Sermons Part 3

But, secondly, the erection of a new capital was a not less deadly blow to Paganism. Rome was the central fortress of heathendom: to withdraw from it the Imperial Government was to deprive it of its ammunition. After the building of Constantinople, Rome still remained the formal official capital of the empire; but, practically, its influence was gone. It no longer guided deliberation; it simply recorded results. And not only was Paganism materially weakened by this transference, but at the same time Christianity was delivered from its fetters. Constantinople was a Christian city from the beginning. Paganism had here no prescriptive claim and no time-honoured prestige. So long as the Imperial Government remained at Rome, it found itself inextricably entangled in Paganism. Constantine had felt its merciless strength, and the foundation of a new capital was his escape from it.

Yet, after all, such weapons as these would have been quite ineffective, if Paganism had possessed any inherent vitality. The grip of death was already upon it before the arm of power was raised against it. It was as when, after long centuries, the tomb of some ancient king is laid open, the stately form, and the majestic features, and the royal robes are exposed to our view. For the moment he seems to be living still as he lived in history; but we look again, and we see only a handful of dust. Sealed in its sepulchre, the corpse might have preserved its outward form for ages still; but the air and the light were poured in upon it, and all at once it crumbles away.

Paganism was confronted with Christianity, and it vanished.

The infancy of Julian had been dabbled in blood. His earliest recollections would carry him back to the time when fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, all had fallen in one indiscriminate ma.s.sacre. From this carnage he and his brother Gallus alone had escaped; he himself, so he believed, because he was too young to be feared, and his brother because he was then a sickly boy, and seemed not to have long to live.

The odium of this foul crime, whether justly or unjustly, rested on his cousin, the Emperor Constantius. If Constantius had not directly ordered it, he was thought to have connived at it. Certainly he had been on the spot, and, whether for want of power or for want of will, he had not prevented it. The courtiers and attendants attempted to palliate his cousin's guilt to the child Julian. They represented to him that Constantius had been deceived; that he was unable to restrain the savage outbreak of the soldiers; that he suffered fearful pangs of remorse; that he attributed to this crime all the misfortunes of his after life. It seems plain from this account that the spectre of this ghastly ma.s.sacre haunted Julian's childish memory. He could not but feel that the bare sword was hanging over his own neck.

Julian was left an orphan before he was seven years old. His mother had died a few months after his birth. His father had perished, as we have seen. For some years after the ma.s.sacre, he appears to have resided at Constantinople. Of his brother Gallus we hear nothing during this period. Julian himself was placed under the charge of an old family servant--a Scythian, Mardonius by name, a strict and pedantic disciplinarian, but also a man of culture, as the sequel shows. Mardonius taught his pupil to keep his eyes fixed on the ground as he took his walks. He led him always to and fro to school by the same way, knowing no other himself, and preventing the lad from discovering any other. He strictly prohibited him from going to the theatre or the circus, and altogether filled his mind with a distaste for the popular amus.e.m.e.nts of his age. We hear nothing of companions.h.i.+p, nothing of outdoor exercise, nothing of the cheerfulness and the sympathy which are equally necessary with the moral discipline and the intellectual training for the proper expansion of child's faculties. Julian was not like other children.

Whatever may have been his natural disposition, his education had never allowed him to be a boy. Human nature, more especially childish nature, must seek relief somewhere from hard conventional restraints.

Where all the usual outlets are closed, the buoyancy and the enthusiasm of the child will devise some means of escape. The paradise of Julian's childish existence was made up of two things. First, his tutor Mardonius was an enthusiastic admirer of Homer. If he prevented him from playing in the field he took him to the leafy islands of Calypso, to the Cave of Circe and the Gardens of Alcinous. With a less intelligent child this might have bred a feeling of disgust; but Julian was quick, imaginative, absorbing, and here was field for his sensibility. And, again, though his walks might be confined to one city, and to one street in that city, yet no bounds could shut out the glories of the heavens above. We have Julian's own authority for saying that his childish imagination was profoundly impressed by their contemplation. "From my earliest days," he wrote long afterwards, "a strange yearning after the rays of the G.o.d, the Sun G.o.d, sunk into my soul; and thus from the time I was quite a little child, when I looked at the light of heaven, I was beside myself with ecstasy, so that not only would I look eagerly and fixedly on the sun, but at night also, when there was a cloudless and clear sky, I gave up everything at once, and was rivetted by the beauties of the heavens, no longer understanding anything that any one spoke to me, nor giving heed to myself what I was doing." These, then, were the two bright spots which relieved the gloom of his childish life--the literature of Greece and the contemplation of the heavens. How large an influence these early memories had on his later apostasy, it will not be difficult to imagine.

