“has throughout all the world persuaded whole churches full of men to despise death, and…”

has throughout all the world persuaded whole churches full of men to despise death, and to mind the things of immortality

Athanasius of Alexandria · On the Incarnation of the Word, and Against the Heathen · NPNF2 IV, On the Incarnation §47

Set against the philosophers, who he says persuaded not even their own neighbours. The claim is deliberately checkable in his own century: not that the teaching is finer, but that whole congregations of ordinary people have stopped being afraid.