Several correspondents of The Times have complained about the present-day persecution of Christians. They conveniently ignore the long, sad history of persecution by Christians of non-Christians and fellow Christians alike.

During the early centuries of Christianity, Christians in Alexandria and in Constantinople persecuted and murdered each other over a vowel in their Creed during the Arian controversy and again over a word during the Monophysite controversy. When Christians were not fighting among themselves, they turned on pagans, Muslims and Jews. So it’s not surprising that Voltaire summed up the history of Christianity as a history of squabbles over mere words and of incitements to crime and cruelty and war.

The crimes and cruelty started soon after Christianity was adopted as the official religion in the Roman Empire. Pagans did not simply fade away into extinction. Their religion was actively suppressed and annihilated and their temples and shrines desecrated and demolished.

The Jews did not fare any better at the hands of the early Christians. In 388, a Christian mob, instigated by the local bishop, burned down a synagogue. The Emperor Theodosius ordered it rebuilt at Christian expense. He was hotly denounced by the most influential of all Christian prelates, Bishop Ambrose of Milan. During the First Crusade, a Christian mob thought it desirable to kill the Jews of Europe before proceeding to fight the Turks in Jerusalem. As the mob marched along the Rhine, they massacred along the way Jews at Speyer, Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Worms and Regensburg.

In the Middle Ages, both the Dominicans and the Franciscans were “aggressive proselytisers” against the Jews who “learned to fear the friars more than any other Christian group” (Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews)

And neither were the Christians any kinder to fellow Christians during the Reformation.

In Spain, the burning at the stake of unrepentant “heretics” by the Holy Office of the Inquisition was a propitiatory offering to God and a restoration of human sacrifice. In France, the tensions between Catholics and Protestants culminated in a gory massacre of 10,000 Huguenots.

The religious conflict in Europe climaxed in the terrible Thirty Years’ War and the result was the desolation of Germany through depopulation, starvation and disease.

After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the papacy ceased to be a political power and religion in Europe declined. Scepticism was encouraged by the coarseness of religious polemic, the brutality of the war between rival creeds and by the cruelties of faith. Men began to doubt creeds that preached Christ and practised wholesale fratricide.