This went on for some years with slight interruptions, and then there was a complete change. It was apparently about the year 344, when Julian would be thirteen or fourteen years old, and Gallus eighteen or nineteen, that, by the Emperor's orders, the two brothers were carried away to Macellum, an imperial castle in the mountain districts of Cappadocia. There they spent the next six years of life in strict retirement. What may have been the reason of this change we are not told, but we can easily suspect. Gallus was now growing up to manhood.

He was tall, well made, and handsome, with flowing auburn hair; not unlike his uncle, the great Constantine, as we may infer from the description of the two men. The suspicious temper of Constantius might take alarm lest this young man should become the centre of disaffection and treason. But, however this may be, the seclusion was complete. Julian speaks of it as banishment. To himself it was the worst kind of banishment. He was banished not only from the city and the court, about which probably he knew little and cared less, but he was banished also from his books and his teachers. The two brothers saw no one of their own rank; their domestics were their only a.s.sociates. Gallus was no companion for Julian. He had no literary taste; notwithstanding his handsome looks he was coa.r.s.e and violent, even ferociously brutal, in his disposition, as the sequel shows. The treatment of Julian during this critical period of his life must have been altogether injurious to the healthy development of his character.

A cramped boyhood almost certainly produces a one-sided manhood.

At length, after six years of seclusion, the brothers were again set free. What was the motive of Constantius--whether he considered that they had been sufficiently restrained, or whether some conscientious scruples found their way into his heart--we cannot say. Gallus and Julian were summoned to Constantinople. Soon after this a formidable insurrection broke out in the West, and Constantius found it necessary to a.s.sociate some one with him in the cares of the empire. Accordingly Gallus, then twenty-five years old, was nominated Caesar, and appointed to the command of the East. The appointment was most disastrous. Now that he was free from control, the innate ferocity of his disposition revealed itself. He has been compared, and the comparison does him no injustice, to a bloodthirsty tiger, who has broken through the bars of his cage, and, enraged by long confinement, fiercely attacks every one who comes in his way. Complaints of his savage, turbulent administration came thick upon the ears of Constantius. There were also rumours of a disloyal conspiracy on the part of the new Caesar.

Constantius might, perhaps, have forgiven the misgovernment; but the treason could not be overlooked. Gallus was recalled, stripped of the purple, and put to death without a hearing. Constantius had dyed his hand once more in the blood of Julian's kindred. Julian was left alone in the world, confronted by the tyrant. This happened in the year 354.

But while the caged pa.s.sions of Gallus had sought compensation in this savage outbreak, the caged intellect of Julian was running riot in its own way. For a time he seems to have enjoyed comparative freedom. At Constantinople, at Nicomedia, at Pergamos, at Ephesus, we hear of his attendance on philosophers, on rhetoricians, on teachers of all kinds.

The jealousy of Constantius could look with complacency on his philosophical and literary ardour. An ungainly, enthusiastic, unpractical scholar was the last man whom he need fear as a rival. It was during this period of turbulent, energetic, unreflecting, intellectual activity that the change came upon him. Whatever might have been the religious feelings of his boyhood, it was only now that Paganism a.s.serted its power over his mind. The incident that decided his apostasy is eminently characteristic of the man and of the period.

It happened in the year 351, the same year as that in which Gallus was invested with the purple, when Julian himself was twenty years of age.

In the course of conversation one of his teachers happened to speak of Maximus, a famous philosopher, whom he described as possessing great natural gifts, and as accompanying his teaching by demonstrations.

Julian's curiosity was excited. He demanded an explanation. He was told that on one occasion Maximus, in the presence of the speaker and others, had burnt a grain of incense in the temple of Hecate and chanted some mysterious hymn, when suddenly they saw the statue of the G.o.ddess smile upon him. On their expressing surprise, he told them that they should see a greater marvel than this--the torches in the hands of the G.o.ddess should burst out into flames of their own accord.

He had scarcely said the word when the lights burst out from the torches. "Stay with your books," said Julian, "and I wish you joy of them; I have found the man I have been seeking for." He sought out Maximus, and was initiated in his philosophy and his magic.

