in the vastness of their territory and the wealth they have derived from subject peoples. To connect this form of greatness with the Sermon on the Mount is audacious: it is a practice which really belongs to the age when English merchants who waxed fat on the negro-slave trade could complacently give the name “Jesus” to their vessels. This form of greatness frankly rested on buccaneering. Europe is great also in intellectual development, with the scientific and technical achievements to which this has led. We need not ask what particular Christian sentiment has inspired this; we know too well the share the clergy have had in repressing it.
Lastly, Europe is great in the cultivation of humane sentiment and the endeavour to practise social justice. It is here that the clergy usually claim their usefulness; and there is hardly a bolder mis-statement in their literature than this. The New Testament contains not a single moral sentiment that was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and to the later Jews: the moral sentiments of the New Testament are so vague and elementary that not a single priest denounced slavery for nine hundred years, and not a Church has denounced war for more than eighteen hundred years: the Christian ethic was so uninspiring that Europe reeked with vice and crime and war and social injustice until the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the nineteenth century: when the reform began, in the nineteenth century, hardly a single
