Renan's Marcus Aurelius

THE elaborate work of M. Ernest Renan on the rise of Christianity, inaugurated twenty years since by the Vie de Jésus, and continued in his essays on the Apostles, Saint Paul, the Antichrist, the Gospels, and the Christian Church, has been completed by the publication of a seventh volume, entitled Marc-Aurèle et la Fin du Monde Antique.¹ Great interest attaches to this culminating volume, for many reasons. It is the last word of as amiable and dispassionate an argument against the supernatural origin of Christianity as we can hope to hear, even in this emancipated age. Its leading subject is the most faultless, and at the same time endearing, of all heathen characters, and there is that in the native sweetness of the biographer’s temper, his mild discernment and pensive magnanimity, which renders him especially sympathetic with his theme. Moreover, the foretaste of the quality of his work afforded by M. Renan’s London lectures, in the spring of 1880, — so much admired, and so widely republished and circulated, — had led to the expectation of a meditative and touching, if not masterly and exhaustive, treatment at his hands of one of the most critical passages in human history.

And the book does not disappoint. If it seems at times to lack unity and coherence ; if the two themes which are treated in connection, and which are not so much Marcus Aurelius and the end of the old order as Marcus Aurelius and the beginning of the new ; if these appear to run side by side, in M. Renan’s glowing pages, without ever really intermingling, and the transition from one to the other required by his alternative treatment strikes one as a little abrupt and artificial, — this, the author would tell us, is no fault of his, but due to the tragic incongruity of the facts themselves. He writes of a man, a monarch, whose character, lifted into the strongest glare of publicity, and still to be minutely scanned of all men, exemplified in a transcendent manner most of the distinctively Christian virtues, and yet who lived and died the conscientious and effectively cruel foe of Christianity. “ So much the worse for Christianity ! ” a ruder skeptic might have made haste to exclaim, but not so M. Renan. He patiently labors to reduce to order, from his own point of view, the great chaos of contemporary circumstances, and presents the result to his readers with hardly any comment more pointed than a melancholy shrug. We ourselves believe that there is a higher point of view than his, at which some of the most painful inconsistencies of the period under consideration tend to merge in a promise, as yet only partially fulfilled, and to disappear. But it will be time enough to advert to this when we have presented as fair a summary as may be in a short review of M. Renan’s own investigations and conclusions.

He gives us, at the outset, his reason for believing that it has never been possible intelligently to write the history of the rise of Christianity until to-day. It was reserved, he thinks, for the mind of the nineteenth century to develop what he calls the génie des origines. The great ecclesiastical historians of the seventeenth century did not possess it, and no more, if we understand what the phrase means, did the professional skeptics of the eighteenth, — like Gibbon. It was perhaps this genius which led M. Renan to the discovery — also made known in his introductory chapter — that Christianity really began with the prophet Isaiah ; and so much at least is true, — and the most fervent believer in all that the Academician denies would be the last to question it, — that the previously vague forecast of a Messiah assumed a new and strange and sorrowful precision in the clairvoyant mind of the greatest of Jewish seers. But the days of the Hebrew prophets were, at best, but the pre-natal days of Christianity, and M. Renan’s concern is with its first appearance in history, which is made nearly side by side with that of stoicism, the most earnest effort of the unassisted human conscience at realizing an ideal of pure morality, — the perfect flower, so to speak, of merely natural piety. How lofty the stoical ideal was, and how uncompromising toward human weakness; how minute the supervision exercised over the minds and lives of converts to that creed by its public preachers and spiritual directors, and how unflinching the self-denial, amounting to extreme asceticism of personal habits, which it exacted, M. Renan shows very strikingly in his first chapter. “ Greek pedagogy had now arrived at perfection,” and the younger and more dévot by nature of the two great An ton ine emperors, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, was put to school by his adoptive father in the straitest sect of that perfected philosophy, and witnessed throughout his illustrious life a noble profession of its teachings. Much as Renan admires the result in his hero’s case, the libre penseur cannot help rebelling at the notion of so severe a spiritual discipline. “ How,” he cries, “did those respectable but slightly priggish pedagogues ever succeed in forming such a man ? ” And he finds a partial answer in the fact that, more than all the far-sought formal instructors, his obligations to whom Marcus Aurelius acknowledges so humbly and scrupulously in the Thoughts, he prized the character and example of his predecessor upon the throne. M. Renan quotes entire — and who would not at any time be glad of an excuse to quote ? — the eloquent and affecting tribute to that father’s memory in the sixth book of the Thoughts, one of the most exquisite pen-portraits ever drawn ; and he finds himself so moved as almost to be persuaded by it that Antoninus Pius was really, in some respects, a better man than Marcus, with more of gladness and spontaneity in his virtue, not so selfconscious. “ No person of sense will deny,” he says of the latter, “ that this was a great soul. Was it also a great mind ? Yes, because he discovered infinite depths in the abysses of duty and conscience. He failed of decision only at a single point : he never ventured absolutely to deny the supernatural.'’'