This grotesque and unnatural combination was, as I have said, characteristic of the man and of the age. In earlier times philosophy and popular superst.i.tion were deadly foes, but in face of Christianity both the one and the other had learnt their weakness, and this unequal alliance was patched up. The new Platonist philosophy adopted not only the mythology of Greece and Rome, but the nature-wors.h.i.+p and the magic of the East. A true theology must appeal at once to the intellect which demands a reason for its allegiance, and to the religious instinct which is conscious of dependence on a higher power.

Christianity recognises both these claims. Greek philosophy appealed to the one faculty; Pagan religion to the other. Thus divided they could do nothing, though the alliance was formed. It was well conceived, but it was impossible, because it was a fundamental violation of truth. Julian, the champion of heathendom, advanced to slay Christianity with philosophy in his right hand and superst.i.tion in his left, and both weapons s.h.i.+vered in his grasp.

Julian was a Pagan now, but he carefully concealed the change. During the next ten years, until the death of Constantius, this cloak of dissimulation was never thrown aside. The immediate outward effect of his conduct was a stricter attention to the services of the Church.

The old fable, said his heathen friend Libanius afterwards, was here reversed, and the lion was clothed in the a.s.s's skin. Only one or two most intimate friends were in the secret, but it was more widely suspected. Ardent Pagans began to look to him as the future restorer of Paganism; old prophecies were banded about that Christianity was soon to come to an end. One such oracle fixed the limit of 365 years for the wors.h.i.+p of Christ. The term was fast drawing to a close. I shall not undertake the task of arraigning Julian as before the bar of the Eternal Righteousness. All such attempts to antic.i.p.ate the verdict of the Great Judge must be as vain as they are presumptuous; but it is due to the n.o.bler features of his character--and these were neither few nor insignificant--to dwell on the extenuating circ.u.mstances of his case. And surely no man's education was more faulty, or more likely to produce a disastrous revulsion. Christianity was a.s.sociated in his memory with everything that was gloomy, terrible, repulsive.

Its champion, in his eyes, was his most deadly enemy, Constantius, who had shed the blood of his nearest kinsmen, and who was ready at any moment to shed his own blood when the occasion might demand. Writing of himself at a later date in apathetic allegory, he describes himself as a youth who, looking back upon the ma.s.s of evil that had befallen him from his own kinsmen and cousins, was so astounded that he resolved to throw himself down to Tartarus, but was rescued by Helios, the Sun G.o.d. This throws a flood of light on the personal influences which coloured his views of Christianity, and finally led to his apostasy. Moreover, the form of Christianity which was presented to him was not calculated to impress him deeply or favourably. The coldness of asceticism would take no firm hold of his ardent and enthusiastic nature. Its representatives, the Arian bishops, would not recommend the cause; the exceeding bitterness of theologic controversy called down his contempt, and the superst.i.tious reverence for the bones of the martyrs aroused his disgust. In the allegory to which I have already alluded he speaks of himself as a child covered with filth and dirt, on whom the Sun G.o.d at length took pity. Whatever rays of light had burst the gloom of his earlier life were a.s.sociated with the glories of nature.

While this strange revel of philosophy and fanaticism was going on in his mind, Julian visited Athens--Athens at once the home of Greek literature and the sanctuary of Pagan idolatry. No place more congenial to his temper could have been chosen than this. Here it was that he fell in with two devout Christian students, Gregory and Basil--names destined hereafter to be famous in the history of the Church. Gregory has left a description of the future emperor as he appeared at this time--a speaking likeness we cannot doubt. The convulsive movements of the shoulder, the half-scared, half-frenzied glance of the eye, the grotesque contortions of the face, the tumultuous, hesitating speech, the loud, immoderate laughter, the restlessness of the whole man from head to foot, seemed to Gregory to bode no good. Much of this was natural to Julian, but much, also, may have been due to the consciousness of the secret seething within his soul. We know what Gregory did not know--that Julian was a Pagan already when he was discussing Christian topics with Christian students.

