It was a dark and stormy night in December. Everybody in the house had long been in bed and asleep; but, deeply interested in the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” I had prolonged my reading until the small hours had begun to increase, and I heard the bells of the Capucin convent strike for two o’clock. I then laid down my book, and began to reflect upon it. The fire had nearly burned out, and, unwilling yet to go, I threw on to it a bundle of canne and a couple of sticks; again the fresh flame darted out, and gave a glow to the room. Outside, the storm was fierce and passionate. Gusts beat against the panes, shaking the old windows of the palace, and lashing them with wild rain. At intervals a sudden blue light flashed through the room, followed by a trampling roar of thunder overhead. The fierce libeccio howled like a wild beast around the house, as if in search of its prey, and then died away, disappointed and growling, and after a short interval again leaped with fresh fury against the windows and walls, as if maddened by their resistance. As I sat quietly gazing into the fire and musing on many shadows of thought that came and passed, my imagination went back into the far past, when Marcus Aurelius led his legions against the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmati, and brought before me the weather-beaten tent in which he sat so many a bleak and bitter night, after the duty of the day was done, and all his men had retired to rest, writing in his private diary those noble meditations, which, though meant solely for his private eye, are one of the most precious heritages we have of ancient life and thought. I seemed to see him there in those bleak wilds of Pannonia, seated by night in his tent. At his side burns a flickering torch. Sentinels silently pace to and fro. The cold wind flirts and flaps the folds of the prÆtorium, and shakes the golden eagle above it. Far off is heard the howl of the wolf prowling through the shadowy forests that encompass the camp; or the silence is broken by the sharp shrill cry of some night bird flying overhead through the dark. Now and then comes the clink of armor from the tents of the cavalry, or the call of the watchword along the line, or the neighing of horses as the circuitores make their rounds. He is ill and worn with toil and care. He is alone; and there, under the shadow of night, beside his camp-table, he sits and meditates, and writes upon his waxen tablets those lofty sentences of admonition to duty and encouragement to virtue, those counselings of himself to heroic action, patient endurance of evil, and tranquillity of life, that breathe the highest spirit of morality and philosophy. Little did he think, in his lonely watches, that the words he was writing only for himself would still be cherished after long centuries had passed away, and would be pondered over by the descendants of nations which were then uncultured barbarians, as low in civilization as the Pannonians against whom he was encamped. Yet of all the books that ancient literature has left us, none is to be found containing the record of higher and purer thought, or more earnest and unselfish character. As I glanced up at the cast of the Capitoline bust of him which stood in the corner of my room, and saw the sweet melancholy of that gentle face, ere care and disappointment had come over it and ruled it with lines of age and anxiety, a strange longing came over me to see him and hear his voice, and a sad sense of that great void of time and space which separated us. Where is he now? What is he now? I asked myself. In what other distant world of thought and being is his spirit moving? Has it any remembrance of the past? Has it any knowledge of the present? Yet the hand that wrote is now but dust, which may be floating about the mausoleum where he was buried, near the Vatican, or perhaps lying in that library of the popes upon some stained manuscript of this very work it wrote, to be blown carelessly away by some studious abbÉ as he ranges the volume on its shelf among the other precious records of the past. The hand is but dust, yet the thoughts that it recorded are fresh and living as ever. Since he passed from this world, how little progress have we made in philosophy and morality! Here in this little book are rules for the conduct of life which might shame almost any Christian. Here are meditations which go to the root of things, and explore the dim secret world which surrounds us, and return again, as all our explorations do, unsatisfied. All these centuries have passed, and we still ask the same questions and find no answer. Where he is now he knows the secret, or he is beyond the desire to know it. The mystery is solved for him which we are guessing, and his is either a larger, sweeter life, growing on and on—or everlasting rest. A stoic, he found comfort in his philosophy, as great perhaps as we Christians find in our faith. He believed in his gods as we believe in ours. How could they satisfy a mind like his? How could these impure and passionate existences, given to human follies and weaknesses, to low intrigues, to vulgar jealousies, to degraded loves, satisfy a nature so high, so self-denying, so earnest, so pure? Yet they were his gods; to them he sacrificed, in them he trusted, looking forward to a calm future with a serenity at least equal to ours, undisturbed by misgivings; believing in justice, and in unjust gods; believing in purity, and in impure gods.