But allowing for this foible, M. Renan goes on to show how it was the glory of the Antonines, and especially of Marcus Aurelius, to have raised philosophy — that is to say, the teaching of morals—to the rank of “a power in the state,” and to have brought it into fashion in a deeply corrupt society. They conceived, also, and instituted the protection of the weak, of women and minors, the orphan, and even the slavé. They took measures to prevent the recurrence of famine and other widespread calamities. They laid the foundation of that marvel of Roman jurisprudence, to which Justinian did but impart its final shape, and which has served as a model for the whole civilized world.

Humanity — mildness of manners — gained infinitely under their sway. The idea of a state governed by wisdom, benevolence, and humanity was established once for all. “ Military power, on the contrary, art, and literature underwent a certain decline. Philosophers and men of letters were far from being the same. The philosophers looked with pity on the frivolity of the literati and their appetite for applause. The literati smiled at the barbaric style of the philosophers, their lack of manners, their beards, and their cloaks. Marcus Aurelius, after hesitating between the two courses, decided firmly for the philosophers. He neglected the Latin language, and ceased to encourage the practice of writing it, preferring Greek, which was the language of his favorite authors. The complete ruin of Latin literature was decided from that hour.” There is a refreshing touch, just here, of that pleasant French humor of M. Renan’s, which seems excluded, for the most part, from the present volume, by the solemnity of the subject, and the persistent heavy-heartedness always discernible at the bottom of his treatment of it. It is thus that he goes on to criticise the existing Mareian monuments: “The plastic arts, so beloved by Hadrian, must have seemed to Marcus Aurelius like quasi-vanities. The remains of his triumphal arch are sufficiently tame. Everything about it, even the barbarians, wears a virtuous air. The eyes of the horses are melting and philanthropic. The Antonine column is a curious work, but without delicacy in its execution, — very inferior to the temple of Antoninus and Faustina, erected in the preceding reign. The equestrian statue at the Capitol charms us by the pure image which it presents of the excellent emperor, and yet the artist had no right so utterly to renounce all boldness and dash. We feel that there were profound causes for that absolute ruin of the arts of design which was to be accomplished within fifty years. Christianity and philosophy wrought equally for this end. The world was becoming too much detached from form and beauty. It wanted nothing any more save to better the lot of the weak and to soften the strong.”

