us of Apuleius. We come on five or six nicely assorted adjectives and substantives; sometimes the studied cadences are not infelicitous; but, upon the whole, the artist of the decline fails less egregiously when he tries to copy the large, simple work of the prime than when he tries to copy the subtle work of the later master.

LACTANTIUS.

Far better, and saner both in style and temper, are the works of Lactantius Firmianus, whose other names, according to most MSS., were Lucius Cælius, or Cæcilius, who wrote his great work during the height of the Diocletian (or rather Galerian) persecution. St. Jerome assures us repeatedly that he was a pupil of Arnobius: it is clear from his own writings that he was educated in Africa, where Arnobius flourished. He was invited to Nicomedia by Diocletian as a professor of Latin rhetoric, and in that capacity he was a failure. Nicomedia was a Greek city, and the residence of the court did not do much to Latinize it; there was little business in the forum, and Lactantius was not employed in it; he had not many pupils, and was in constant want until Constantine employed him in his old age as a teacher to his son Crispus.

Naturally he was disgusted with his profession, and saw its hollowness, though he was not ungrateful to it, as he had trained his eloquence for the exposition of truth by the discussion of imaginary law-cases.

In his youth he wrote a "Symposium," or poem in hexameters, on his journey from Africa to Nicomedia, and a book entitled "Grammaticus," and perhaps a copy of verses in elegiacs on the phoenix, in which the latest form of the legend is set forth: The phoenix lays his own funeral pyre, and the heat of pairing-time lights it; the result is a worm which turns. into an egg, which turns into a phoenix, which flies away with the ashes of its predecessor. The poem does not discard mythology, but the feeling of immortal life out of death may fairly be taken for a sign of sympathy with Christianity.

His earliest undoubted work which has reached us is Christian, but still reserved in the expression of doctrine. Its title

is "De Opificio Dei," and its object is a criticism at once of the Epicurean and Stoic doctrines of creation. He wishes to carry teleology just far enough to prove a wise and mighty and beneficent Creator, and to prove that it breaks down soon enough to prove that he is incomprehensible. The writer follows Aristotle and Varro in extolling the mechanism of the human body, and declines to be baffled by the Epicurean and sceptical argument from the helplessness of human infancy. He asks whether his opponents would like to change with dumb animals because they can stand alone sooner than babies, and hints that babies are better off than birds, which have to be born twice over, first in the egg and then as fledglings, and suggests that the hen which has to hatch them without eating goes through more than a human mother. As for physiology, he supposes that he knows the use of the two great cavities-one holds air and nourishes the soul, the other holds food and nourishes the muscles. He has plenty to say in praise of the intestinal canal, which holds the food long enough and not too long; and triumphs over philosophical ignorance of the purposes of the liver and the spleen, and the "globe of the heart," and "the most bitter liquor of the gall." About the spleen philosophers are ignorant still, but the liver is one of the best-known organs, and every physiologist who likes may smile at the suggestion that its primary function is to be the seat of love, as the primary function of the "globe of the heart" is to be the seat of fear.

A pendant to the treatise "De Opificio Dei" is the treatise "De Ira Dei," which is a criticism of the current doctrines of Providence, as the earlier work is a criticism of the current doctrines of creation. It corresponds to the doctrine of "a moral governor" in the eighteenth-century apologetic. His thesis is, that the Epicureans are wrong in holding that the Deity is purely indifferent to human affairs, and that the Stoics are wrong in holding that he is a being of pure benevolence in either case men would have no motive to fear God, which is inseparable from the essence of religion. The author keeps to the divine working, and does not seriously discuss the divine nature, so that we do not know how he would have

met the classical scholastic dictum, "Affectus in Deo denotat effectum."

The treatise "De Ira Dei" contains references to Lactantius's great work, the seven books of "Divine Institutions," and is therefore later; it is addressed to Donatus, to whom another work, "De Mortibus Persecutorum," was addressed by Cæcilius, who is still thought to be rightly identified with Lactantius, who, according to St. Jerome, wrote "De Persecutione." The "Divine Institutions" seem to be dedicated to Demetrianus, like the "De Opificio Dei."