“No!” said a mild voice, “I did not believe in impure and unjust gods.” And looking up, I saw before me the calm face of the emperor and philosopher of whom I was thinking. There he stood before me as I knew him from his busts and statues, with his full brow and eyes, his sweet mouth, his curling hair, now a little grizzled with age, and a deep meditative look of tender earnestness upon his face.

I know not why I was not startled to see him there, but I was not. It seemed to me natural, as events seem in a dream. The realities, as we call those facts which are merely visionary and transitory, vanished; and the unrealities, as we call those of thought and being, usurped their place. Nothing seemed more fitting than that he should be there. To the mind all things are possible and simple, and there is no time or space in thought which annihilates them.

I arose to greet my guest with the reverence due to such a presence.

“Do not disturb yourself,” he said, smiling; “I will sit here, if you please;” and so speaking, he took the seat opposite me at the fire. “Sit you,” he continued, “and I will endeavor to answer some of the questions you were asking of yourself.”

“Had I known your presence I should hardly, perhaps, have dared to ask such questions, or at least in such a form,” I said.

“Why not ask them of me if you ask them of yourself?” he responded. “They were just and natural in themselves, and the forms of things are of little use to one who cares for the essence—just as the forms of the divinities I believed in are of no consequence compared to their essences. What we call thoughts are but too often mere formulas, which by dint of repetition we finally get to believe are in themselves truths, while they are in fact mere dead husks, having no life in them, and which by their very rigidity prevent life. No single statement, however plausible, can contain truth, which is infinite in form and in spirit. If we are to talk together, let us free ourselves, if we can, from formulas, since they only check growth in the spirit, and, so to speak, are mere inns at which we rest for a moment on account of our weariness and weakness. If we stay permanently in them we narrow our minds, dwarf our experience, and make no more progress. For what is truth but a continual progression towards the divine?”

“Yet would you say that formulas are of no use? that we should not sum up in them the best of our thought?”

“Undoubtedly they are useful. They are trunks in which we pack our goods; but as we acquire more goods, we must have larger and ever larger trunks. It is only dead formulas which kill, and the tendency of formulas is to die and thus to repress thought. Look at the nutshell that holds the precious germ of the future tree. It is a necessary prison of a moment; but as that germ quickens and spreads, the shell must give way, or death is the consequence. The infinite truth can be comprehended in no formula and no system. All attempts to do this have resulted in the same end—death. Every religious creed should be living, but every Church formalizes it into barren words and shapes, and erelong, Faith—that is, the living, aspiring principle—dies, wrapped up in its formal observances or rigid statements, and becomes like the dead mummies of the Egyptians—the form of life, not the reality.”

“Too true,” I answered, “all history proves it. Every real and thinking man feels it. As habits get the better of our bodies, so conventions and formulas get the better of our minds. But pray continue; I only listen; and pardon me for interrupting you.”

“What I say has direct relation to the questions you were asking when I entered. There is a grain, often many grains, of truth in every system of religion, but complete Truth in none. If we wait until we attain the perfect before adhering to one, we shall never arrive at any. Each age has its religious ideas, which are the aggregate of its moral perceptions influenced by its imaginative bias, and these are shapen into formulas or systems, which serve as inns, or churches, or temples of worship. These begin by representing the highest reach of the best thought of the age, but they soon degenerate into commonplaces, thought moving on beyond them, and of its very vitality of nature seeking beyond them. At these inns the common mass put up, and the host or priest controls them while they are there, and society organizes them, and so a certain good is attained. In what you call the ancient days, when I lived on the earth, I found a system already built and surrounded by strong bulwarks of power. To strike at that was to strike at the existence of society. A religious revolution is a social revolution; one cannot alter a faith without altering everything out of which it is moulded. To do that, more evil might result than good. Man’s nature is such that if you throw down the temple of his worship at once, assaulting its very foundations, you do not improve his faith; you but too often annihilate it, so implanted is it in old prejudices, in the forms stamped on the heart in youth, and in the habits of thought. It is only by gradual changes that any real good can be done—by enlarging and developing the principles of truth which already exist, and not by overthrowing the whole system at once.”

