which Hadrian's splen lid and lavish character is described.] Then shall reign three (Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Verus, to whose time therefore the poem belongs), whose times shall be the last. . . . . Then from the uttermost parts of the earth, whither he fled, shall the matricide (Nero) return; and now, O Rome, shalt thou mourn, disrobed of thy imperial purple, and clad in sackcloth. The glory of thy eagle-bearing legions shall perish. . . . . . For there shall be confusion on all mortals over the whole earth, when the Almighty Ruler comes, and, sitting upon his throne, judges the souls of the quick and the dead and the whole world; there shall be wailing, and scattering abroad, and ruin, when the fall of the cities shall come, and the abyss of earth shall open."-l. viii., pp. 679-693. Other sibyls sang on the same subject; one of them, in particular, celebrates the victory of Christianity, which he represents under the image of a temple spreading over the heavens, and embracing all living beings.'-Tschirner, pp. 194-199.

We have ventured to insert some few lines omitted by our author. The notice of the return of Nero, (whom the memory of his horrible persecutions of the Roman converts, as well as the atrocity of his character, arrayed in the blackest colours to the minds of all Christians) as Antichrist, may be traced in many passages of the Fathers. Thus early began on the one side the dangerous and exasperating custom of representing the triumph of Christianity as fatal not merely to the religious, but to the temporal, power of Rome; on the other, the appeal to that strong and profound sentiment, the eternal majesty of Rome, which to the last period of the contest was the great support and strength of the pagan party.

During the disastrous period which elapsed between the golden age of the Antonines and that of Dioclesian, Christianity spread with almost uninterrupted progress. No doubt the miseries which involved the whole Roman empire, from the tyranny of a rapid succession of masters, from grinding taxation, and the still multiplying inroads and expanding devastations of the barbarians, assisted its progress. Many took refuge in a religion which promised beatitude in a future state of being, from the inevitable evils of this life. But one of the most curious facts in the religious history of this period is the influence of Christianity on heathenism itself. Philosophy, which had long been the antagonist, now made common cause with the popular religion against Christianity; to all appearance, indeed, there was an amicable approximation between the two hostile religions. Heathenism, as interpreted by philosophy, almost found favour with some of the more moderate Christian apologists, while, in the altered tone of controversy, the Christians have no longer to defend

defend themselves against those horrible charges of licentiousness, incest, and cannibalism which their first advocates are constrained to notice. On a closer acquaintance with their moral habits, these suspicions died away among their bitterest adversaries; the effrontery of hostile calumny dared no longer venture on such notorious falsehoods. On one side, the Christians, not altogether wisely, endeavoured to enlist the earlier philosophers in their cause; they were scarcely content with asserting that the nobler Grecian philosophy might be designed to prepare the human mind for the reception of Christianity; they were almost inclined to endow these sages with a kind of prophetic foreknowledge even of its more mysterious doctrines.

'I have explained,' says the Christian, in Minucius Felix, the opinions of almost all the philosophers, whose most illustrious glory it is, that they have worshipped one God, though under various names; so that one might suppose, either that the Christians of the present day are philosophers, or that the philosophers of old were already Christians.'Octavius, c. 20.

But these advances on the part of Christianity were more than met by paganism. The heathen religion, in fact, which prevailed at least among the more enlightened pagans during this period, and which Julian endeavoured to reinstate as the established faith, was almost as different from that of the older Greeks and Romans, or even from that which prevailed at the commencement of the empire, as it was from Christianity. It worshipped in the same temples-it performed to a certain extent the same rites-it actually abrogated the local worship of no single one of the multitudinous deities of paganism. But over all this, which was the real religion both in theory and in practice in older times, had risen a kind of speculative theism, to which the popular worship acknowledged its humble subordination. Tschirner has advanced the opinion that the height of heathen incredulity would of itself have produced some reaction in favour of the old faith. The Voltaire of paganism, Lucian, in his indiscriminate mockery of all which had been so long held sacred, would necessarily provoke opposition: though many would be laughed away from the altars of their ancestors, others would rally round them, particularly when they possessed the specious excuse of returning to the pure philosophical principles of their faith.