But Julian's studies were rudely interrupted. Constantius again found the burden of the empire too heavy for his shoulders, and again he resolved to divide it. Julian, very reluctantly on his part, was appointed Caesar, and charged with the administration of Gaul. He was now twenty-five years of age. The courtiers of Constantius laughed at the new Caesar, and certainly the appointment did not give any fair promise of success. But this enthusiastic philosopher, this student recluse, soon showed that he had in him the making not only of an able ruler, but also of a consummate general. In vain the flatterers of Constantius ridiculed Julian's petty triumphs, as they were pleased to call them; in vain they dubbed him a scribbling Greek. Campaign after campaign added to his reputation. His administration of Gaul was unmistakably brilliant. So matters went on for five years, till the jealousy of Constantius brought about a crisis. An ill-judged attempt to withdraw Julian's best Gaulish troops produced a mutiny; the soldiers proclaimed him emperor, and he accepted the t.i.tle. Having a.s.sumed the imperial purple, he marched to force his recognition on Constantius; but he was saved the peril of an appeal to arms. Fever antic.i.p.ated the conflict, and carried off Constantius opportunely.

Julian was now absolute emperor, master of himself and master of the world. He could throw off the mask at length; he was free to carry out his long cherished design for the restoration of Paganism. With what energy, with what devotion, with what fanaticism, with what futility he worked for this end it will be my business in my next and concluding lecture to describe.

III.[10]

The history of Julian has been employed as an apologue by more than one writer when satirising some religious reaction of his day. A well-known living theological critic of Germany uses it as a cloak for an attack on the late King of Prussia, and English clergymen under the reign of James II., a.s.sailing the religious tendencies of the King, denounced him as another Julian the Apostate. Such comparisons may serve their immediate purpose, but they are almost always misleading, and may be very unjust. I think, however, that we may, with advantage, compare this Pagan reaction in the Roman empire under Julian with the Papal reaction in England under Mary. The two sovereigns, indeed, have little in common except their manifest sincerity, but the general relations and the ultimate effects of the two movements are not so very dissimilar. They both interposed after a very decided predominance of the opposite cause; they both were a return to the forms of the past; they both involved a reversal of the traditional policy of the reigning house; they both were short in duration, but resolute, uncompromising, energetic in action; and they both proved utterly futile in the result, because they were unsupported by any deep feeling in the ma.s.s of the people. So far as they produced any effects at all, they served only to nerve the energies and rea.s.sure the confidence of their antagonists.

Julian was now thirty years old when the death of Constantius left him sole master of the Roman empire. In stature he was rather below the average height; his frame was muscular and strong; his shoulders were unusually broad; his neck was thick and arched; he had a bright and piercing eye--the family characteristic which was so remarkable in his uncle Constantine; the upper part of his face, the brow, and the nose were fine and well chiselled; his mouth was too large, and his lower lip hung disagreeably. He wore a rough, pointed beard, the usual appendage of philosophers. Of his personal appearance he was studiously careless. It would almost seem as though the courtly dignity and scrupulous neatness of his cousin Constantius had produced a revulsion in him. He ostentatiously vaunts his unpolished manner and his slovenly habits. He was signally undignified in all his gestures.

Of his excitability and his restlessness of manner I have already spoken. He was a hurried, reckless talker. His tongue, we are told, was never at rest. His energy was enormous. During his administration of Gaul, when his days had been spent in the anxieties of government or in the toils of war, he would sit up half the night studying or writing. When he became Emperor his energy seemed only to increase.

The great purpose of his life, the restoration and reform of Paganism, was now definitely before him, and he worked at it with a determination which never slackened. Into a short reign of eighteen months he crowded an amount of work which probably no sovereign has ever surpa.s.sed. He had on his shoulders the undivided weight of a great empire; he was preparing for a difficult and dangerous campaign; he was busied with the hopeless task of restoring an effete religion; he was writing hither and thither to the representatives of heathendom, scolding, stimulating, encouraging; and yet he found time for a vast amount of literary work besides. He corresponded with rhetoricians and philosophers; he composed orations and hymns in praise of heathen deities; he wrote a lengthy and elaborate attack on the Christian religion, and threw off light squibs on his contemporaries and on his predecessors. If his one fatal act of apostasy had not perverted and spoiled everything, he might have ranked among the greatest of princes. As it was, he has no claim to the t.i.tle of greatness. He did nothing which has lived, because he did nothing which deserved to live. He left nothing, absolutely nothing, behind which has tended to make mankind happier, or better, or wiser.

