The Christian religion has all the vices of slavery, and encourages submission to evil instead of resistance to it; it has in it the pathetic beauty of the meekness of the bruised and beaten wife still loving the injurer, of the slave forgiving the slave-driver, but it is a beauty which perpetuates the wrong of which it is born.  Better, far better, both for oppressor and for oppressed, is resistance to cruelty than submission to it; submission encourages the wrong-doer where resistance would check him, and Christianity fails in that it omits to value strong men and true patriots, rebels against authority which is unjust.  Rome taught its citizens to reverence themselves, to love their country, to maintain freedom:  the Roman would die gladly for his mother-country, and deemed his duty as a citizen the foremost of his obligations.  The love of country, and the sense of service owed to the State, is the grandest and sublimest virtue of the Pagan world.  All felt it, from the highest to the lowest:  at Thermopylae the Spartans died gladly for the land they covered with their bodies, faithful unto death to the duty entrusted to them by their country; men and women equally felt the paramount claim of the State, and mothers gave their sons to death rather than that they should fail in duty there.  The Roman was taught to value the Republic above its officers; to resist the highest if he grasped at unfair supremacy; to maintain inviolate the rights and the liberties of the people.  Christianity undermined all these manly virtues; it preached obedience to “the powers that be,” whether they were good or bad; it upheld the authority of a Nero as “ordained of God,” and pronounced damnation on those who resisted him; and so it paved the way for the despotism of the Middle Ages, by crushing out the manhood of the nations, and fashioning them into Oriental slaves.  Little wonder that kings embraced Christianity, and forced it on their subjects, for it placed the nations bound at their footstools, and endorsed the tyranny of man with the authority of God.  Throughout the New Testament what word is there of patriotism?  The citizenship is in heaven.  What incitement to heroism?  Resist not the power.  What appeal to self-reverence?  In my flesh dwelleth no good thing.  What cry against injustice and oppression?  Honour the king, and give obedience to the froward.  Christianity makes a paradise for tyrants and a hell for the oppressed.

Intertwined with the evil of omissions of duty is the direct injury of commanding NON-RESISTANCE, and of enforcing INDIFFERENCE TO EARTHLY CARES.  “I say unto you that ye resist not evil:  but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.  And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.  And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.  Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (Matt. v. 39-42).  The surface