How, then, was it, after all, that a monarch moved by motives even of ultra-benevolence could have ruthlessly persecuted, with full intent to exterminate, the very class of his subjects whose aims and ideas were most nearly identical with his own ? M. Renan answers this trying question as well, perhaps, as it ever can be answered, in his fourth chapter. He shows how little the emperor could have known of individual Christians, and how inevitably that little was calculated to give him an unfavorable impression of them as men and citizens. Asa stoic he might, and we know that he did, admire the constancy with which they died ; but equally as a stoic, he disliked their forwardness in inviting death, their bold and, as it seemed to him, unnatural exultation in it. “These voluntary deaths appeared to the august moralist affectations, as unreasonable as the theatrical suicide of Perigrinus. We find this note in the memorandum books of his Thoughts : ‘ A disposition of the soul to be always ready to be separated from the body, whether for extinction, or dispersion, or persistence. When I say ready, I mean as the result of a ripe judgment; not out of pure opposition, like the Christians. It must needs be an act founded upon reflection, sober, fit to persuade others, with no alloy of ostentatious tragedy.’ ” Then, too, the vast extent of the Roman Empire rendered its ruler but slightly responsible for what occurred in remote provinces, and the most painfully memorable persecution of the reign of Marcus Aurelius took place in far-away Gaul, where the gross absurdities of certain lawless if not licentious fanatics, like the Markosians, were calculated justly to prejudice the loyal and orthodox children of Rome. But it was as a Roman ruler, deeply reverent of Roman tradition, and penetrated with the idea of the sanctity of the state, that the emperor found, and with reason, the Christian theory and attitude most menacing. The Christians essayed no open revolt, it is true; nay, they were strenuously charged by their teachers to obey their masters according to the flesh. It was in the reign of Nero that St. Paul had written, “ There is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God.” Nevertheless, these meek people declared unmistakably, by all their words and acts and rites, that they sought another country than Rome, and owned allegiance to an unseen king. They constituted thus, and plainly proposed to constitute, a state within the sacred Roman state, — a city of God set over against the city of this world; and this is what no government can tolerate and live. The most absolute and the most democratic alike have to call in surgery for the removal of such a danger, and the earlier the better for the actual régime.

“ Whenever,” says M. Renan, “ a faction in the bosom of a great state has interests opposed to those of all the rest of the state, hatred becomes inevitable. Now the Christians did, at heart, desire that all things should go as badly as possible. So far from making common cause with the good citizens, and endeavoring to avert the dangers which threatened their country, the Christians gloried in them. The Montanists, and in fact all Phrygia, carried to the point of madness their vindictive prophecies against the empire; . . . and such prophecies were a crime, with penalties provided by law. Roman society felt instinctively that it was declining; it had but a vague idea of the causes of its own enfeeblement, and suspicion fastened, not unnaturally, upon the Christians. There was a fancy that a return to the old gods might bring back good fortune. Those gods had made the greatness of Rome ; they were supposed to be irritated by the blasphemies of the Christians. Would not the best method of appeasing them be to slay the Christians ? The latter did certainly not deny themselves the pleasure of railing at the inanity of the sacrifices and the other methods employed for the exorcising of scourges. Fancy a libertine, in England, who should burst out laughing in public on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the queen ! ”

It must be confessed that this last illustration has somewhat the air of an anticlimax. Such, however, is an outline of M. Renan’s defense of his hero on the heaviest charge which can be brought against him. Nor does he omit to remind us that Tertullian himself, in the third century, before the martyrs of Lyons had lain an hundred years asleep, lauded the “ gentle persecutor ” as “ both great and good.”