Julian, if his own account may be believed, a.s.sumed the imperial diadem with the greatest reluctance; it was forced upon him by the soldiers before he knew where he was; and yet there is reason to believe that his coyness was in great measure affected. It is quite clear that he was already possessed of the idea of a Pagan restoration, and that he considered himself as having a special call from his G.o.ds for this work. The Genius of Rome, we are told, appeared to him in a vision. He reproached the reluctant Caesar with having so often driven him from his doors, and threatened to depart for ever if he were excluded this time. Thus warned, Julian responded to the call; but he still continued to dissemble. We read of his praying to Mercury, of his receiving admonitions from Jupiter; we are told of his consulting auspices and using divination in private; and yet on the festival of the Epiphany, many months after he had been proclaimed Emperor, we find him entering a Christian Church, and there solemnly offering up his prayers to Almighty G.o.d. His heathen biographer and admirer a.s.signs as the reason, that he might secure the allegiance of his Christian subjects. The strange thing is that neither Julian, nor Julian's friends, seemed to think any apology needed for this dissimulation. Much, indeed, should be forgiven to one who, from early childhood, had been driven by the cruelty of his lot to s.h.i.+eld himself under an impenetrable reserve; but it is hard to understand the moral blindness which fails to see that this flagrant violation of truth had need to sue for forgiveness. Those martyrs whom Julian derided and despised held it a glorious gain to sacrifice life and all things rather than consent even to a momentary act which might be interpreted as a denial of their faith. I need not ask which is the loftier spectacle of the two.

But indeed Julian, notwithstanding the many n.o.ble features in his character--his justice, his moderation, his strict temperance, his unsparing energy--was wholly wanting in those higher graces which are the crown of the Christian character. He was egotistical in the extreme; his self-consciousness rarely, if ever, deserts him; he will let all the world know that he is a model philosopher; he is always thanking his G.o.ds that he is not as other men are. Even when he satirises himself his irony is only a veil--a very thin veil, which rather suggests than conceals his self-complacency. He is always standing before the mirror, always soliciting the admiration of mankind. Of the childlike humility which is the main portal to the kingdom of heaven, he knows nothing. And yet with all this dissimulation and all this acting we should do the man a gross injustice if we imagined that he was insincere. Of his sincerity in the work which he undertook he gave every proof which it is possible for a man to give. He showed himself ready to spend and be spent for it. This strange combination of the enthusiast and the dissembler, of the fanatic and the philosopher, may be very difficult to realise; but there can be no doubt that they did unite in the person of Julian. In this spirit Julian applied himself to his task.

This task was two-fold. He must depress Christianity, and he must reanimate and reform Paganism. In his relation to Christianity he avowed himself on principle favourable to absolute toleration. "I do not wish the Galileans," he wrote, "to be put to death or to be beaten unjustly, or to suffer any other wrong. We ought rather to pity than to hate those who are unfortunate in matters of the greatest importance." How far this was the genuine dictate of his heart, and how far it was suggested by principles of expediency, we cannot tell, but at all events he could not persuade himself to apply his principle frankly. He restored a heretic bishop because his restoration would create divisions among Christians, and expelled the orthodox Athanasius because his presence was a tower of strength to the Church.

The letters of Julian on this occasion betray the weakness of his position. He has absolutely nothing to allege against Athanasius except that he had taught men to treat the G.o.ds with contempt, and that he had dared to baptise Greek ladies of rank--in other words, that he was highly successful as a Christian missionary. Having no argument, he descends to abuse. He scolds the Alexandrians that pet.i.tion him to rescind the decree of banishment: he reviles Athanasius himself; he calls him an impious villain, a vile Manichaean.

He responds to their pet.i.tion by expelling him not from Alexandria only, but from the whole of Egypt. Altogether there is a marked deterioration in Julian's character from the time when he becomes his own master. He had plainly supposed that he should carry everything before him: he had imagined that he had only to proclaim toleration, and his subjects would be as enamoured of Paganism as he himself was.

He was grievously disappointed. He found in Christianity a strength, a vitality, a resistance for which he was not prepared. He found in Paganism a feebleness, an irresolution, an indifference, an utter absence of self-sacrifice, which contrasted strangely with his own devoted enthusiasm.

