[Sidenote:  Julian’s character.]

Christian charity will not delight in counting up the outbreaks of petty spite and childish vanity which disfigure a noble character of purity and self-devotion.  Still less need we presume to speculate what Julian would have done if he had returned in triumph from the Persian war.  His bitterness might have hardened into a renegade’s malice, or it might have melted at our Master’s touch.  But apart from what he might have done, there is matter for the gravest blame in what he did.  The scorner must not pass unchallenged to the banquet of the just.  Yet when all is said against him, the clear fact remains that Julian lived a hero’s life.  Often as he was blinded by his impatience or hurried into injustice by his heathen prejudice, we cannot mistake a spirit of self-sacrifice and earnest piety as strange to worldling bishops as to the pleasure-loving heathen populace.  Mysterious and full of tragic pathos is the irony of God in history, which allowed one of the very noblest of the emperors to act the part of Jeroboam, and brought the old intriguer Maris of Chalcedon to cry against the altar like the man of God from Judah.  But Maris was right, for Julian was the blinder of the two.

CHAPTER VII.

THE RESTORED HOMOEAN SUPREMACY.

[Sidenote:  Effects of Julian’s reign.]

Julian’s reign seems at first sight no more than a sudden storm which clears up and leaves everything much as it was before.  Far from restoring heathenism, he could not even seriously shake the power of Christianity.  No sooner was he dead than the philosophers disappeared, the renegades did penance, and even the reptiles of the palace came back to their accustomed haunts.  Yet Julian’s work was not in vain, for it tested both heathenism and Christianity.  All that Constantine had given to the churches Julian could take away, but the living power of faith was not at Caesar’s beck and call.  Heathenism was strong in its associations with Greek philosophy and culture, with Roman law and social life, but as a moral force among the common people, its weakness was contemptible.  It could sway the wavering multitude with superstitious fancies, and cast a subtler spell upon the noblest Christian teachers, but its own adherents it could hardly lift above their petty quest of pleasure.  Julian called aloud, and called in vain.  A mocking echo was the only answer from that valley of dry bones.  Christianity, on the other side, had won the victory almost without a blow.  Instead of ever coming to grapple with its mighty rival, the great catholic church of heathenism hardly reached the stage of apish mimicry.  When its great army turned out to be a crowd of camp-followers, the alarm of battle died away in peals of defiant laughter.  Yet the alarm was real, and its teachings were not forgotten.  It broke up the revels of party strife, and partly roused the churches to the dangers of a purely heathen education.  Above all, the approach of danger was a sharp reminder that our life is not of this world.  They stood the test fairly well.  Renegades or fanatics were old scandals, and signs were not wanting that the touch of persecution would wake the old heroic spirit which had fought the Empire from the catacombs and overcome it.