ulian's heathenism.]

Before we can understand Julian's influence on the Arian controversy, we
shall have to take a wider view of the Emperor himself and of his policy
towards the Christians generally. The life of Julian is one of the
noblest wrecks in history. The years of painful self-repression and
forced dissimulation which turned his bright youth to bitterness and
filled his mind with angry prejudice, had only consolidated his
self-reliant pride and firm determination to walk worthily before the
gods. In four years his splendid energy and unaffected kindliness had
won all hearts in Gaul; and Julian related nothing of his sense of duty
to the Empire when he found himself master of the world at the age of
thirty.

But here came in that fatal heathen prejudice, which put him in a false
relation to all the living powers of his time, and led directly even to
his military disaster in Assyria. Heathen pride came to him with
Basilina's Roman blood, and the dream-world of his lonely youth was a
world of heathen literature. Christianity was nothing to him but 'the
slavery of a Persian prison.' Fine preachers of the kingdom of heaven
were those fawning eunuchs and episcopal sycophants, with Constantius
behind them, the murderer of all his family! Every force about him
worked for heathenism. The teaching of Mardonius was practically
heathen, and the rest were as heathen as utter worldliness could make
them. He could see through men like George the pork-contractor or the
shameless renegade Hecebolius. Full of thoughts like these, which
corroded his mind the more for the danger of expressing them, Julian was
easily won to heathenism by the fatherly welcome of the philosophers at
Nicomedia (351). Like a voice of love from heaven came their teaching,
and Julian gave himself heart and soul to the mysterious fascination of
their lying theurgy. Henceforth King Sun was his guardian deity, and
Greece his Holy Land, and the philosopher's mantle dearer to him than
the diadem of empire. For ten more years of painful dissimulation Julian
'walked with the gods' in secret, before the young lion of heathenism
could openly throw off the 'donkey's skin' of Christianity.

[Sidenote: Julian's reorganisation of heathenism.]

Once master of the world, Julian could see its needs without using the
eyes of the Asiatic camarilla. First of all, Christian domination must
be put down. Not that he wanted to raise a savage persecution. Cruelty
had been