barbarism, or to imbibe with the study of the classics in the heathen schools the principles of idolatry. In his view the Hellenic writings, especially the works of the poets, were not only literary, but also religious documents to which the heathen had an exclusive claim, and he regarded Christianity as irreconcilable with genuine human culture. The Galileans, says he in ridicule, should content themselves with expounding Matthew and Luke in their churches, instead of profaning the glorious Greek authors. For it is preposterous and ungrate ful, for them to study the writings of the classics, and yet despise the gods, whom the authors revered; since the gods were in fact the authors and guides of the minds of a Homer, a Hesiod, a Demosthenes, a Thucydides, an Isocrates, and a Lysias, and these writers consecrated their works to Mercury or the muses.* Hence he especially hated the learned church teachers, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen, Apollinaris of Laodicea, who applied classical culture to the refutation of heathenism and the defence of Christianity. To evade his interdict, the two Apollinaris produced with all haste Christian imitations of Homer, Pindar, Euripides, and Menander, which were considered by Sozomen equal to the originals, but soon passed into oblivion. Gregory also wrote the tragedy of "The suffering Christ," and several hymns, which still exist. Thus these fathers bore witness to the indispensableness of classical literature for a higher Christian education, and the church has ever since maintained the same view.t

Julian further sought to promote his cause by literary assaults upon the Christian religion; himself writing, shortly before his death, and in the midst of his preparations for the Persian campaign, a bitter work against it, of which some fragments are left in the refutation by Cyril of Alexandria. Julian repeated

* Epist. 42.

Dr. Baur (1. c. p. 42) unjustly charges the fathers with the contradiction of making use of the classics as necessary means of education, and yet of condemning heathenism as a work of Satan. But this is only the one side, which has its element of truth especially as applied to the heathen religion; while on the other side they acknowledged, after Clement and Origen, the working of the divine Logos in the Hellenic philosophy and poetry preparing the way for Christianity.

the arguments of Celsus and Porphyry, expanded them by his larger acquaintance with the Bible, and breathed into all a bitter hatred. He calls the religion of " the Galilean,” or “the dead Jew," as he called Jesus, an impious human invention and a conglomeration of the worst elements of Judaism and heathenism without the good of either. Hence he compares the Christians to leeches which draw all impure blood and leave the pure. He puts the Bible far below Hellenic literature. The first Christians he styles most contemptible men, and the Christians of his day he charges with ignorance, intolerance, and superstitious worship of dead persons, bones and the wood of the cross.

3. To the same hostile design against Christianity is to be referred the favor of Julian to its old hereditary enemy, Judaism.

The emperor, in an official document, affected reverence for that ancient popular religion and sympathy with its adherents, praised their firmness under misfortune, and condemned their oppressors. He exempted Jews from burdensome taxation, and even encouraged them to return to the holy land and to rebuild the temple on Moriah in its original splendor. He appropriated considerable sums to this object from the public treasury, intrusted his accomplished minister Alypius with the supervision of the building, and promised, if he should return victorious from the Persian war, to honor with his own presence the solemnities of reconsecration, and the restoration of the Mosaic sacrificial worship.*

His real purpose in this undertaking was certainly not to advance the Jewish religion; for in his work against the Christians he speaks with great contempt of the Old Testament, and ranks Moses and Solomon far below the pagan lawgivers and philosophers. His object in the rebuilding of the temple was rather, in the first place, to enhance the splendor of his reign and thus gratify his personal vanity; and, then, most probably to put to shame the prophecy of Jesus respecting the

* Jul. Epist. 25, which is addressed to the Jews, and is mentioned also by Sozomen, V, 22.

destruction of the temple (which, however, was actually fulfilled three hundred years before once for all), to deprive the Christians of their most popular argument against the Jews, and to break the power of the new religion in Jerusalem.*

The Jews now poured from east and west into the holy city of their fathers, which from the time of Hadrian they had been forbidden to visit, and entered with fanatical zeal upon this great national religious work, in hope of the speedy introduction of the Messianic reign and the fulfillment of all the prophecies. Women brought their most costly ornaments, turned them into silver shovels and spades, and carried even the earth and stones of the holy spot in their silken aprons. But the united power of heathen emperor and Jewish nation was insufficient to restore a work, which had been overthrown by the judgment of God. Repeated attempts at the building were utterly frustrated, as even a contemporary heathen historian of conceded credibility relates, by fiery eruptions from subterranean vaults; and perhaps, as Christian writers add, by a violent

* Gibbon, c. XXIII: "The restoration of the Jewish temple was secretly connected with the ruin of the Christian church."

† Julian himself seems to admit the failure of the work, but, more prudently, is silent as to the cause, in a fragment of an epistle or oration, p. 295 ed. Spanh., where he asks: Τί περὶ τοῦ νεὼ φήσουσι, τοῦ παρ ̓ αὐτοῖς τρίτον ἀνατραπέντος ¿yεipoμévov dè ovdè võv: "What will they (i.e., the Jewish prophets) say of their own temple, which has been three times destroyed, and is not even now restored? This I have said (he continues) with no wish to reproach them, for I myself, at so late a day, had intended to rebuild it for the honor of Him who was worshipped there." According to the words next following, he seems to have seen in the event a sign of the divine displeasure with the religion of the Jews, but intended, after his return from the Persian war, to attempt the work anew. The impartial Ammianus Marcellinus, himself a professed pagan, a friend of Julian and his companion in arms, tells us more particularly, lib. XXIII, 1: Quum itaque rei fortiter instaret Alypius, juvaretque provinciae rector, metuendi globi flammarum prope fundamenta crebris assultibus erumpentes fecere locum exustis aliquoties operantibus inaccessum; hocque modo elemento destinatius repellente cessavit inceptum. ("Alypius therefore set himself vigorously to the work and was seconded by the governor of the province; when fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the foundations, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more, and thus the fierce element obstinately repelling them, he gave up his attempt.”) Michaelis, Lardner, Gibbon, Guizot, Milman (note on Gibbon), Gieseler, and others, endeavor to explain this as a natural phenomenon, resulting from the bituminous

.*

whirlwind, lightning, earthquakes, and miraculous signs, especially a luminous cross, in the heavens ;* so that the workmen either perished in the flames, or fled from the devoted spot in terror and despair. Thus, instead of depriving the Christians of a support of their faith, Julian only furnished them a new argument in the ruins of this fruitless labor.