“But in the religious system to which you gave your adherence,” I exclaimed, “what was there grand and inspiring? What truth was there out of which you could hope to develop a true system? for certainly you could not believe in the divinities of your day.”

“Reverence to the gods that were,” he answered, “to a power above and beyond us; recognition of divine powers and attributes. This lay as the corner-stone of our worship, as it does of yours.” “Almost,” I cried, “it seems to me worse to worship such gods as yours than to worship none at all. Their attributes were at best only human, their conduct was low and unworthy, their passions were sensual and debased. Any good man would be ashamed to do the acts calmly attributed to the divinities you worshiped. This, in itself, must have had a degrading influence on the nation. How could man be ashamed of any act allowed and attributed to the gods?”

“Your notions on this point are natural,” he calmly answered, “but they are completely mistaken. There is no doubt that in every system of religion the tendency is to humanize and, to a certain extent, degrade God. To attribute to Him our own passions is universal, with the mass. To deify man or to humanize God is the rule. You deify that beautiful character named Christ, and you humanize God by representing Him as inspired with anger and cruelty beyond anything in our system. You attribute to Him a scheme of the universe which is to me abhorrent. Will you excuse me if I state thus plainly how it strikes one who belonged to a different age and creed, and who therefore cannot enter into the deep-grained prejudices and ideas of your century and faith?”

“Speak boldly,” I said. “Do not fear to shock me. I am so deeply planted that I do not fear to be uprooted in my faith. And, besides, that is not truth which does not court assault, sure to be strengthened by it. If you can overthrow my faith, overthrow it.” “That I should be most unwilling to do,” he answered. “No word would I say to produce such a result. In your faith there is a noble and beautiful truth, which sheds a soft lustre over life; and in my own day the pure and philosophic spirit of Jesus of Nazareth was recognized by me and reverenced. ’T is not of Him I would speak, but rather of the general scheme of the regulation of this world by God that I alluded to; and I yet pause, fearing to shock you by a simple statement of this creed.”

“I pray you do not hesitate; speak! I am ready and anxious to hear you.”

“It is only in answer to what you say of the acts and passions attributed by us to our divinities, as constituting a clear reason why we should not reverence them, that I speak. You attribute to your God omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love. Yet in his omnipotence He made first a world, and then placed in it man and woman, whom He also made and pronounced good. In this, according to your belief, He was mistaken. The man and woman proved immediately not to be good; and He, omnipotent as He was, was foiled by another power named Satan, who upset at once his whole scheme. After infinite consideration and in pity for man, He could or did invent no better scheme of redeeming him than for Himself, or an emanation from Himself, to take the form of man, and to suffer death through his wickedness and at his hands. Thus man, by adding to the previous fault the crime of killing God on the earth, acquired a claim to be saved from the consequences of his first fault. A new crime affords a cause of pardon for a previous fault of disobedience. What was this first fault, which induced God to drive the first man and woman out of the Paradise He had made for them? Simply that they ate an apple when they were prohibited. Is any pagan legend more absurd than this? Then for the justice of God, on what principle of right can the subsequent crime and horror—without example—of killing God, or a person, as you say, of the Trinity, afford a reason for removing from man a penalty previously incurred? When one remembers that you assume God to be omniscient as well as omnipotent, and that He might have made any other scheme, by simply forgiving man, or obliging him to redeem himself by doing good and acting virtuously, instead of committing a crime and a horror, this belief becomes still more strange. Nor can you explain it yourself; you only say it is a mystery which is beyond your reason, but none the less true. Yet though it offends all sense of justice and right in my mind, you believe it and adhere to it as a corner-stone of your faith. Are you sure I do not offend you?”

“Pray go on,” I said. “When you have said it is a mystery, you have said all. Shall man, with his deficient reason, pretend to understand God? This is a truth revealed to us by his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who was himself in a human form; and when God reveals to us a mystery, shall we not believe it? Shall we measure Him by our feeble wits?”