The chief ideas of the work are "wisdom" and "religion," which are in fact inseparable: the simple feel the need of religion, the educated of wisdom; and if they attain to either they attain to both. In the first book he attacks polytheism; in the second he explains its origin; in the third he gives his criticism of heathen philosophy; in the fourth he gives his theory of true knowledge; in the fifth, his theory of virtue. Both are made to depend upon true religion, and this is illustrated by the contrast between Christians and heathens. The subject of virtue is continued in the sixth book, where he explains that charity to others is the chief part of the service of God, and explains the defects of the Stoic and Peripatetic theories of virtue. In the last book we have the doctrine of the blessed life, that is, according to Lactantius, a doctrine of future rewards and punishments; the world was made for man in six days, and it will last six ages, which, according to the best chronologies accessible to Lactantius, had at most two hundred years to run;' at the end of the six thousand years came the downfall of Rome and the reign of Antichrist. Unlike Arnobius, Lactantius regards the downfall of Rome as an unmixed calamity, though it is to be followed by the millennial reign, in which God dwells among the righteous who have part in the first resurrection, in the holy city on earth. Then comes the loosing of the devil, and everything else which crude interpreters have been led to expect from the Book of Revelation. The author is throughout quite as dependent upon the Sibyl as upon the prophets of the Old

1 Lact. "Div. Inst." vii. 16.

2 Ib. vii. 15, 25.

Testament. He constantly takes the attitude of an enlightened moderator between the dogmatist and the sceptic: he holds that Socrates and the New Academy have finally disposed of the theory that philosophy is a body of independent knowledge, while the Stoics have disposed of the doctrine of opinion upon which the Academy was anxious to fall back.' It is equally absurd to hold that men can know all things, which is the portion of God, and that they can know nothing, which is the portion of beasts: the rational position is that man, who has a celestial soul in a terrestrial body, is capable of a real, though a partial, knowledge, though this is only to be obtained by revelation. Revelation, according to Lactantius, is to be authenticated rather by prophecy than by miracles;2 and this shows his general mind towards argument: he is quite willing to admit that all the stories of oracles and prodigies which are embalmed in the classical histories are true, only this serves to confirm the history of the fall of the angels in Genesis. All false religions originate with the celestial or terrestrial demons: the celestial demons are the angels who were appointed to guard mankind from the devil, and saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and the terrestrial demons are their sons; and between them they are the authors of all the mischief in the world, and gratify their depraved appetites under cover of the worship paid to the images of false gods, who were nothing but deified kings—an explanation which steadily gained in plausibility up to the time of Diocletian, the last emperor who was solemnly deified. Of course all the immoralities of mythology are set down to the charge of these deified kings, of whom Jupiter was the first. Here again it is remarkable how closely the author adheres to classical tradition: he seriously believes the legend of the golden age, when Justice dwelt among men. The accession of Jupiter drove her away, because Jupiter was the first to introduce false worship, which is the essence of injustice; till the days of Jupiter men served God rightly in abstaining from all outward service except kindness to one another. It is an old observation that the Christianity of Lactantius is very 1 Lact. "Div. Inst." iii. 4. Ib. v. 13, 19. 3 Ib. ii. 15. • Ib. v. 6.

rudimentary: he insists repeatedly on the fear of falling into torment among the angels, and says little or nothing about the doctrine of the sacraments, which perhaps may be intentional.

The most penetrating part of the book is the criticism of philosophy, which he regards as defective because it has no reference to the fear of God or a future life. He singles out for rebuke the famous saying of Anaxagoras, that he was born to behold the sun and the face of heaven.' The contrast is really typical. Anaxagoras gives full expression to the ideal of philosophy as a life lived for its own sake, and Lactantius insists that it is selfish precisely because it is disinterested, and does not subordinate life to duty and to a higher end (for Lactantius, like many others, cannot resolve the conception of duty into anything but an external rule and a motive for obeying it), and the Stoical ideal, though less openly egotistic, still found the chief good in the self-consciousness of the wise man at every moment. As for the civic virtue of the ancient world, Lactantius makes exactly the same objection' which all modern advocates of Christianity used to make until the charitable foundations of the age of Trajan and his successors were understood, that pagan civilization was apt to forget the value of provision for the weak and suffering, which, in the judgment of Lactantius, was the most essential part of virtue and the remedy for the sins of the flesh, which it is scarcely practicable to avoid. He is in agreement, upon the whole, with the tradition of philosophy, that the whole system of public amusements was wrong: he protests especially against the competitions in eloquence and poetry, which were still apparently in sufficient vigor to be a temptation.

He reasserts his superiority in the theory of the passions.* According to the Peripatetics, the important thing was to keep them within due limits; according to the Stoics, they were to be suppressed altogether; according to Lactantius, they were to be rightly directed-it is impossible, if we love and fear and hate aright, to love or fear or hate too strongly. Lactantius even reaches the observation that the intellect is enlight1 Lact. “Div. Inst." iii. 9. Ib. vi. 16. Ib. vi. 18, 20. Ib. vi. 15, 16.