which the author has embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and passion.  Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than this noble dream of a pursuit through life of the spirit of heavenly beauty.”  Nothing could be more true, so far as it goes, than this admirable paragraph, yet Pater’s book is more than that.  The main drift of it is the reconciliation of Hellenism with Christianity in the experience of a man “bent on living in the full stream of refined sensation,” who finds Christianity in every point fulfilling the ideals of Epicureanism at its best.

The spiritual stages through which Marius passes on his journey towards this goal are most delicately portrayed.  In the main these are three, which, though they recur and intertwine in his experience, yet may be fairly stated in their natural order and sequence as normal types of such spiritual progress.

The first of these stages is a certain vague fear of evil, which seems to be conscience hardly aware of itself as such.  It is “the sense of some unexplored evil ever dogging his footsteps,” which reached its keenest poignancy in a constitutional horror of serpents, but which is a very subtle and undefinable thing, observable rather as an undertone to his consciousness of life than as anything tangible enough to be defined or accounted for by particular causes.  On the journey to Rome, the vague misgivings took shape in one definite experience.  “From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down through the stillness fell to pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel.”  That was sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vague fear of evil—­of one’s “enemies.”  Such distress was so much a matter of constitution with him, that at times it would seem that the best pleasures of life could but be snatched hastily, in one moment’s forgetfulness of its dark besetting influence.  A sudden suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of enemies, seemed all at once to alter the visible form of things.  When tempted by the earth-bound philosophy of the early period of his development, “he hardly knew how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, the conscience, as we call it, still was within him—­a body of inward impressions, as real as those so highly valued outward ones—­to offend against which, brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty, as to a person.”  Later on, when the “acceptance of things” which he found in Marcus Aurelius had offended him, and seemed to mark the Emperor as his inferior, we find that there is “the loyal conscience within him, deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderful sort of authority.”  This development of conscience from a vague fear of enemies to a definite court of appeal in a man’s judgment of life, goes side by side with his approach to Christianity.  The pagan idealism of the early days had never been able to cope with that sense of enemies, nor indeed to understand it; but in the light of his growing Christian faith, conscience disentangles itself and becomes clearly defined.