Note 134 — Chapter VII · ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY AND ITS OPPONENTS
Reading edition
It would indeed be unintelligible that intellectual decline without change of social system should put morals on a sound footing. The very asceticism which seeks to mortify the body is an avowal of the vice from which it recoils, and insofar as this has prevailed under Christianity it has specifically hindered general temperance,134 inasmuch as the types capable of self-rule thus leave no offspring.