Turning aside, at this point, from the more simple and grateful of his two themes, — the illustration of the emperor’s character, — M. Renan adds to the infinite labors of other historians in the same field his own effort at illuminating the obscurity of the second-century annals, and disentangling the confusions of the primitive Christian sects. How herculean a task this is, and how disheartening, none know who have never essayed it for themselves. Most of those who have done this, however, have had the stimulus of some dear point to be proved, or have followed the clew of some overmastering conviction. M. Renan’s entire disengagedness is more favorable to the clearness than to the vivacity of his narrative. He has not feeling enough to arouse his own imagination, and so he seldom gives us pictures. Hardly does he betray the shadow of a bias. Justin, Tatian, Marcio and Melito, Claudius, Sagaris and Apelles, Irenæus and Pope Victor, Celsius and Lucian ; Gnostics, Manichees, Montanists, and even Markosians, are reviewed as nearly as possible, nulla discrimine. He has, indeed, interesting and often suggestive reflections to make on every one of the eccentricities of opinion and varieties of growth which these names represent. When he calls Tatian a “ Lamennais of the second century,” and those bishops of Asia Minor who first sought, by written appeals and apologies, to conciliate the imperial pow er; who were “ able politicians, while seeming to hearken only for the inspiration of heaven, violent themselves, yet opposed to violence,” — when he sums up the history of these men by dubbing them “ Dupanloups anticipés,” he uses terms which at once help to realize the conflicts of that early day, to his own countrymen, and to all who have followed with interest the remarkable recent history of the church militant in France. Nor does he confine himself to his own country in his search for illustrations, but uses also, as terms of comparison, the Irvingites and the Latter-Day Saints ; and the last very properly, since the Montanists were practical millenarians, who believed that Christ had even then come, for the second time, in the form of the Paraclete, and that the New Jerusalem had been identified as an obscure town in Phrygia.

But if M. Renan finds his placid soul moved to something like active disgust by the sickly ideals and suicidal austerities of the more fanatical Christian sectaries. and inflicts upon his readers some ridiculous and even revolting details of manners and customs, he renders full and reverential justice to the temperance, the charity, the simplicity, no less than the superhuman constancy, of the martyrs of Lyons. The chapters xviii. and xix., which describe the Asian origin and connections of this little church in Gaul, and the awful crisis through which it passed in the year 177, are in M. Renan’s noblest style, honorable alike to the depth of his historical researches and the breadth and tenderness of his humanity. We can quote but one out of many equally moving passages : —

“ The example of the martyrs” (this was after Marturus, Sanctus, Blandina, and the resthad been several times frightfully tortured) “was contagious. Those who had disowned the faith came to themselves, and prayed that they might be questioned again. Some of the Christians doubted the validity of these conversions, but the martyrs themselves cut short the question by offering their hands to the renegades, and so communicating a part of the grace that was in them. It was admitted that the living could, in such a case, reanimate the dead, and that in the great community of the church those who had more than enough might impart to those who lacked. . . . The most admirable thing, in fact, about the confessors of Lyons was that glory did not dazzle them. Their humility equaled their courage and their holy freedom of will. Heroes who had over and over again proclaimed their faith in Christ, who had faced the wild beasts, whose bodies were covered with wounds and burns and bruises, dared not arrogate to themselves the name of martyrs, would not even allow it to be given them by others. If any one of the faithful, either in a letter or by word of mouth, called them so, they reproached him keenly. They reserved the title of martyr, first of all, for Christ, the true and faithful witness, the first-born from the dead, the first who had lived his life in God ; and afterward for those to whom it had already been granted to die confessing their faith, and whose title was thus, after a fashion, sealed and ratified. For themselves, they were only poor, humble confessors. All they asked of their brethren was to pray for them without ceasing, that they might yet make a good end. So far from showing themselves lofty and hard toward the poor apostates, like the Ultramontanists and certain martyrs of the third century, they had a motherly pity for them, and shed continual tears before God on their behalf. They accused no one, prayed for their executioners, discovered extenuating circumstances for every fault, absolved but never condemned. Certain rigorists thought them over-indulgent toward the renegades. They replied by quoting St. Stephen : ' If he prayed for those who stoned him, may not we for our own brethren ? ’ ”