It is infinitely tragical to contemplate his gradually descending from the high level on which he took his stand at first to mean devices of all kinds--more tragical than though he had boldly taken up the sword of the persecutor at once. He would not desert his principle of toleration; he never ceased to enunciate that to the last; but he would connive at violations of it. Pagan outrages on the Christians were condoned or gently rebuked. When a.s.saults on their life and their property were reported to him, he would say, flippantly, these Galileans--so he always called them--ought not to resent the opportunity of being made martyrs when they prized martyrdom so highly; that they had no just cause for complaint in being condemned to poverty when poverty was so loudly extolled in their Lord. But, indeed, Julian showed unmistakably by one enactment that toleration with him was not an inviolable principle. An edict was issued by him forbidding any Christian to give instruction in Greek literature under any circ.u.mstances. The reason a.s.signed was that, as they did not believe in the G.o.ds of Homer and Hesiod, they were not fit expositors on these points. "Let them go," wrote the Emperor, "to the churches of the Galileans, and there expound Matthew and Luke." Among those condemned to silence by this decree were not a few of the most ill.u.s.trious teachers of the age. It made a profound sensation at the time. It was most severely criticised by Julian's own heathen admirers at a later date. "It deserves," writes one, "to be buried in eternal silence." To what further lengths the intolerance of Julian might have gone as he realised more and more the bitterness of failure if his reign had been prolonged, we can only conjecture; but the descent was sufficiently rapid to suggest that, soured by disappointment, he might, had he lived, have been found at the last among the most relentless of persecutors.

But while he was thus employing every artifice to depress Christianity, he was also straining every nerve to reanimate and restore Paganism. "He was," says his heathen panegyrist, Libanius, "the best of priests as he was the first of Emperors." He valued the t.i.tle of Chief Pontiff, we are told, more highly than the dignity of Emperor. As Chief Pontiff he made his influence felt throughout the empire, reopening temples, restoring privileges, reinst.i.tuting sacrifices. No deity and no rite in any corner of his dominions escaped his vigilance. Whether it was the wors.h.i.+p of the Phrygian Cybele, or of the Apis at Memphis, or of the Daphnian Apollo at Antioch, his interest was equally unflagging. He was everywhere advising, coaxing, threatening, goading into activity, where he could not fan into enthusiasm. And not content with thus exercising his official superintendence, he was most a.s.siduous in his own personal services. In season and out of season he would ply the bystander with questions as to his religious belief. In season and out of season he would dispute against the Galileans. Wherever he went the altars smoked with victims. He would offer sacrifices of a whole hecatomb at once. He ransacked land and sea for rare birds and beasts, that he might offer them in sacrifice to the G.o.ds. At Antioch his soldiers were constantly seen borne away from the temple through the streets, gorged and intoxicated, after the revelry of these religious festivals. All kinds of divination, by flight of birds, by the inspection of entrails, by the sound of waters, by oracular responses, and by Sibylline books, were diligently sought out.

Every charlatan who pretended to some new secret of soothsaying was welcomed by him. Strange to say, all this fervour of devotion did not recommend Julian to his heathen subjects. It shows the hollowness of Paganism at this time that his conduct was met either with ridicule or with condemnation. The common people called him in derision a victim butcher, and not a sacrificial priest. It was sneeringly said that if he had returned triumphant from his Persian expedition the whole race of cows must have become extinct. The devotion of the Emperor found no response in the ma.s.s of his subjects.

But Julian was not only a restorer, he was also a reformer of heathendom. Whether he was conscious of the difference or not, the Paganism which he had set up as his ideal was quite another thing from the Paganism which had been handed down from the past. He strove to graft the morality and the organisation of Christianity on the stem of heathendom. The priests of Paganism were merely the performers of certain rites, the depositories of certain mysteries. They had no moral, or educational, or philanthropic conscience. The Christian clergy, on the other hand, over and above their duties in the public services of the Church, were expected to be also the pastors and teachers, the guides and examples, the ministers of comfort, and the dispensers of alms to their flocks. Julian attempted to infuse this pastoral element into the Pagan priesthood, to which it was wholly foreign. In the letters which are extant the priests are enjoined by him to abstain from the theatre or the tavern; they are forbidden to engage in any degrading occupation; they are required to see that their wives, and children, and servants attend regularly on the service of the G.o.ds; they are told to imitate the grave demeanour and the benevolent hospitality of Christian bishops. "It is shameful,"

writes the Emperor, "that the impious Galileans should support our people as well as their own." Such a conception of the priest's office must have surprised Julian's correspondents. They had not bargained for anything of the kind.

