1, when he died.
Neither of these brothers possessed the disposition or the discernment
of their father; yet they all pursued their father's purpose of
abolishing the ancient superstitions of the Romans and other pagans, and
of propagating the Christian religion throughout the Roman Empire. The
thing itself was commendable and excellent; but in the means employed
there was much that was censurable.

Rhetoricians and philosophers, whose schools were supposed to be so
profitable to the community, exhausted all their ingenuity, both before
the days of Constantine the Great and afterward, to arrest the progress
of Christianity. In the beginning of this century Hierocles, the great
ornament of the Platonic school, composed two books against the
Christians, in which he had the audacity to compare our Saviour with
Apollonius Tyanaeus, and for which he was chastised by Eusebius in a
tract written expressly against him. Lactantius speaks of another
philosopher who endeavored to convince the Christians they were in
error; but his name is not mentioned. After the reign of Constantine the
Great, Julian wrote a large volume against the Christians, and Himerius
and Libanius in their public declamations, and Eunapius in his lives of
the philosophers, zealously decried the Christian religion. Yet no one
of these persons was punished at all for the licentiousness of his
tongue or of his pen.

How much harm these sophists or philosophers, who were full of the pride
of imaginary knowledge and of hatred to the Christian name, did to the
cause of Christianity in this century appears from many examples, and
especially from the apostasy of Julian, who was seduced by men of this
stamp. Among those who wished to appear wise, and to take moderate
ground, many were induced by the arguments and explanations of these men
to devise a kind of reconciling religion, intermediate between the old
superstition and Christianity, and to imagine that Christ had enjoined
the very same thing which had long been represented by the pagan priests
under the envelope of their ceremonies and fables. Of these views were
Ammianus Marcellinus, a very prudent and discreet man; Chalcidius, a
philosopher; Themistius, a very celebrated orator, and others, who
conceived that both religions were in unison, as to all the more
important points, if they were rightly understood, and therefore held
that Christ was neither to be contemned nor to be honored to the
exclusion of th