Martyrum sanguis semen ecclesiœ; but that precious seed must be buried quite out of sight, and must attract and assimilate all sorts of rude and alien elements from the soil into which it falls, before it can arise and stand upright in the world’s open air, informed with a strength which will enable it to resist the manifold shocks and perils which beset each living and growing thing. In the institution of the episcopacy and its growing importance, M. Renan finds just such an alliance with mundane and therefore conservative forces. It was the episcopacy which gave to early Christianity its shape and substance ; which transformed it from a vision into an organism ; which rooted it deep, and therefore raised it high ; which enabled it, in due time, successfully to encounter, and finally to supersede in its own chosen seat, the decaying empire of the pagan world. “ Power loves power,” says M. Renan, with a touch of cynicism, “ and the hatred between Christianity and the empire was the hatred of those who are one day to love. . . . And so, thanks to episcopacy, which had been pronounced a tradition from the twelve Apostles, the church wrought, without enfeebling herself, the most difficult of transformations. She passed, if I may venture to say so, from the conventual state to the laical; from the condition of a conventicle of visionaries to that of a church accessible to all men, and consequently exposed to many imperfections. That which had seemed destined to be but a dream of fanatics had become an enduring religion. . . . The excesses of those who had dreamed of a spiritual church and a transcendent perfection were broken against the good sense of the establishment. The masses, already considerable, who went into the church constituted a majority there, and lowered its moral temperature to a possible level.”

Admitting that " bon sens ” is in some sort the foible of M. Renan, it is impossible to deny the power with which he presents this theory of the growth of the visible church. But his premises involve conclusions which many of the advocates of episcopacy would be quite unwilling to admit. The episcopacy of those days unquestionably implied the papacy, and M. Renan renders good service to the cause of Catholic Christianity by offering the clear testimony of the least suspect of witnesses to the fact that from the very beginning of the church’s consciousness the little bishopric of Rome was obeyed as the originating, controlling, and responsible brain of that integral organism, whose members were even then extended from Syria to Gaul. Incidentally, also, while developing this theme, he gives the most lucid brief account which we remember ever to have met of that controversy concerning the time of the Easter celebration which bears so strongly upon the subject. But with his wonted attention to counterpoint, — for M. Renan is nothing, after all, if not an artist, — he makes haste to offset this concession to Catholic claims by insisting that the rule of the undivided church suffered a veritable suspension of five hundred years or so (from Constantine to Charlemagne), and to this interregnum he applies the peculiarly Gallic pet name of déchéance.

On the whole, however, he indulges but sparingly in forecast of any kind, but confines himself strictly within the chronological limit embraced by the emperor’s life-time. When he returns from his review of the necessarily chaotic beginnings of ecclesiasticism to consider the life of Marcus Aurelius among his legions, and his “ inner martyrdom and preparation for death,” he has a subject into which he can put his whole heart, and his mode of treating it is extremely beautiful and pathetic : —

“ Before the colossal assault of united barbarism, Marcus Aurelius was truly admirable. He did not love war, and he made war only against his will, but when it was necessary he made it well. He became a great captain as a matter of duty. . . . His life was now almost entirely passed in the region of the Danube, at Carnuntum, near Vienna or in Vienna itself, on the banks of the Gran, in Hungary, sometimes at Sirmium. His ennui was immense, but he knew how to conquer ennui. Those insipid campaigns against the Quadi and the Marcomanni were admirably conducted; the distaste which he felt for them did not prevent him from giving them the most conscientious attention. The army loved him, and did its duty perfectly. . . . Fatherly and philosophical toward these half-savage hordes, he insisted, out of self-respect, upon testifying a consideration for them, which they did not comprehend ; like a gentleman who, as a pledge of his personal dignity, might treat a red-skin like a well-bred man. He naïvely exhorted them to reason and justice, and finished by inspiring them with respect. . . . What cost the emperor most, in these far-away wars, was the being deprived of his accustomed society of savans and philosophers. Almost all of them had recoiled from the fatigues of the campaign, and had remained at Rome. Occupied all day with military exercises, he passed his evenings in his tent, alone with himself. There, throwing off the constraint which his duties imposed, he pondered on the uselessness of the conflict which he sustained so valiantly. A skeptic about war, even while Waging it, he detached himself from all things, and, lost in the contemplation of universal vanity, he doubted even the legitimacy of his own victories. ‘ The spider,’ he writes, ‘ is proud of having captured a fly ; one man of catching a sardine, one a wild boar, and another a few Sarmatians. Properly speaking, they are all brigands.’ ”

