to the senate-house. With something of the impatience of a statesman for the discussions of cultivated leisure, he repeats the theory of the one God being worshipped under many forms;1 his real ground is the old view of gods of nations and gods of cities who were assigned to each by the divine mind.2 The strongest point in his own eyes is the appeal to tradition: he makes Rome herself plead for reverence to her age, for the use of the ancestral rites by the ministry of which she had subdued the world. He makes one fatal concession. If Victory, he pleads, is denied the honour of a god, let honour at least be paid to the name. When a passionate worshipper of the ancestral religions was willing to plead that his god might be tolerated as a metaphor, his defence could only hasten its downfall. The apology of Libanius, which was addressed to Theodosius a few years later,5 is in some respects feebler than the appeal of Symmachus. Like Celsus, the tutor of Julian speaks with the scorn of one on a higher platform of men "who have left the fire-tongs, the hammer, and the anvil, and arrogantly discourse about heaven

4

Sed

1"Æquum est, quicquid omnes colunt, unum putari. otiosorum disputatio est hæc."—Relationes, iii. c. 10, edit. Meyer. 2 "Varios custodes urbibus cultus mens divina distribuit."-Idem,

c. 8.

3 Utar cerimoniis avitis."-Idem, c. 9.

4 "Reddatur saltem nomini honor, qui numini denegatus est."Idem, c. 3.

5 Between 388 and 391-Sievers, Das Leben des Libanius, p. 192.

and those who dwell in it."1 He prays that the temple should not be destroyed on the ground that the gods worshipped therein had been useful to Rome, even the source of its power, and avers that to destroy the temples would be to destroy the very soul of the country. His chief plea is unconsciously a condemnation of Hellenism. It is, that the law had not explicitly ordered the destruction of the temples; had the king enjoined it, the destroyers of the temples would have done no wrong; no one was so audacious as to claim to be superior to the law. The difference between this abject surrender to the will of the State and the clear declaration of Origen for the supremacy of the divine law above all human enactments is the measure of the difference between Hellenism and Christianity, between a religion which was only national and one which was truly individual, between a philosophical theory and a spiritual faith. Christianity was influenced by Hellenic ideas both directly and indirectly; but Hellenism was to the very end unconscious of any relationship, and continued to repeat its exploded watchwords as if Christianity had never existed. The theology of Libanius is not one step in advance of that of Celsus. And

1 Libanius, 'Trèр τŵv ieрŵv-Reiske, vol. ii. pp. 179, 180.

2 Idem, vol. ii. p. 167 —τούτῳ τετύφλωταί τε καὶ κεῖται καὶ τέθνηκε ψυχή.

3 Idem, vol. ii. pp. 163, 172, 174, 176. οὐκοῦν οἱ καθαιροῦντες οὐκ ἠδίκουν τῷ τὰ δοκοῦντα τῷ βασιλεῖ ποιεῖν—vol. ii. p. 201.

this was necessarily the case.

Neither in its popu

lar form nor as interpreted by philosophy did paganism contain any principle of development. As held by the populace, its development was a contradiction in terms, for its strongest argument was the appeal to the past. Its interpretation by philosophy was futile, like all unreal compromises, and killed the religion which it professed to save; for the one God of the philosophers was never really brought into relation to the inferior deities of the many. As if its only chance of survival was the absolute isolation of its own ideas, to the last Hellenism regarded the Christian conceptions as utterly alien: having no principle of life, it lacked the power to assimilate; while by its concessions to the popular religions it destroyed its own coherence. Christianity claimed to be at once a philosophy for the few and a saving faith for the many, and in both forms equally divine and authoritative: it took captive Hellenic culture, and transformed it from an enemy into a servant; for, like a living organism, it had power to assimilate all that was akin to itself without being faithless to the law of its own inner development.

1 Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, vol. i. p. 567.

INDEX OF PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS

AND NAMES.