but no Christian writer suggests that what is good or true in their thought is ascribable to paganism qua paganism; though modern ethical development is constantly set down to the score of Christianity. In the same fashion, hospitals in Christian countries are constantly credited to the Christian account, without a thought of admitting that Moslem hospitals are the product of the Koran, or that the mutual helpfulness of Eskimos is a specific result of their heathenism. Paganism is made to figure in general as promoting vice and human sacrifices and slavery; Christianity as putting these things down. The impartial historian pronounces that it has indeed beneficently availed for the suppression of human sacrifice in general, in virtue of its primary dogma; but that qua religion it has no more told against slavery than has Islam; that the slavery maintained till last century under Christian sanctions and auspices has been as cruel as any seen in human history; that the persistence of vice within the sphere of Christianity is the despair of its devotees; and that even in the matter of human sacrifice the hideous massacre wrought on that pretext by the crusaders at Jerusalem tells of a terrible per contra to the account of the faith. To claim for Christianity the latter-day curtailment of slavery, finally, would be to ignore alike the potent economic and the political causation, and to overlook the fact that the strongest defence ever made of slavery as an institution was founded on the Christian sacred books. These facts belong to the "history of Christianity," like the facts of missionary enterprise and the establishment of universities by the Papacy in the Middle Ages: a mere recital of all the forms of progress made in the Christian era has no claim to such a title.
Doubtless it is difficult to trace all the reactions of creed upon society and polity; and it is not to be pretended that a general sketch can even establish the main critical principles to be applied, any more than it can complete the outline of the facts. But inasmuch as the popular fashion of doing both is wholly fallacious, a concise statement which aims at both is necessary, and may lead to fuller and better elucidations. In the preface to the first edition, a hope was expressed that such a conspectus might do an occasional service even to an opponent by bringing out a clear issue; and one hostile German critic was good enough to say that this service had been done.