lted at our Master's touch. But apart from what he might have
done, there is matter for the gravest blame in what he did. The scorner
must not pass unchallenged to the banquet of the just. Yet when all is
said against him, the clear fact remains that Julian lived a hero's
life. Often as he was blinded by his impatience or hurried into
injustice by his heathen prejudice, we cannot mistake a spirit of
self-sacrifice and earnest piety as strange to worldling bishops as to
the pleasure-loving heathen populace. Mysterious and full of tragic
pathos is the irony of God in history, which allowed one of the very
noblest of the emperors to act the part of Jeroboam, and brought the old
intriguer Maris of Chalcedon to cry against the altar like the man of
God from Judah. But Maris was right, for Julian was the blinder of the
two.

CHAPTER VII.

_THE RESTORED HOMOEAN SUPREMACY._

[Sidenote: Effects of Julian's reign.]

Julian's reign seems at first sight no more than a sudden storm which
clears up and leaves everything much as it was before. Far from
restoring heathenism, he could not even seriously shake the power of
Christianity. No sooner was he dead than the philosophers disappeared,
the renegades did penance, and even the reptiles of the palace came back
to their accustomed haunts. Yet Julian's work was not in vain, for it
tested both heathenism and Christianity. All that Constantine had given
to the churches Julian could take away, but the living power of faith
was not at Caesar's beck and call. Heathenism was strong in its
associations with Greek philosophy and culture, with Roman law and
social life, but as a moral force among the common people, its weakness
was contemptible. It could sway the wavering multitude with
superstitious fancies, and cast a subtler spell upon the noblest
Christian teachers, but its own adherents it could hardly lift above
their petty quest of pleasure. Julian called aloud, and called in vain.
A mocking echo was the only answer from that valley of dry bones.
Christianity, on the other side, had won the victory almost without a
blow. Instead of ever coming to grapple with its mighty rival, the great
catholic church of heathenism hardly reached the stage of apish mimicry.
When its great army turned out to be a crowd of camp-followers, the
alarm of battle died away in peals of defiant laughter. Yet the alarm
was real, and its teachings were not forgotten. It broke up the revels
of party st