phy, and were led to despise rather than to admire the counterfeit. The general upshot of the controversy probably was to spread very widely a spirit of religious indifference, and to reduce the great controversy of the day to a question of words or ceremonies. Meanwhile Paganism at Rome continued to rear her head with little abatement of external splendor. A casual observer might hardly conjecture how much was hollow beneath the surface. Notwithstanding some expressions of a contrary import which occur in the writings of the period, it seems to be proved convincingly that under Constantius the temples were still left open, nor were their estates as yet confiscated. The sacrifices were not disused; there was no proscription of the priesthood. On looking below the surface it might be observed, indeed, that with the general decline of wealth and energy the temples fell into disrepair, their property dwindled away, the prodigality of offerings and ceremonies was curtailed; the priesthood with its attendant expenses was regarded as a burden rather than an honor. The Pagans were apt to imagine that this decline was the direct effect of prohibition; the Christians more justly ascribed it to natural decay and decrepitude; but at Rome at least it does not seem, in any case, to mark a distinct advance in Christianity. It was not till the Church became more united in herself that she was enabled to enter bodily upon the abandoned inheritance of her predecessors.

Such were the circumstances under which the apostate emperor resolved to strike a blow for the recovery of the ancient faith. Naturally sensitive and enthusiastic, his genius was inflamed by the study of the ancient creeds and philosophies which his guardians had incautiously allowed him. He had learned to combine, after the fashion of the eclectic Paganism of the day, the legends of the Homeric mythology with the moral and spiritual theories of the schools; he could prostrate himself before the image of Jupiter or Apollo as the concrete representative of actual beings, which were themselves in their turn only the representatives of abstract ideas. He became early imbued with a strong repulsion from Christianity, which presented itself to him as the religion of the court, and deformed accordingly with many and gross corruptions, and still more as the religion of the tyrant who had been the persecutor of his family and the murderer of his only brother. It was almost inevitable that Julian should imbibe a mortal hatred of the faith which Constantius had disgraced with so much of cruelty and of personal depravity. Not in Julian only, but in other Pagans of this period we can trace a suppressed disgust at the moral inconsistencies which disfigured the progress of the rival faith, and which were, as usual, most conspicuous in the highest places both of the Church and of the State.

CHAP. LXXIII. JULIAN OPPOSES CHRISTIANITY.

607

While, however, we allow the excuse which may be pleaded for Julian's lapse in religion, we must remark, in justice to the creed he repudiated, that it was he, and not his Christian opponents, who set the example of repression and persecution. To the end of the reign of Constantius, and even later, it cannot be truly said of the Christian rulers that they employed forcible means for the advancement of their faith. The authorities which have been sometimes alleged to the contrary may be met by counter statements which seem on the whole convincing. But the religious policy of Julian admits of no such favorable extenuation. Not that he followed the barbarous examples of the persecutors of old in devoting the believers to the sword, the fire, and the lions. The Christians were now far too powerful to be so treated. The temper of the times was more humane; the feelings of the Pagans towards them had softened on more familiar acquaintance. Nor was Julian himself, it may be added, inclined by nature to cruelty or violence. He did not even adopt the milder injustice of closing the Christian churches or confiscating their endowments. He employed a subtler method of repression, and one which, if his life had been prolonged, might possibly have inflicted a severer blow upon the faith, and retarded its progress more effectually. It was much to his honor that he rather exerted himself to write down the religion of the Galileans, as he contemptuously called the Christians, thinking to brand them with ignominy in the eyes of the Greeks and Romans by noting their obscure provincial origin. But they had outlived the obloquy of the Cross, and neither his arguments nor his ridicule would have much availed him. He took at last the harsher step of shutting the schools and colleges against them, forbidding them to exercise the function of Sophists or teachers, and so degrading them in the eyes of the learned and literary classes of his subjects. He overrated, perhaps, in his pedantry the amount of this degradation in the eyes of the multitude. He forgot undoubtedly that the Gospel had been first preached and widely disseminated by preachers with little tincture. of secular knowledge. As it had been before, so we may well believe would it have been again; but we can conceive that the interdiction of literature to the believers at this juncture would have been a serious though certainly not a fatal blow had it been long continued. At all events, we may remark with interest how strong the spirit of letters was now among them. Forbidden to study or lecture upon Homer and Eschylus, they turned the Scriptures into Greek hexameters and iambics, and persisted in the cultivation of taste and imagination with no little success even under these adverse circumstances.

Julian made yet another effort to refute the pretensions of his

adversaries. The Christians pointed to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem as a standing evidence of the truth of their Master's prophecy, and declared that the sentence once executed upon it was final and irreversible. The Temple had never been rebuilt. It never should, it never could, be rebuilt. Upon this issue they were prepared to stake the truth of their religion. Julian determined to test it. In the plenitude of his secular power he gave orders to rebuild the Temple. He sent a body of workmen to excavate the ruins which still cumbered the site, and to lay his new foundations. The work was now proceeding vigorously, when, according to the account we have received even from a Pagan historian, the men were interrupted and utterly discomfited by a violent convulsion of the earth, with fire and smoke and sulphureous exhalations. The Christians exultingly claimed it for a miracle. The Pagans themselves seem to have been awed and dismayed by it. Even Julian had, perhaps, his misgivings; at least he made no further attempt to prosecute his venturous defiance. The circumstance has been readily accounted for by natural causes; but it would be weakness in a Christian to shut his eyes to the Providence which arrested the enemy of Christ and baffled his machinations, at a moment when the faith of multitudes was no doubt trembling in the balance.