“I do not mean to argue with you. This is furthest from my intention; though I might say this holds good of us in the ancient days, as well as with you now. I only wish, however, to show you that you believe what you acknowledge to be beyond reason—a mystery, as you call it. You believe this, and yet you despise the pagan for believing what his gods told him, simply because it was unreasonable or ridiculous.”

“The question,” I said, “is very different; but let it pass. Pray go on.”

“Your God is a God of infinite love, you say. Yet in the opinion of many of you, at least, this infinitely loving God, omnipotent, and having the power to make man as He chose,—omniscient, and knowing how to make him good and happy if He wished to,—has chosen in his love to make him weak and impotent, to endow him with passions which are temptations to evil, to afflict him with disease and pain, to render him susceptible to torments of every kind and sufferings beyond his power to avoid, however he strive to be good and virtuous and obedient; and then at the last, after a life of suffering and struggle here, either to save him and make him eternally happy, or, if He so elect, without any reason intelligible to you or any one, to plunge him into everlasting torment, from which he can never free himself. Now, I ask you in what respect is such a God better than Jupiter, who, even according to the lowest popular notions, whatever were his passions, was at least placable; who, whatever were his follies, was not a demon like this? And when one takes into consideration the fact that there is not a humane man living who would not be ashamed to do to his own child, however vicious, what he calmly attributes to this all-loving God, the belief in such a God seems all the more extraordinary.”

“It is a mystery,” I said, “that one like you, born in another age and tinctured with another creed, could not be expected to understand. It would be useless for me to attempt it, and certainly not now, when I so greatly prefer hearing you to speaking myself. My purpose is not now to defend my religion, but to listen to your defense of yours.”

“Well, then, allow us to have our mystery too. If you cannot explain all, neither could we; but neither with us nor with you was that a reason for not believing at all. It was the mystery itself, perhaps, that attracted us and attracts you. The love of the unintelligible is at the root of all systems of religion. If man is unintelligible to us, shall not God be? Man has always invested his gods with his own passions, and his gods are for the most part his own shadows cast out into infinite space, enlarged, gigantic, and mysterious. Man cannot, with the utmost exercise of his faculties, get out of himself any more than he can leap over his own shadow. He cannot comprehend (or inclose within himself) God, who comprehends and incloses him; and therefore he vaguely magnifies his own powers, and calls the result God. God the infinite Spirit made man; but man in every system of religion makes God. In our own reason He is the best that we can imagine—that is, our own selves purged of evil and extended. We cannot stretch beyond ourselves.”

“Ay, but your gods were not the best you could conceive. They were lower of nature than man himself in some particulars, and were guilty of acts that you yourself would reprove.”

“This is because you consider them purely in their mythical history, according to the notions of the common ignorant mass; not looking behind those acts which were purely typical, often simply allegorical, to the ideas which they represented and of which they were incarnations. You cannot believe that so low a system as this satisfied the spiritual needs of those august and refined souls who still shine like planets in the sky of thought. Do you suppose that Plato and Epictetus, that Zeno and Socrates, that Seneca and Cicero, with their expanded minds, accepted these low formulas of Divinity? As well might I suppose that the low superstitions of the Christian Church, in which the vulgar believe, represent the highest philosophy of the best thinkers. Yet for long centuries of superstition the Church has been accepted by you just as it stands, with its saints and their miracles, and its singular rites and ceremonies. Nor has any effort been made to cleanse the bark of St. Peter of the barnacles and rubbish which encumber and defile it. Religious faith easily degenerates into superstition in the common mind. And why has the superstition been accepted? Simply because it is so deeply ingrained into the belief of the unthinking mass, that there might be danger of destroying all faith by destroying the follies and accidents which had become imbedded in it. Not only for this; by means of these very superstitions men may be led and governed, and leaders will not surrender or overthrow means of power. Yet the best minds,” he continued, “did what they could in ancient days to purify and refine the popular faith, and sought even to elevate men’s notions of the gods by educating their sense of the beautiful, and by presenting to them images of the gods unstained by low passions and glorious in their forms.”

