Note 18 — Chapter VII · FALLACIES IN POPULAR ARGUMENTS

Historians find that the rapidity of the spread has been much exaggerated, and that it was not until the Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicæa in A.D. 325 that the spread commenced to emerge from insignificance. Even then the adhesion to the new Faith was for a long period of a purely nominal character, the unwilling converts remaining, to all intents, pagans after they were baptised. The spread of Christianity was for a long time confined to cosmopolitan trading towns only, the villagers remaining pagans—hence the name. (Mutatis mutandis, it is the villagers who are now the last to be touched by the spread of “paganism.”) What were the “Providential” methods of conversion? The prevailing ignorance and superstition were taken advantage of by the propagators of the Gospel and frauds freely perpetrated, while “edicts of toleration removed the temporal disadvantages which had hitherto retarded the progress of Christianity.”18 After the Emperor Constantine had been converted, “the cities which signalised a forward zeal, by the voluntary destruction of their temples, were distinguished by municipal privileges, and rewarded with popular donations.”19 When these measures failed, Church and State had recourse to persecution, quite as cruel as, and on a scale that far exceeded, the persecution of the early Christians by the heathen. For instance, the Emperor Theodosius, at the suggestion of the ecclesiastics who governed his conscience, promulgated, in the space of fifteen years (A.D. 380–394), “at least fifteen severe edicts against the heretics, more especially against those who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.”20 Buddhism, on the contrary, unlike Christianity and Mohammedanism, was promulgated without persecution or religious wars, and spread far more rapidly than Christianity. In his apologetic work, Anti-Theistic Theories, Dr. Flint refers to Buddhism thus: “The very marvellous system of thought called Buddhism, which originated in India about 500 years B.C., has spread over a greater area of the earth and gained more adherents than even Christianity, and by peaceful means—by the power of persuasion—not by the force of arms, not by persecution.”