expressive of a rare and potent beauty in the personality that inhabited them.  There were inscriptions there to the dead martyrs, inscriptions full of confidence and peace.  Old pagan symbols were there also—­Herakles wrestling with death for possession of Alkestis, and Orpheus taming the wild beasts—­blended naturally with new symbols such as the Shepherd and the sheep, and the Good Shepherd carrying the sick lamb upon his shoulder.  The voice of singers was heard in the house of an evening singing the candle hymn, “Hail, Heavenly Light.”  Altogether there seemed here to be a combination of exquisite and obvious beauty with “a transporting discovery of some fact, or series of facts, in which the old puzzle of life had found its solution.”

It was none other than the Church of the early Christian days that Marius had stumbled on, under the guidance of his new friend; and already in heart he had actually become a Christian without knowing it, for these friends of comeliness seemed to him to have discovered the secret of actualising the ideal as none others had done.  At such a moment in his spiritual career it is not surprising that he should hesitate to look upon that which would “define the critical turning-point,” yet he looked.  He saw the blend of Greek and Christian, each at its best—­the martyrs’ hope, the singers’ joy and health.  In this “minor peace of the Church,” so pure, so delicate, and so vital that it made the Roman life just then “seem like some stifling forest of bronze-work, transformed, as if by malign enchantment, out of the generations of living trees,” he seemed to see the possibility of satisfaction at last.  For here there was a perfect love and self-sacrifice, outwardly expressed with a mystic grace better than the Greek blitheness, and a new beauty which contrasted brightly with the Roman insipidity.  It was the humanism of Christianity that so satisfied him, standing as it did for the fullness of life, in spite of all its readiness for sacrifice.  And it was effective too, for it seemed to be doing rapidly what the best paganism was doing very slowly—­attaining, almost without thinking about it, the realisation of the noblest ideals.

“And so it came to pass that on this morning Marius saw for the first time the wonderful spectacle—­wonderful, especially, in its evidential power over himself, over his own thoughts—­of those who believe.  There were noticeable, among those present, great varieties of rank, of age, of personal type.  The Roman ingenuus, with the white toga and gold ring, stood side by side with his slave; and the air of the whole company was, above all, a grave one, an air of recollection.  Coming thus unexpectedly upon this large assembly, so entirely united, in a silence so profound, for purposes unknown to him, Marius felt for a moment as if he had stumbled by chance upon some great conspiracy.  Yet that could scarcely be, for the people here collected might have figured as the earliest handsel, or pattern, of a