Note 8 — Chapter II · MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY

Christianity made its way precisely because (1) it was a construction from current moral and religious material; and because (2) it adopted a system of economic organization already tested by Jews and Gentiles; and (3) because its doctrines were ascribed to a God, not to a man. Anything like a moral renovation of the world it never effected; that conception is a chimera of chimeras. While Mill, the amateur in matters of religious research, who “scarcely ever read a theological book,”8 ascribed to Christian morality a unique and original quality, Newman, the essentially religious man, deliberately affirmed with the Rationalists that “There is little in the ethics of Christianity which the human mind may not reach by its natural powers, and which here or there ... has not in fact been anticipated.”9 And Baur, who gave his life and his whole powers to the problem which Mill assumed to dispose of by a dithyramb, put in a sentence the historic truth which Mill so completely failed to grasp:—