Lucian had exhausted the philosophy of unbelief. The highest point is always the turning point; unbelief cannot remain the dominant opinion or sentiment, and at the commencement of the third century it could not but pass away, since Christianity in part, in part the philosophy of the age, which will presently be described, gave another direction to the world. The same causes which led a part of the existing race of men to the church,

disposed

disposed others to seek consolation and succour in other forms of religion. In the mass of the people, faith in their gods had at no time been entirely extinguished; nowhere had the temples been closed. An entirely different tone, from that which had before prevailed, shows itself in the third century. In the lives of the men distinguished during this period by their situation, there is no trace of that ostentatiously-displayed contempt for religion of which the Roman history, subsequent to the introduction of the Grecian philosophy, offers so many examples. Epicureanism lost its partisans and admirers; the most distinguished writers treated on matters of religion with decency, if not devout respect; no one was ambitious of passing for a despiser of the gods; and with faith and piety broke forth all the aberrations of religious faith and devout feeling, wonder-working, mysticism, and dreamy enthusiasm in their various forms. This altered bias of the times shows itself less in the renewed zeal for the re-establishment of the ancient faith, as such, in its former splendour, and particularly the restoration of the Roman religious ceremonial to its former dignity and importance (although there are some examples even of this, since Decius was urged to his measures against the Christians by zeal of this nature); but far more in the inclination to betake itself to foreign forms of worship, to mingle together various religions, to practise them at the same time, and to seek out the leading notion of the philosophy of the age in these diverse systems. Of these syncretic opinions the two Cæsars, Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus, who ruled the Roman empire from the year 218 to 235, afford two remarkable examples. The effeminate Syrian, Heliogabalus, was indeed only a superstitious devotee, who introduced into Rome the Sun-God, Heliogabalus, who was worshipped at Emesa under the form of a black round stone, supposed to have fallen from heaven, and whose high-priest he had been. He built him a splendid temple, where costly offerings were made; placed the Ancilia, the Palladium, and the sacred fire of Vesta in this temple; married Astarte, whom he brought from Carthage to Rome, with the Syrian God, and so insulted both the religious feelings and the national pride of the Romans. But the religious syncretism of the time is expressed in a manner which cannot be mistaken, by the fact that the emperor mingled together in this manner the genuine Syrain, the Roman, and African worship, and entertained the design of making the temple of Heliogabalus a point of reunion for the religious worship of the Samaritans, the Jews, and the Christians, and thus in a proper sense a Pantheon. These same syncretic opinions appear, and in a nobler form, in the enlightened and well-intentioned emperor Alexander Severus; for of him it is recorded that he placed in his private chapel, as objects of worship, Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish race, and Christ, the author of Christianity, as well as Orpheus, the founder of the Grecian mysteries, and Apollonius of Tyana, the teacher of Indian, Egyptian, and Grecian wisdom. He constantly quoted, as he did the sayings of the wise men of Greece, the precept of Christ, "Do unto all men as ye would they should do unto you;" and while he decorated the temples of Isis and Osiris, and practised divination, he studied the works of Plato and of Cicero.'-Tschirner, page 401.

This in fact was in the true spirit of the new Platonism which began to exercise a supreme authority, to the extinction of the older forms of Grecian philosophy, over the minds of the more intellectual class. This new Platonism aspired to be a religion as well as a philosophy. It introduced very different views of the Deity, to which it endeavoured to harmonise the popular belief. Such of the mystic legends as it could allegorise, it retained with every demonstration of reverence; the rest it either allowed quietly to fall into oblivion, or repudiated as lawless fictions of the poets. The Life of Apollonius,' by Philostratus, is a kind of philosophico-religious romance of this school. The manner in which poetry became moral and religious allegory is illustrated by the treatise of Porphyrius on the cave of the nymphs in the Odyssey. The skill, as well as the dreamy mysticism with which this school of writers combined together the dim traditions of an older philosophy and the esoteric doctrines of the mysteries, to give the sanction of antiquity to their own vague but attractive theories, may be fully traced in the Life of Pythagoras, and the work on the mysteries by Iamblichus.

