d yet life and power,--Christianity and the world, as
well as the Antonines themselves, would not have been gainers? That
alliance was not to be. The Antonines lived and died with an utter
misconception of Christianity; Christianity grew up in the Catacombs,
not on the Palatine. And Marcus Aurelius incurs no moral reproach by
having authorized the punishment of the Christians; he does not thereby
become in the least what we mean by a _persecutor_. One may concede that
it was impossible for him to see Christianity as it really was;--as
impossible as for even the moderate and sensible Fleury[218] to see the
Antonines as they really were;--one may concede that the point of view
from which Christianity appeared something anti-civil and anti-social,
which the State had the faculty to judge and the duty to suppress, was
inevitably his. Still, however, it remains true that this sage, who made
perfection his aim and reason his law, did Christianity an immense
injustice and rested in an idea of State-attributes which was illusive.
And this is, in truth, characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, that he is
blameless, yet, in a certain sense, unfortunate; in his character,
beautiful as it is, there is something melancholy, circumscribed, and
ineffectual.

For of his having such a son as Commodus, too, one must say that he is
not to be blamed on that account, but that he is unfortunate.
Disposition and temperament are inexplicable things; there are natures
on which the best education and example are thrown away; excellent
fathers may have, without any fault of theirs, incurably vicious sons.
It is to be remembered, also, that Commodus was left, at the perilous
age of nineteen, master of the world; while his father, at that age, was
but beginning a twenty years' apprenticeship to wisdom, labor, and
self-command, under the sheltering teachership of his uncle Antoninus.
Commodus was a prince apt to be led by favorites; and if the story is
true which says that he left, all through his reign, the Christians
untroubled, and ascribes this lenity to the influence of his mistress
Marcia, it shows that he could be led to good as well as to evil. But
for such a nature to be left at a critical age with absolute power, and
wholly without good counsel and direction, was the more fatal. Still one
cannot help wishing that the example of Marcus Aurelius could have
availed more with his own only son. One cannot but think that with such
virtue as his there