But, with all his efforts, Julian made no real advance. There were, in large numbers, apostasies when he apostatised, just as there had been conversions when Constantine was converted; but these insincere adherents from fas.h.i.+on or self-interest are the weakness, not the strength, of any cause. Julian could not have deceived himself. He saw none of the self-sacrifice which is the only evidence of genuine religious conviction. He upbraided the crowds who flocked to the temples, not to wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ds, but to applaud the Emperor.

And now the end was fast approaching. About Midsummer 362, Julian took up his residence at Antioch, where he spent nine months preparing for his Persian campaign. This sojourn aggravated his disappointment. The people of Antioch did not take kindly to their sovereign. Before long he had succeeded in making himself equally unpopular with both the great sections of the community. At Antioch, where Christianity had first obtained its name, the Christians formed an exceptionally large fraction of the whole population. They would not be predisposed favourably towards an apostate, and his injustice only served to confirm their hatred. A fire broke out in the temple of Apollo of Daphne, and it was burnt to the ground. Without any adequate reason his suspicions fell on the Christians; he put the suspected persons to cruel tortures, but elicited no confession. Thus foiled, he ordered the princ.i.p.al church of Antioch to be closed and razed to the ground.

The att.i.tude of the Christians was one of stern defiance. Under the walls of the palace, along the streets of the city, wherever the Emperor would be likely to hear, were chanted the words of the Psalmist--"Confounded be all they that wors.h.i.+p carved images, and that delight in vain G.o.ds. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands. Eyes have they and see not. They that make them are like unto them, and so are all they that put their trust in them." Nor was he more fortunate with the heathen population. He and they were co-religionists, but his Paganism was not their Paganism. The theatrical exhibitions, the festive orgies, the dancing and the revelry, these were the very soul of religious wors.h.i.+p to them. He despised all such things. They ridiculed the officious devotion with which he hurried from temple to temple and from altar to altar, present at every festival, and partic.i.p.ating in every rite. He took his revenge by satirising their unG.o.dliness. He told them at the great festival of their patron G.o.d, the Daphnian Apollo, he had expected to see costly victims smoking on the altar, but found there only one miserable goose, the solitary offering of a poor priest.

Indeed, he was doomed to disappointment on all sides. One great project which he entertained at this time was the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem. It was not that he loved the Jews, but that he hated the Christians. So he entered into communication with the Jewish patriarch, and the work was commenced. The ruined walls were demolished, the foundations of the new building begun; but as the workmen penetrated underground, great globes of fire burst out from the earth and drove them back. Again and again they renewed the attempt; again and again they were repulsed. The project was relinquished and the temple remains unbuilt to this day.

Thus irritated and disappointed, Julian left Antioch and commenced his march. At his departure he vented his anger against the offending people by declaring that he would not enter the city again, but on his return he would go to Tarsus instead. He was as good as his word. He did return to Tarsus; but he returned there a corpse. Disastrous omens, we are told, thronged upon him. During his march on Hierapolis, as he entered the city, a portico suddenly gave way, and crushed fifty soldiers under its ruins. At Davana a huge stack of straw fell, and smothered to death as many more. At Carrhae, the fatal scene of the defeat of Cra.s.sus, he was troubled with sinister dreams. At Circesium he received letters from Sall.u.s.t, the Prefect of Gaul, entreating him to suspend the ill-omened expedition. Here, too, was an apparition of sinister augury. The corpse of an executed criminal was found lying across the path. At another place an enormous lion confronted the soldiers across their path. He was shot by them, and presented to Julian. It portended the death of a king, but on the question what king was meant there was a division of opinion. The Etruscan soothsayers considered it a disastrous sign; the philosophers interpreted it favourably. The next day a soldier named Julia.n.u.s was struck down by lightning. This omen again was differently explained.

The soothsayers and the philosophers took opposite sides.

