Our Sun God - The History of Christianity Before Christ. John Denham Parsons

civilisation of the Saracens or Moors, and to develop marine intercourse between the nations, caused the evolution of a Christian civilisation, and now enables the Church to claim as its peculiar product a result achieved in spite of itself.

      In spite of itself; for from the destruction of the Alexandrian Library in A.C. 390 and the murder of Hypatia, down to the persecutions of Galileo and of Bruno, and the invectives which, even as late as the present century, the Greek, Roman, and Protestant Churches have alike thundered forth against scientific facts and their promulgators, the Church has everywhere and always used its influence in as adverse a manner towards science as it dared.

      But even if the reader has just possibly been able to free himself or herself sufficiently from the prejudices of a Christian education and environment to assimilate the foregoing facts, such an one may yet be quite unaware, or unable to realise, that Christianity as well as Civilisation existed before our era, and, like it, was not due either to the advent, life, or teaching, of Jesus the Nazarene.

      This was admitted by more than one of the Fathers, however, and amongst others by the great St. Augustine. For toward the close of his remarkable career, that famous Bishop of Hippo wrote the following ever-to-be-remembered passage:—

      “Again, in that I said ‘This is in our time the Christian Religion, which to know and also follow is most sure and certain salvation’; it is affirmed in regard to this name, not in regard to the sacred thing itself to which the name belongs. For the sacred thing which is now called the Christian Religion existed in ancient times, nor indeed was it absent from the beginning of the human race until the Christ Himself came in the flesh, whence the true religion, which already existed, came to be called ‘the Christian.’ So when after His resurrection and ascension to heaven the Apostles began to preach and many believed, it is thus written, ‘The followers were first called Christians at Antioch.' Therefore I said 'This is in our time the Christian Religion,' not because it did not exist in earlier times, but as having in later times received this particular name."