Truth is not Democratic

Right now I'm reading and loving "Founded on a Rock:  A History of the Catholic Church" by Louis De Wohl.  It is fascinating, and reads like a page-turner novel--even shorter and more accessible than "Triumph" by H.W. Crocker, which is also excellent on the same topic.  I can't recommend Louis De Wohl's books highly enough--most of them are historical novels about specific parts of Christianity--my favorite author right now, I would say.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from his description of the early days of the Church in the Roman Empire:

"Such was the view of many well-educated Romans.  The Christians were fanatics for insisting that their God alone was a god.  Why could they not be more tolerant?  After all, other people also had a right to their beliefs, and if some preferred to believe in Isis or Apollo or even the Gallic horse-goddess Epona, or all of them and a few more, why not acknowledge them at least as existing gods, equal to anybody else's?  Why not at least show them respect and courtesy?

'Pagan philosophies were there for the choosing, too.  You could be a Stoic, an Epicurean, or a Cynic...Every philosophical school maintained that it was the sole possessor of the truth.  And thus Pontius Pilate, when Truth incarnate stood before him, saying, "Whoever belongs to the truth, listens to my voice," answered with a skeptical shrug: "What is truth?" and half an hour later condemned a Man he knew in truth to be innocent, to a cruel death.

'Truth, of its very nature, must be intolerant.  Christians believed in the truth.  Therefore they had to be intolerant of what was not true.  Jupiter, Athena, Isis and all the rest were no more than figments of men's imagination.  The Emperor was not divine and therefore must not be worshipped.

'Truth is not democratic, it does not depend upon a majority vote.  The whole world can be wrong and one man, opposing its opinion and belief, can be right.

'Christian intolerance seemed intolerable to the tolerant pagans.  So the tolerant pagans proceeded to kill the intolerant Christians...only to find that with each new persecution the number of Christians increased instead of decreasing.  If on the other hand Christians had been "tolerant," they would have become merely one more sect in the pagan world."

Studying history the past couple of years with the kids, I've found the infinite number of occasions of history repeating itself to be quite startling.  It's comforting, really, that the forces of good have continued to prevail, even through times far more hopeless and scary than ours.  Thy Will Be Done!!