But this day when he visited her there was a strange calmness on his features, a more quiet and self-possessed expression in his sunken eyes, than she had marked for years.  This apparent improvement was but momentary—­it was a false calm, which the least breeze could ruffle.

‘May the gods bless thee, my brother!’ said she, embracing him.

‘The gods!  Speak not thus vaguely; perchance there is but one God!’

‘My brother!’

’What if the sublime faith of the Nazarene be true?  What if God be a monarch—­One—­Invisible—­Alone?  What if these numerous, countless deities, whose altars fill the earth, be but evil demons, seeking to wean us from the true creed?  This may be the case, Ione!’

’Alas! can we believe it? or if we believed, would it not be a melancholy faith answered the Neapolitan.  ’What! all this beautiful world made only human!—­mountain disenchanted of its Oread—­the waters of their Nymph—­that beautiful prodigality of faith, which makes everything divine, consecrating the meanest flowers, bearing celestial whispers in the faintest breeze—­wouldst thou deny this, and make the earth mere dust and clay?  No, Apaecides:  all that is brightest in our hearts is that very credulity which peoples the universe with gods.’

Ione answered as a believer in the poesy of the old mythology would answer.  We may judge by that reply how obstinate and hard the contest which Christianity had to endure among the heathens.  The Graceful Superstition was never silent; every, the most household, action of their lives was entwined with it—­it was a portion of life itself, as the flowers are a part of the thyrsus.  At every incident they recurred to a god, every cup of wine was prefaced by a libation; the very garlands on their thresholds were dedicated to some divinity; their ancestors themselves, made holy, presided as Lares over their hearth and hall.  So abundant was belief with them, that in their own climes, at this hour, idolatry has never thoroughly been outrooted:  it changes but its objects of worship; it appeals to innumerable saints where once it resorted to divinities; and it pours its crowds, in listening reverence, to oracles at the shrines of St. Januarius or St. Stephen, instead of to those of Isis or Apollo.

But these superstitions were not to the early Christians the object of contempt so much as of horror.  They did not believe, with the quiet scepticism of the heathen philosopher, that the gods were inventions of the priests; nor even, with the vulgar, that, according to the dim light of history, they had been mortals like themselves.  They imagined the heathen divinities to be evil spirits—­they transplanted to Italy and to Greece the gloomy demons of India and the East; and in Jupiter or in Mars they shuddered at the representative of Moloch or of Satan.

Apaecides had not yet adopted formally the Christian faith, but he was already on the brink of it.  He already participated the doctrines of Olinthus—­he already imagined that the lively imaginations of the heathen were the suggestions of the arch-enemy of mankind.  The innocent and natural answer of Ione made him shudder.  He hastened to reply vehemently, and yet so confusedly, that Ione feared for his reason more than she dreaded his violence.