Another mode in which the apostate undertook to combat the enemy is, perhaps, more curious than any of these. He attempted not only a ceremonial, but a moral revival of Paganism itself. Other champions before him, such as Augustus and Domitian, had made an effort to restore the temples, the sacrifices, and the ritual usages of the ancient faith. But no emperor, no lawgiver, no philosopher had conceived the idea of breathing a moral spirit into the juggling of the priesthood. Many kings and many sages of the ancient world had proclaimed more or less enlightened principles of morality; but in these movements the priests as such had taken, it would seem, no part whatever. The gods of Olympus had never been represented as models of the social virtues. The worship of such gods had never been illustrated by moral precepts. The graces of justice, humanity, and mercy were no more enforced in the service of the temples than those of purity and godly living. But Julian had profited by the principles of the religion he so unfortunately opposed. He felt the disadvantage at which Paganism stood in its contest with a system which declared that a true faith must be shown by good deeds. He did not shrink from urging the Pagans to take the Christians as an example in moral conduct, and emulate them in works of charity, while they excelled them, as he proclaimed, in real piety. It speaks well both for the head and the heart of the most honest worship

1

CHAP. LXXIII.

DECAY OF PAGANISM.

609

per the idols could ever boast that he specially enjoined the foundation of hospitals for the care of the sick-an institution which, at least on any large and notable scale, seems to have been absolutely unknown in Pagan society.

It was natural perhaps for the Christians to heap obloquy upon the name of the " apostate," whose genius they could not appreciate, and from whom they had encountered a check and an affront. It is important, however, to observe how imperfect was the sympathy with their patron which even the Pagans generally entertained. They did not fail, indeed, to do justice to the ability of his government, both in peace and war, and to the grandeur of the designs he conceived and partly executed, though cut off before middle life. But upon his attempt to revive the ceremonial of their faith they looked with undisguised contempt. The Christians had resented the slackness of Constantine, and were inclined to attribute his remissness in enforcing the true faith at the point of the sword to his imputed leaning towards the Arian heresy; but the Pagans, on the contrary, mocked at Julian for the very zeal and enthusiasm he manifested in their cause. The fact was that the philosophers or Sophists of the day, while professing themselves votaries of the ancient religion, had no regard either for its ritual or for its doctrines, and took but a languid interest in its traditions; while even among its blinder adherents the routine of rites and sacrifices had become burdensome, and was practically evaded to the utmost. A story is told of Julian's disgust when he found that the hecatombs which should have been lavished on one of the greatest shrines in Asia had dwindled to the offering of one paltry goose, and that the priest who made the sacrifice was himself insensible to the degradation of his patron deity. It is evident that Paganism as a dogmatic and a ritual system was rapidly dying out, and that the toleration which Constantine had accorded to it was effectually advancing the interests of the rival faith. The substantial advance of Christianity under this equal treatment, impeded though it was by many internal hinderances, bears striking testimony to the force of justice in the cause of truth.

26*

CHAPTER LXXIV.

Succession of Jovian.—Abandonment of the provinces beyond the Tigris.— Succession of Valentinian I. in the West and Valens in the East.-Final division of the empire.-State of religion and progress of Christianity at Rome.-Contest for the bishopric of Rome.-Triumph of Damasus.-Succession of Gratian in the West and association with him of Valentinian II. -Influence of Ambrosius, bishop of Milan.-The statue of Victory removed from the Senate-house-Rival orations of Symmachus and Ambrosius.— Death of Valens and appointment of Theodosius I. in the East.-Revolt of Maximus and death of Gratian. (A.D. 363–383.)

THE general indifference to the great religious question of the day is marked by the content with which the soldiers of Julian, who had been invited to attend the daily sacrifices of their late commander, now followed the Christian standard of the labarum under which Jovian conducted his retreat. The army, indeed, was too much distressed by the hardships it had to undergo to think of any thing but its own safety. The unarmed population of the East was dismayed at the surrender of the strong fortress of Nisibis, together with all claim that might yet survive to the provinces beyond the Tigris, and the renunciation of alliance with Armenia. The people of Antioch felt themselves once more exposed to the assault of the Persians, who had already so often threatened them. But the line of the Euphrates constituted a good frontier for the defence of the empire; nor, indeed, did Sapor venture to demand the cession of the broad and fertile plain of Mesopotamia, which still remained a portion of the Roman dominions. Jovian, the elect of the army, seems to have been a man of some conduct and ability; but his reign, which lasted no more than seven months, was too short to put his qualities fully to the test. While professing himself a Christian and an orthodox believer, he maintained the principle of religious equality with the heretics as well as the Pagans; and while he reinstated Athanasius in his episcopal authority, he seems to have exhibited no intolerance towards the Arians. He fell sick and died in his progress towards Constantinople. In Rome, so long abandoned by its emperors, the situation of parties remained altogether unchanged.

A.D. 364.

The ministers or officers who attended on the late emperor's progress again offered the purple to a chief of their own selection.