The source of all our information concerning the emperor’s private life in these and the yet darker days which were to follow them before its close is of course his own immortal book: and, widely as that hook has been read and passionately loved, no commentator has perhaps ever come so near to doing it full justice as M. Renan. We gratefully accept and adopt each word of eloquent eulogy, only regretting that our space will allow us to quote so little of his ardent but never undiscriminating praise : " A divine candor breathes from every page. Never did man write more simply and entirely for himself, with the sole desire of unburdening his heart, — without any witness save God. There is not so much as the shadow of a system. Marcus Aurelius had, strictly speaking, no philosophy. Owing almost everything to stoicism transformed by the Roman spirit, he is yet of no school. . . . The book of Marcus Aurelius, having no dogmatic basis, will keep its freshness forever. All alike, from the atheist, or him who fancies himself such, to the man most deeply involved in the beliefs of some particular cult, may find fruit for edification in it. It is the most purely human book that ever was written. It grazes no controverted question. In theology the emperor fluctuated between pure deism, polytheism interpreted in a physical sense, after the style of the stoics, and a kind of cosmic pantheism. . . . Marcus Aurelius is therefore no free-thinker ; he is hardly even a philosopher, in any strict sense of the word. Like Jesus, he had no speculative philosophy. His theology is quite contradictory. He has no fixed views about the soul or immortality. ... He was never anxious to reconcile himself with himself on the subject of God or of the soul. Quite as if he had read the Critique of Practical Reason, he saw clearly that in what concerns the infinite no formula is absolute, and that in affairs of this kind one’s only chance of perceiving the truth once in one’s life lies in contradieting one’s self often. He boldly separated moral beauty from all fixed theology. He would not allow duty to depend on any metaphysical opinion concerning the first cause. Never was the intimate union with a hidden God carried to a point of such unheard-of delicacy.” And then follows that matchless passage out of the fourth book of the Thoughts, which ought to be so familiar to every serious mind to-day that the merest fragment will suggest the whole : “ To offer to the government of the God within thee a being, manly, of ripe age, a friend of the public weal, a Roman, an emperor, a soldier at his post awaiting the call of the trumpet, a man ready to leave this life without regret. There be many grains of incense destined for the same altar : one falls sooner into the fire, another later; the difference is naught. . . . Man, thou hast been a citizen of this great state, the world ; what matters it whether for five years or for three ? —for that which is conformable to the laws is unjust for none.” And so on to that last sigh of the perfectly chastened spirit: “ Depart, then, satisfied, for he also who releases thee is satisfied.”

