their priesthoods and augurships among their proudest honours, and the Senate itself still opened every sitting with an offering of incense on the altar of Victory.  The public service was largely heathen, and the army too, especially its growing cohorts of barbarian auxiliaries.  Education also was mostly heathen, turning on heathen classics and taught by heathen rhetoricians.  Libanius, the teacher of Chrysostom, was also the honoured friend of Julian.  Philosophy too was a great influence, now that it had leagued together all the failing powers of the ancient world against a rival not of this world.  Its weakness as a moral force must not blind us to its charm for the imagination.  Neoplatonism brought Egypt to the aid of Greece, and drew on Christianity itself for help.  The secrets of philosophy were set forth in the mysteries of Eastern superstition.  From the dim background of a noble monotheism the ancient gods came forth to represent on earth a majesty above their own.  No waverer could face the terrors of that mighty gathering of infernal powers.  And the Nicene age was a time of unsettlement and change, of half-beliefs and wavering superstition, of weakness and unclean frivolity.  Above all, society was heathen to an extent we can hardly realise.  The two religions were strangely mixed.  The heathens on their side never quite understood the idea of worshipping one God only; while crowds of nominal Christians never asked for baptism unless a dangerous illness or an earthquake scared them, and thought it quite enough to show their faces in church once or twice a year.  Meanwhile, they lived just like the heathens round them, steeped in superstitions like their neighbours, attending freely their immoral games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them.  Thus Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone.  Heathen influences therefore strongly supported Arianism.

[Sidenote:  (2.) Jews.]

The Jews also usually took the Arian side.  They were still a power in the world, though it was long since Israel had challenged Rome to seventy years of internecine contest for the dominion of the East.  But they had never forgiven her the destruction of Jehovah’s temple. [Sidenote:  A.D. 66-135.] Half overcome themselves by the spell of the eternal Empire, they still looked vaguely for some Eastern deliverer to break her impious yoke.  Still more fiercely they resented her adoption of the gospel, which indeed was no tidings of good-will or peace to them, but the opening of a thousand years of persecution.  Thus they were a sort of caricature of the Christian churches.  They made every land their own, yet were aliens in all.  They lived subject to the laws of the Empire, yet gathered into corporations governed by their own.  They were citizens of Rome, yet strangers to her imperial comprehensiveness.