On the great elementary principle of Christianity, an approximation had taken place at a still earlier period. Celsus, the assailant of Christianity, during the reign of the Antonines, distinctly asserted the right of heathenism to fall back upon this rational principle of religion. Tschirner has thus embodied the sentiments of the philosopher on this subject, from passages selected out of different parts of his work, to which Origen at a later period wrote his memorable answer :—

While we,' thus proceeded the advocates of the older faith, adhere to that which has been handed down to us from remote antiquity, and what the religious histories of all people have taught, we are by no means compelled to reject the ideas of God, and of divine things developed by philosophy and introduced into life. We also can place a Supreme Being above the world and above all human things, and approve and participate in whatever may be taught of a spiritual rather than material adoration of the gods; for with the belief in the gods who were worshipped in every land and by every people, may well be reconciled the belief in a Primal Being, a Supreme God, who has given to every land its guardian, to every people its presiding deity. The unity of the Supreme Being, and the consequent unity of the design of the world, remains, even if it be admitted that each people has its gods, whom it must worship in a peculiar manner, according to their peculiar character; and the worship of all these different deities is reflected back on the Supreme God, who has appointed them as it were his delegates and representatives. Those who say that men ought not to serve many masters, impute human weakness to God; God is not jealous of the adoration paid to subordinate deities, he who cannot be degraded or out

raged.

raged. Reason itself might justify the belief in the inferior deities, which are the object of the established worship. For since the Supreme God can only produce that which is immortal and imperishable, the existence of mortal beings cannot be explained, unless we distinguish from him those inferior deities, and assert them to be the creators of mortal beings and of perishable things.'-Tschirner, p. 334.

This simpler theory was wrought out by the new school of Platonists into a much more artificial and imaginative system; which, at the same time that it approached much nearer, was still no less avowedly hostile to the Gospel. It would perhaps have admitted Christianity (if Christianity would have been so untrue to its divine origin and authority) as one of the received and acknowledged varieties of religious faith; but it still asserted its own superiority; it tolerated rather than approved. Upon these terms it made common cause with the other Eastern religions, which, during the whole of this period, were constantly extending towards the westthe Egyptian, the Mithriac, the Phrygian. These, as appears from the inscriptions quoted by M. Beugnot, and from other curious evidence, seem to have been eagerly and willingly admitted into the religious system of the established heathenism. They were welcomed perhaps with the greater readiness, because they did not, like Christianity, demand the sacrifice of the existing faith; they were content to be received into a kind of partnership with the old idolatry; they were in fact mysteries which, like those of Samothrace and Eleusis, though they separated their own immediate votaries from the rest of mankind, as far as their own rites, or the privileges of knowledge and sanctity which they were supposed to confer, interfered not in the least with their conformity to the local worship of their country. As he who had gone through the last probation in the older mysteries, the hierophant himself, would have excited no astonishment if he had appeared as a worshipper in the temple of Minerva or of Jove, so we find the same persons exercising the highest pontifical offices in the old religion of Rome, and at the same time priests of Cybele or of Mithra.

The peculiar character assumed by the paganism of this period-its manifest distinction from the old mythic faith of Greece, and the political religion of Rome-has by no means, in our opinion, been developed with the care and fulness which the subject demands. Nothing, indeed, could show more conclusively the inefficiency of any philosophic system to supply the want of a religion, than the very narrow influence exercised by this Egyptian Platonism. Its votaries were probably far inferior to those of any one of the foreign religions introduced into the Greek and Roman part of the empire. Of itself, it was far too abstract and metaphysical, to extend beyond the schools of Alex