The very strictures which M. Renan, in his quality of critic, seeks sometimes to pass upon the work of this truly sacred author are such as imply a higher praise. When he says that the Thoughts fortify, but do not console, he does but measure the greatness of a courage which dared contemplate and confess that crushing whole of human misery whose weight upon the soul of thinking man nothing short of divine interposition ever could have lightened. W hen he says that the emperor had not enough of intellectual curiosity, that he did not know all which a contemporary of Ptolemy ought to have known, and that he held opinions on cosmogony which were not up to the highest level even of the science of his time, he does but set the immutability of moral truth over against the incessant fluctuations and transformations of physical speculation, and show how everlastingly the latter are subordinate to the former. He is almost relieved to note that for one moment the emperor seems to have resisted, if not resented, what Renan calls “ the absurdity, the colossal iniquity, of death.” The agony of the royal spirit is indeed sharp, but it soon subsides in calm. Humbly and without reservation, he accepts the uncertain issue at the hands of the unknown God. “ Oh,” cries the rebellious rédacteur, “ c’est trop de résignation, cher maître ! . . . To say that if this world has not its counterpart the man who has sacrificed himself for the good and the true ought to quit it contentedly, and absolve the gods, is too simple. No ; he has the right to blaspheme. For why should his credulity have been thus abused ? ” and so on. Yet of these two, the master and the not wholly unworthy pupil, whose difference in dignity and fitness of attitude is here so conspicuous, the more patient, by God’s will, had never so much as heard of the resurrection from the dead; the more petulant has known and refused it. It is the same when M. Renan proceeds to deprecate the excess of generosity which made the emperor so incredulous of the levity and faithlessness of Faustina ; which prevented him from reading aright the sinister signs that attended the youth of the atrocious Commodus, and from sparing the world, over which he himself had so wisely ruled, a fearful infliction by disinheriting his son. The immense and singular charity of purity for impurity should be no new thing to a student of the Gospels like M. Renan, however difficult of explanation. As for Commodus, many things combine to make his hateful character and career one of the severest tests of faith in the divine order which occur in human history. That he should have been the son of Marcus Aurelius at all, as his horror-stricken subjects tried in vain to prove that he was not; that he should have been permitted to live long enough effectually to undo so much of his father’s most beneficent work on Roman society ; finally, that he should actually have protected the Christians whom his father persecuted, and all through the intercession of a courtesan who had had a Christian education, and who was presently to compass his murder and the end of the Antonine dynasty,— these things help to make the reign which succeeded that of the best of emperors a standing menace to all who presume to account on merely natural and rational grounds for the facts of human history. No sneer at the faith which prospered through the direful protection of Commodus is allowed, even at this point, to escape the lips of this generous compatriot of Voltaire,— so near in the mildness and magnanimity of his spirit to the kingdom which he disavows. “ C’est triste en effet ” is about all that he says. For our own part, we feel inclined to retort upon him his own remonstrance with Marcus Aurelius : “ Too much resignat ion,” cher M. Renan ! If the saintly father and the beastly son were not equally the instruments of a regeneration which neither of them apprehended, then there is something more than triste in the tragedy of their connection with the salvation of the world.

But the world, M. Renan plaintively objects, is not yet saved ; and then, still haunted by the thought that it ought to be, and is t,o be, he talks vaguely (for him) and somewhat weakly, in his concluding chapters, of primary schools and ministers of public instruction ; of " ethnic reactions” from the centralizing tyranny of Judaism; nay, even of the possible mission of “ the more liberal dissenting sects,” although he admits that these last have not yet proved their efficacy in the world.

It is all to no purpose. These visionary suggestions do not signify; and the diffident and disheartened manner in which they are proffered shows that the candid historian feels that they do not. The lot of the human race in this world is mysterious and painful still, but, unpleasant and unlikely as the fact may have appeared to Greek wit and Roman pride, and may still appear to “ Aryan” prejudice generally, the salvation of humanity, the only definite hope in the future which it has at present, or, as yet, ever has had, is “of the Jews.” The touching piety of more than one heathen âme d'élite in the first Christian centuries, of several of the Antonines, of Plutarch, of Seneca, and also, by prophetic Hashes, of Virgil, and even Cicero, does but complicate to distraction the riddle of human destiny, unless we can believe theirs to have been, in very truth, an unconscious Christianity.

There is nothing unreasonable in such a theory. If we believe, as a tenet of Christian philosophy, that the divine Logos was indeed “ that true light which lighteth every man that Cometh into the world,” then it may well be that the diffused glow of the sunrise of truth reached many a spirit on which its direct rays never fell ; more especially while the light yet lay level, and the orb was hardly lifted above the world’s horizon. That such a solution has been virtually accepted in the central church of Christendom is shown by the habitual coupling in intimate association of certain Christian and pagan names equally illustrious : Gregory and Trajan, Dante and Virgil, St. Thomas and Aristotle, De Maistre and Seneca. And the familiar legend which represents the great Gregory as obtaining of heaven, by his own sore sufferings in the flesh, the release from purgatory of the Emperor Trajan’s soul is but the translation of our theory into the popular language of Christianity, the extension to the unconscious Christian of the communion of saints.