witness of them, and may well be supposed to
startle the gods from their rest, and draw down their hottest
thunderbolts. But I will not say more, when there must be so many able
to do so much better in behalf of what I must still believe to be a good
cause. Let me entreat the Emperor, before he condemns, to hear. There
are those in Rome, of warm hearts, sound heads, and honest souls, from
whom, if from any on earth, truth may be heard, and who will set in its
just light a doctrine too excellent to suffer, as it must, in my hands.'

'They shall be heard, Nicomachus. Not even a Jew or a Christian shall
suffer without that grace; though I see not how it can avail.'

'If it should not avail to plant in your mind so good an opinion of
their way as exists in mine,' I resumed, 'it might yet to soften it, and
dispose it to a more lenient conduct; and so many are the miseries of
life in the natural order of events, that the humane heart must desire
to diminish, not increase them. Has Aurelian ever heard the name of
Probus the Christian?'

The Emperor turned toward Fronto with a look of inquiry.

'Yes,' said the priest, 'you have heard his name. But that of Felix, the
bishop of the Christians, as he is called, is more familiar to you.'

'Felix, Felix, that is the name I have heard most, but Probus too, if I
err not.'

'He has been named to you, I am certain,' added Fronto. 'He is the real
head of the Nazarenes,--the bishop, but a painted one.'

'Probus is he who turned young Piso's head. Is it not so?'

'The very same; and beside his, the lady Julia's.'

'No, that was by another, one Paul of Antioch, also a bishop and a fast
friend of the Queen. The Christians themselves have of late set upon
him, as they were so many blood-hounds, being bent upon expelling him
from Antioch. It is not long since, in accordance with the decree of
some assembled bishops there, I issued a rescript dislodging him from
his post, and planting in his place one Domnus. If our purposes prosper,
the ejected and dishonored priest may find himself at least safer if
humbler. Probus,--I shall remember him. The name leads my thoughts to
Thrace, where our greater Probus waits for me.'

'From Probus the Christian,' I said, 'you will receive,' whenever you
shall admit him to your presence, a true account of the nature of the
Christians' faith and of the actual condition of their community--all
which, can be had only from a member of it.'

But little m