These impious Galileans give themselves to this kind of humanity: as men allure children with a cake, so they… bring converts to their impiety. … Now we can see what it is that makes these Christians such powerful enemies of our gods; it is the brotherly love which they manifest toward strangers and toward the sick and the poor, the thoughtful manner in which they care for the dead, and the purity of their own lives.

Juliani Imperatoris (aka “Julian the Apostate”) “Quae Supersunt Praeter Religious apud Cyrillum: Omnia, 1:391 f. <Quote as translated I got from combining two sources: “Healing & Christianity” by Morton T. Kelsey (1973) page 147, and “The Growth of Medicine from Earliest Times to about 1800” (1917) by Albert H. Buck.>

I know many who bemoan that Christianity is not like it was in the earliest years of the church. Maybe the worship today is not as sincere as it was back then. Maybe we are not as united today as we were back then. Perhaps we lack the doctrinal purity or maybe some obscure practice of then has been lost today. Maybe we don’t have the same ecclesiastical structure as then.

For me, I think the quote by an enemy of the church is revealing. If such as an “enemy” today could say that our secret is “… the brotherly love which they manifest toward strangers and toward the sick and the poor, the thoughtful manner in which they care for the dead, and the purity of their own lives”, we wouldn’t have to be searching for problems…

… and we won’t have to ‘toot our own horn’ by saying things that sadly or commonly far from true like “And they will know we are Christians by our love… by our love. Yes, they will know we are Christians by our live.”