measure of its iniquities. In another half-century perjured juries and corrupted magistrates had finished their work; the world could endure them no longer, and the free institutions which had been the admiration of mankind were buried under the throne of the Cæsars.

207

LUCIAN.

THE men of genius who had the misfortune, under the later Roman Emperors, to be blind to the truth of Christianity have been punished by a neglect which they do not wholly deserve. With Tacitus the era closes in which a Roman of ability has been allowed to have shut his eyes to the light without wilful sin. Thenceforward all men of intellectual reputation who remained unconverted have been held guilty by Christendom of deliberate unbelief. Their writings have been thrown aside as either mischievous or useless. The age itself and the character of their contemporaries has been left to be described by the Fathers of the Church; and unless for special reasons, or by exceptional and curious students, the last representatives of the old classical literature remain generally unread. Nor is this neglect diminishing or likely to diminish. When modern books were scarce, any writing which had value in it was prized at its true worth. Plutarch was Shakespeare's chief authority for his Greeks and Romans. Men of culture, who were weary of the quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, preferred the calmer atmosphere of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. The lofty spiritualism of the Alexandrian Platonists was a favourite food with the Cambridge philosophers of the seventeenth century. The exacting demands of modern literature, however, leave inadequate leisure for the study of even

the most accomplished of the classical writers. Modern languages encroach more and more on the old domain of Greek and Latin, and either divide the schools with them or threaten to expel them altogether. The ready quotation from Horace has disappeared from society and almost from the Senate house. Still less of leisure has been left for the less polished, if not less interesting, writers of the succeeding centuries; and except an occasional metaphysician, who makes excursions into Proclus or Plotinus, or an anti-Christian controversialist, who goes for assistance to the fragments of Celsus or Porphyry, it is rare that any one wanders aside into the pages of authors who are looked on as degenerate classics of dangerous tendency, without the literary merit which might compensate for their spiritual deficiency.

Our indifference costs us more than we are aware of. It is supremely desirable that we should be acquainted with the age in which Christianity became the creed of civilised mankind, and we learn but half the truth from the Christian fathers. Whether we regard Christianity as a miracle from without, or as developed from within, out of the conscience and intellect of man, we perceive, at any rate, that it grew by natural causes, that it commended itself by argument and example, that it was received or rejected according to the moral and mental condition of those to whom it was addressed. We shall understand the history of its triumph only when we see the heathen world as the heathen world saw itself. The most indispensable guides in such an inquiry are the writers who remained unconvinced. Nor is it uninteresting to see why they were unconvinced, or how, when they noticed its existence, the new creed appeared to them.

We invite our readers to forget their prejudices, and to accompany us, so far as our few pages will allow, on an

expedition into Lucian. Every one has heard of Lucian's name; nine people out of every ten, if asked who Lucian was, would be ready with an answer that he was a scoffer and an atheist, and in that answer would show decisively that they had never read a page of him. The censure and the ignorance rise from the same source. On the strength of a Dialogue, which has been proved to be spurious, Lucian has been denounced as a direct enemy of Christianity. Lucian is supposed to have encouraged with his satires the hatred which took shape in the persecutions. He has been, therefore, spoken of systematically as a special servant of Satan, as a person whose company decent people were bound to avoid.

Yet Lucian, in his genuine writings, mentions the Christians but once, and then only as a simple-minded sect whose credulity made them the easy dupes of quacks and charlatans. He had looked at Christianity, and had passed it by as one of the thousand illusions which were springing like mushrooms in the hotbed of Greco-Asiatic speculation. The abominations of paganism and the cant of the popular philosophers were the real objects of his detestation; and, so far as concerned the common enemy, the Fathers and Lucian were fighting on the same side. Yet it is doubtful whether, had they known him as he was, he would have been regarded as a welcome ally, or otherwise as anything but intolerable to them. The lightning-like mockery with which Lucian strikes at folly and imposture was unfavourable, however legitimate its objects, to the generation of a believing spirit. To the Fathers the pagan cultus was a worship of devils, to Lucian it was a dishonest or base affectation; and his dissecting knife cuts occasionally into theories where their own nerves were susceptible. His detestation of falsehood was a passion. No кaλòv ɛûdos, no edifying falsehood,

no ideal loveliness or supposed beneficent influence to be derived from illusion could blind his judgment or seduce his allegiance to truth. He lived in an age when the established creeds were a mockery, and philosophy was a juggle of words; when itinerant thaumaturgists, like Proteus or Apollonius, were the favourites of emperors and were regarded by millions upon millions as representatives or incarnations of the gods; while politicians and men of the world were labouring in desperate conservatism to keep the pagan religion on its feet, for fear society should fall to pieces if it was openly confessed to be untrue. With this ignoble terror, and with the quackery and dishonesty which were the inevitable fruit of it, Lucian lived in perpetual war, striking at it with a pungency of satire which is perhaps without its equal in literature. He has the keenness of Voltaire, the moral indignation, disguised behind his jests, of Swift; but while Lucian, no more than Swift or Voltaire, will spare the scoundrel any single lash which is his due, he, like Shakespeare, has still a pity for the poor wretch, as if to be a scoundrel was itself the sharpest of penalties. When Charon's boat-load of ghosts is carried before the judgment bar of Rhadamanthus, a powerful nobleman is found among them who had exhausted the list of possible human depravities—cruelty and avarice, gluttony and lust indulged beyond the limits of nature. Witness after witness deposes to the dreadful truth. His bed tells its tale of horrors. His lamp, unable to say what had been done in daylight when it was not present, details its catalogue of midnight orgies. Each crime, discovered or undiscovered, was supposed to leave its scar upon the soul. The prisoner, being ordered to strip, discloses a person so wealed and marked that the natural substance of it was nowhere visible. Rhadamanthus exclaims in horror for