“But surely your idea of Jupiter or Zeus,” I answered, “was most unworthy when compared with that which we entertain of the infinite God, the source of all created things, the sole and supreme Creator. The Hebrews certainly attained a far loftier conception in their Jehovah than you in your Jupiter.”

“What matter names?” he replied; “Zeus, Jehovah, God, are all mere names, and the ideas they represented were only differenced by the temperaments and character of the various peoples who worshiped them.” “But the Jehovah of the Jews was not merely the head ruler of many gods, but a single universal God, one and infinite!”

“No! I think not. The Jehovah of the Jews underwent many changes and developments with the growth of the Hebrew people; and in many of their writings He is represented as a passionate, vindictive, and even unreasonable and unjust God, whose passions were modified by human arguments. And, so far from being a universal God of all, He was specially the God of the Hebrews, and is so constantly represented in their Scriptures. He comes down upon earth and interferes personally in the doings of men, and talks with them, and discusses questions with them, and sometimes even takes their advice. In process of time this notion is modified, and assumes a nobler type; but He is never the Universal Father, nor the God whose essence is Love,—never, that is, until the coming of Christ, who first enunciated the idea that God is love,—rejoicing over the saving of man, far and above all human passions. ‘Vengeance is mine’ was the original idea of Jehovah; and He was feared and worshiped by the Jews as their peculiar God, whose chosen people they were. As for his unity, whatever may have been the popular superstitions of the Greeks and Romans, God is recognized by the greatest and purest minds as one and indivisible, the Father of all, who commands all, who creates all, who is invisible and omnipotent. Do you not remember the fragment of the Sibylline verses preserved by Lactantius,25 S. Theophilus Antiochenus, and S. Justinus, where it is said that Zeus was one being alone, self-creating, from whom all things are made, who beholds all mortals, but whom no mortal can behold?—

So, also, Pindar cries out:—

So again, in the same spirit, the Appian hymn says of Zeus:—

And Euripides exclaims, ‘Where is the house, the fabric reared by man, that could contain the immensity of God?’

and adds that the true God needs no sacrifices on his altar. And Æschylus, in like manner, says:—

And Sophocles, also in similar lines, proclaims the unity and universality of God. And Theocritus, in his ‘Idylls,’ echoes the same sentiment. The same cast of thought, the same lofty idea of God, is found among the ancient Romans. Lucan exclaims in his ‘Pharsalia:’—

Valerius Soranus makes him the one universal, omnipotent God, the Father and Mother of us all:—

Can any statement be larger and more inclusive than this?27 Such indeed was the true philosophic idea of Jupiter, as entertained by the best and most exalted in ancient days. You must go to the highest sources to learn what the highest notions of Deity are among any people, and not grope among the popular superstitions and myths. Then, again, what nobler expressions of our relation to an infinite and universal spirit of God are to be found than in Epictetus and Seneca? ‘God is near you, is with you, is within you,’ Seneca writes. ‘A sacred spirit dwells within us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and all our good. There is no good man without God.’ And again: ‘Even from a corner it is possible to spring up into heaven. Rise, therefore, and form thyself into a fashion worthy of God.’ And again: ‘It is no advantage that conscience is shut up within us. We lie open to God.’ And still again: ‘Do you wish to render the gods propitious? Be virtuous.’ One might cite such passages for hours from the writings of these men. Can you, then, think that our notions of God and duty were so low and so debased?

“Look, too, at our arts. Art and religion with us and the Greeks went hand in hand. If you seek the true spirit of religion among any people, you will always find it in the productions of their art. In sculpture, the most ideal of the plastic arts, you will see the real features of the gods. They are grand, calm, serene, dignified, and above the taint of human passion; claiming reverence and love in their beauty and perfection beyond the human. Here there is nothing mean or low. So godlike are they even in the poorer specimens of their noble figures that have come down to you, that you yourselves recognize in them ideal grace and power. Read the reflection of our faith in their forms and features, and you will find in it nothing vulgar, nothing degrading. The best personifications of your own divinities in art look poor beside them. God himself in your pictures is feeble compared with the divine Jupiter of Phidias; the Madonna weak and tame beside the august grandeur of his Athene. Christ in your art is pitiable beside the splendor of Apollo; so far from being the highest type of even man, he is almost the weakest, composed of pale negatives, and with nothing very positive and grand; while your saints are affected, cowardly, and cringing, compared with the heroic demigods of Greece. In art, at least, the ancient deities still live and command reverence from a serene world beyond change. Would you know what our faith was, look at the great works of art and at the best thoughts of the greatest minds we owned, and not at the corrupted text of popular superstition. These, indeed, were worthy of reverence. They lifted the thoughts and cleared the spirit, and filled it with a sense of beauty and of power. Who could look at that magnificent impersonation of Zeus at Olympia, by Phidias, so grand, so simple, so serene, with its golden robes and hair, its divine expression of power and sweetness, its immense proportions, its perfection of workmanship, and not feel that they were in the presence of an august, tremendous, and impassionate power?”