Arrived at the scene of conflict, the Emperor, after obtaining some successes, offered a magnificent sacrifice--ten fine bulls--to Mars the Avenger. The omens were unmistakably sinister. Julian was disgusted with the ingrat.i.tude of the G.o.d, and called Jupiter to witness that he would not sacrifice to Mars again; "nor," adds the historian, "did he belie his oath, being carried off prematurely by a speedy death." These prodigies, with others, are related by a Pagan who accompanied the army. Christian writers add an incident of which I see no reason to question the proof, and which certainly deserves to be true. Julian's common taunt against the Christians was their wors.h.i.+p of a dead man. While preparing for his expedition at Antioch, he fell into dispute, after his manner, with a Christian whom he met accidentally, and said mockingly, "What is the Son of the carpenter doing now?" "He is making a coffin," was the prompt reply. The Son of the carpenter was making a coffin--a coffin not for Julian only, but for the Paganism of which Julian was the champion.

It is not necessary for me to follow out this expedition to its disastrous issue. It is sufficient to say that Julian was inveigled, surrounded, pierced by a spear from some unknown Persian or Saracen hand. He perceived at once that he was mortally wounded. His words at this moment are differently reported. According to one account, he cried out, "Oh, Galilean, thou hast conquered!" Another story relates that he took the blood welling from the wound in his hand, and flung it up towards the sun, his patron G.o.d, with an imprecation--"There, take thy fill." Neither saying, perhaps, is reported on sufficiently good authority, but either would accord well with the disappointment and irritation which marked the closing scenes of his life. He inquired what was the name of the place. It was a small village called Parthia. He had been forewarned long ago that in Parthia he should die. He had supposed that the famous country of that name was meant.

We are reminded by this incident of an English sovereign lying on his death-bed in the famous chamber at Westminster, which still bears the name of Jerusalem. "It hath been prophesied to me many years I should not die but at Jerusalem, which vainly I supposed the Holy Land."

Within a few hours Julian had breathed his last. He died on the 26th June, 363, being not yet quite thirty-two years old, and with him perished the last and best hope of Paganism. Less than twenty years after, the Emperor Gratian refused the t.i.tle of Supreme Pontiff. This was the first overt act of disestablishment. Then blow followed blow in rapid succession. Paganism was first disestablished, then disendowed, then prohibited; yet it still continued to linger on till at length it was buried in the grave of the empire. St. Augustine's _City of G.o.d_ was the paean of victory over the enemy slain.

Julian's work had been found like a child's castle elaborately piled up of sand on the brink of the ocean. The rising tide advanced steadily, inexorably, relentlessly, and no traces of the structure remain.

WOMAN AND THE GOSPEL.[11]

"And He took the damsel by the hand."--MARK v. 41.

In selecting this text I have no intention of saying many words on the actual scene itself. The raising of Jairus's daughter attracts our attention by its vivid narrative, and by its intense human pathos, while the two foreign words, summing up the interest of the story, linger strangely in our ears, impressing it effectually on our memories. Nor, again, do I purpose speaking of its direct theological import, whether as an answer to human faith, or as a manifestation of the Divine power. In this latter aspect this is one of three signal miracles, the antic.i.p.ations of Christ's own resurrection. It claims, and it has received, the most earnest study, both in itself and in relation to other incidents of the same cla.s.s.

These more obvious aspects of the text are beside my present purpose.

I wish to-day to treat it from a wholly different point of view.

Christ's miracles have always the highest spiritual significance. They are not miracles only, but parables also. The Messiah's kingdom would have achieved comparatively little for mankind if it had brought deliverance to the captive in a literal sense only. A far heavier and more galling bondage would still remain--the bondage of sin. Physical blindness is only a type of moral blindness; Christ's healing power in the one case is the pledge of His healing power in the other. The palsy of the body symbolises the palsy of the soul. If the paralytic is bidden to take up his bed and walk, this is before all things an a.s.surance to us that Christ is able and willing to heal the paralysis of the soul. From this point of view the words of the text are full of meaning to all who are met together to-day. "He took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise. And straightway the damsel arose, and walked; and they were astonished with a great astonishment."

Need I remind you that this is the earliest miracle of raising the dead recounted in the Gospels? Two others follow. The widow of Nain and the sisters of Bethany receive back their dead. But the one was a growing youth, the other was a man of mature age. The young woman was Christ's first miracle of resurrection. On her was wrought first this stupendous miracle. For her was won this earliest triumph over death and h.e.l.l. Is not this a significant fact in itself, but especially significant for you, for it proclaims the fundamental principle of the Gospel charter? It announces that the weak and the helpless in years, in s.e.x, in social status, are especially Christ's care. It declares emphatically that in Him is neither male nor female. It is a call to you, you women-workers, to do a sister's part to these your sisters.