Part 7

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 surpassed. 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 title 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, assumed 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 gods for this work. The Genius of Rome, we are told, appeared to him in a vision. He reproached the reluctant Cæsar 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 God. His heathen biographer and admirer assigns 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 shield 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 noble 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 gods 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 gods 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 petition him to rescind the decree of banishment: he reviles Athanasius himself; he calls him an impious villain, a vile Manichæan. He responds to their petition 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 assaults 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 circumstances. The reason assigned was that, as they did not believe in the gods 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 illustrious 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 title 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, reinstituting sacrifices. No deity and no rite in any corner of his dominions escaped his vigilance. Whether it was the worship 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 assiduous 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 gods. 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 mass 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 gods; 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 fashion 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 worship the gods, 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 principal church of Antioch to be closed and razed to the ground. The attitude 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 worship carved images, and that delight in vain gods. 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 worship 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 participating in every rite. He took his revenge by satirising their ungodliness. He told them at the great festival of their patron god, 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 Carrhæ, the fatal scene of the defeat of Crassus, he was troubled with sinister dreams. At Circesium he received letters from Sallust, 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 Julianus 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 ingratitude of the god, 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 worship 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 god, 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 title 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 God_ was the pæan 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 anticipations 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 class.

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 assurance 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."