The providential frustration of this project is a symbol of the whole reign of Julian, which soon afterwards sank into an early grave. As Cæsar he had conquered the barbarian enemies of nature of the soil, and the subterranean vaults and reservoirs of the temple hill, of which Josephus and Tacitus speak. When Herod, in building the temple, wished to penetrate into the tomb of David, to obtain its treasures, fire likewise broke out and consumed the workmen, according to Joseph. Antiqu. Jud. XVI, 7, § 1. But when Titus undermined the temple, A.D. 70, when Hadrian built there the Ælia Capitolina, in 135, and when Omar built a Turkish mosque in 644, no such destructive phenomena occurred so far as we know. We must therefore believe, that Providence itself, by these natural causes, prevented the rebuilding of the national sanctuary of the Jews.

* Gregory Nazianzen, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Philostorgius, Rufinus, Ambrose, Chrysostom: all of whom regard the event as supernatural, although they differ somewhat in detail. Theodoret speaks first, of a violent whirlwind, which scattered about vast quantities of lime, sand, and other building materials, and was followed by a storm of thunder and lightning; Socrates mentions fire from heaven, which melted the workmen's tools, spades, axes and saws; both add an earthquake, which threw up the stones of the old foundations, filled up the excavation, and, as Rufinus has it, threw down the neighboring buildings. At length a calm succeeded the commotion, and, according to Gregory, a luminous Cross surrounded by a circle appeared in the sky, nay, crosses were impressed upon the bodies of the persons present, which were shining by night (Rufinus) and would not wash out (Socrates). Of these writers, however, Gregory alone is a contemporary witness, relating the event in the year of its occurrence, 363, and that with the assurance, that even the heathen did not call it in question (Orat. IV, p. 110-113). The Greek and Roman church historians, and Warburton, Mosheim, Schroeckh, Neander, Guericke, Kurtz, Newman, Robertson, and others, of the Protestant, vindicate the miraculous, or at least providential character of this remarkable event. Comp. also J. H. Newman (since gone over to Romanism): Essay on the Miracles recorded in Ecclesiastical History, prefixed to the Oxford Tractarian translation of Fleury's Eccles. Hist. from 381-400 (Oxf. 1842) pp. CLXXV-CLXXXV. Warburton and Newman defend even the crosses, and refer to similar cases, for instance one in England in 1610, where marks of a cross of a phosphoric nature, and resembling meteoric phenomena, appeared in connection with lightning and produced by electricity. In Julian's case they assume that the immediate cause which set all these various physical agents in motion, as in the case of the destruction of Sodom, was supernatural.

the Roman empire in the West; and now he proposed, as ruler of the world, to humble its enemies in the East, and by the conquest of Persia to win the renown of a second Alexander. He proudly rejected all proposals of peace; crossed the Tigris at the head of an army of sixty-five thousand men, after wintering in Antioch, and after solemn consultation of the oracle; took several fortified towns in Mesopotamia; exposed himself to every hardship and peril of war; restored at the same time, whenever he could (not every where), the worship of the gods; but brought his army into a most critical position, and in an unimportant nocturnal skirmish, received from a hostile arrow a mortal wound. He died soon after, on the 27th of June, 363, in the thirty-second year of his life; according to heathen testimony, in the proud repose and dignity of a Stoic philosopher, conversing of the glory of the soul (the immortality of which, however, he considered at best an uncertain opinion);* but ac. cording to later and somewhat doubtful Christian accounts,† with the hopeless exclamation: "Galilean, thou hast conquered!"

So died, in the prime of life, a prince, who darkened his brilliant military, executive and literary talents, and a rare energy, by a fanatical zeal for a false religion and opposition to the true; and earned, instead of immortal honor, the shame of an unsuccessful apostate.

With Julian himself fell also his artificial, galvanized heathenism "like the baseless fabric of a vision, leaving not a rack behind," save the great lesson, that it is impossible to swim against the stream of history or to stop the progress of Christianity.

* Ammianus, 1. XXV, 3. He was himself in the campaign, and served in the body guard of the emperor; thus having the best opportunity for observation.

Sozomen, VI, 2; Theodoret, III, 25 (Nɛvíkŋkaç гahɛhais); then, somewhat differing, Philostorgius, VII, 15. Gregory Nazianzen, on the contrary, who elsewhere presents Julian in the worst light, knows nothing of this exclamation, to which one may apply the Italian maxim: Se non è vero, è ben trovato. The above-named historians mention also other incidents of the death, not very credible; e. g. that he threw towards heaven a handful of blood from his wound; that he blasphemed the heathen gods; that Christ appeared to him, etc. Sozomen quotes also the groundless assertion of Libanius, that the mortal wound was inflicted not by a Persian, but by a Christian, and was not ashamed to add that he could hardly be blamed who did this "noble deed for God and for his religion."