th their lips sealed. The polemic literature of Christianity is
loud and triumphant, the books of the Pagans have been destroyed.

Only an ignorant man will pronounce a violent or bitter judgement here.
The minds that are now tender, timid, and reverent in their orthodoxy
would probably in the third or fourth century have sided with the old
gods; those of more daring and puritan temper with the Christians. The
historian will only try to have sympathy and understanding for both.
They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia,
Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arius: every party has yielded up its
persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and
heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all
claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought
might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and
John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they
would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison
with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to
the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of
them. In the words of one who speaks with greater knowledge than mine,
'the most inward man in these four contemporaries is the same. It is the
Spirit of the Fourth Century.'[196:1]

* * * * *

'Dieselbe Seelenstimmung, derselbe Spiritualismus'; also the same
passionate asceticism. All through antiquity the fight against luxury
was a fiercer and stronger fight than comes into our modern experience.
There was not more objective luxury in any period of ancient history
than there is now; there was never anything like so much. But there does
seem to have been more subjective abandonment to physical pleasure and
concomitantly a stronger protest against it. From some time before the
Christian era it seems as if the subconscious instinct of humanity was
slowly rousing itself for a great revolt against the long intolerable
tyranny of the senses over the soul, and by the fourth century the
revolt threatened to become all-absorbing. The Emperor Julian was
probably as proud of his fireless cell and the crowding lice in his
beard and cassock as an average Egyptian monk. The ascetic movement
grew, as we all know, to be measureless and insane. It seemed to be
almost another form of lust, and to have the same affinities with
cruelty. But it