Casesar hoped to reform men by changing institutions and laws; Christ wished to remake institutions, and lesson laws, by changing men. - p. 562
All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and nations; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ's victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated, it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming of the Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the onsoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world of sick brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed to no longer need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace. -p. 602
