Laudator Temporis Acti

Gilbert Highet (1906-1978), A Clerk of Oxenford (1954; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 81:

Some of the pagans who opposed the new religion were well intentioned. They were not devils incarnate. And they insisted that the Greco-Roman world was sustained by certain long-standing traditions. In contrast with these traditions, Christianity appeared to them to be simple anarchism, the cult of a naïve group of mystics who expected the world to come to an end at any moment, and who therefore cared nothing about the duties and responsibilities involved in administering a civilized community—public health, and education, and taxation, and commerce, and national defense, and day-to-day social progress. They pointed to the fact that Rome, as it came closer and closer to accepting Christianity, had been growing weaker and weaker under the attacks of the barbarians: some of them said that Christianity meant the abandonment of the will to live.