With the inception of Christianity, however, the case was very different. At the birth of Jesus the inhabitants of Palestine, with the exception of the Essenes, were sunk low in the mire of bigotry, prejudice, and priestly domination. The mind of the people was less philosophically prepared to grasp a broad and exalted creed such as essential Christianity; it required dogmas more definite, doctrines more easily comprehended; and Jesus had perforce to mould his utterances to the temperament and mental capacity of the people among whom he preached.
To the east of the Holy Land was India, with its refined and more perfect civilization; to the west, Central Europe, with its savage and ignorant tribes, worshippers of trees, and in servitude to many superstitious practices and customs. Christianity, with its immense potential resources, its innate power for good, required some outlet for its activities; and, as was only natural, it spread in the direction where a pure and sublime religion was most needed, and experienced little difficulty in eventually conquering the savage intellect of Central Europe. Becoming appropriated by men who, living in the far North, depended for their very life upon a ceaseless struggle with adverse circumstances, it gradually lost the softening and refining influences which are so characteristic of the Oriental temperament, and became the vehicle for the passions and ambitions of a race more brutal and more unsympathetic than that among which it took its rise.
And to what an extent has this religion of Christ, the evangel of peace and goodwill, been since prostituted! The mistaken--though, no doubt, well-intended--dogmas formulated by the Holy Catholic Church proved to be, in their short-sightedness and complete lack of insight into human nature, a prolific source of degeneration, bigotry, persecution, ignorance, immorality, and extreme ecclesiastical tyranny in the Dark Ages. The rigid and narrow doctrines inculcated by the Puritans have been almost as fruitful a cause of moral perversion and reckless narrow-mindedness. To-day it must be acknowledged that we have outgrown the gross and debasing Christianity of those mediæval times; but many of us are still fast chained in the shackles of prejudice and intolerance, with all their concomitant delusions and hypocrisies.