“Ah!” I exclaimed, “that truly I wish I could have seen—what majesty, what beauty, it must have had!”

“Ay!” he answered. “No one could see it and not be enlarged in spirit by it.”

“Was, then, the Athena of the Parthenon,” I asked, “equal in merit?”

“It was very different. It wanted the power and massive grandeur of the Zeus; but in its dignity and serenity it had a wondrous charm. It was the true type of wisdom, calm above doubt, and with a gentle severity of aspect, as if, undisturbed by the tormenting questions that vex humanity, it saw the eternal truth of things. When I compare with these wondrous statues your best representations of your divinities, I cannot but feel how vast a difference there is; and when in your temples one sees the prostrate figures of men and women clinging to vulgar and degraded images of saints, imploring aid and protection from them, and soliciting their interposition against the avenging hand of Deity, I cannot see that you are better than we.”

“But, after all, through this there is a belief in a pure and infinite Being beyond—a Being beyond all human passion; not imperfect and subject to wild caprices, and capable of abominable acts.”

“You see, we go back to the same question,” he replied. “You profess to worship a God above nature, and yet your prayers are to Christ, the man; to the saints, who were lower men and women; and you cling to these as mediators. Well; and we also believed in a spirit and power undefined and above all, whose nature we could not grasp, and who expressed himself in every living thing. Our gods were but anthropomorphic symbols of special powers and developments of an infinite and overruling power. They partly represent, in outward shape and form, philosophic ideas and human notions about the infinite God, and partly body forth the phenomena of nature, that hint at the great ultimate cause behind them, of which they are, so to speak, the outward garment, by which the Universal Deity is made visible to man. In our religion nature was but the veil which half hid the divine powers. Everywhere they peered out upon us, from grove and river, from night and morning, from lightning and storm, from all the elements and all the changes and mysteries of the living universe. It delighted us to feel their absolute, active presence among us—not far away from us, involved in utter obscurity, and beyond our comprehension. We saw the Great Cause in its second plane, close to us, in the growing of the flower, in the flowing of the stream, in the drifting of the cloud, in the rising and setting of the sun. Our gods (representing the great idea beyond, and doing its work) were anthropomorphic by necessity, just as yours are in art. The popular fables are but the mythical garb behind which lie great facts and truths. They are symbolical representations of the great processes of nature, of the laws of life and growth, of the changes of the seasons, of the strife of the elements. Apollo was the life-giving sun; Artemis, the mysterious moon; Ceres and Proserpine, the burial of the grain in the earth, and its reappearance and fructification. So, on another plane, Minerva was the philosophic mind of man; Venus, the impassioned embodiment of human love, as Eros was of spiritual affections; Bacchus, the serene and full enjoyment of nature. We but divided philosophically what you sum up in one final cause; but all our divisions looked back to that cause. In an imaginative people like the Greeks, there is also a natural tendency to mythical embodiment of facts in history as well as in nature; and in the early periods, when little was written down, traditions easily assumed the myth form. Ideas were reduced to visible shapes, and facts were etherealized into ideas and imaginatively transformed. The story of Diana and Endymion, of Cupid and Psyche, will always be true—not to the reason, but to the imagination. It expresses poetically a sentiment which cannot die. So, also, what matters it if DÆdalus built a ship for Icarus, and Icarus was simply drowned? Sublimed into poetry, it became a myth, and Icarus flew on waxen wings across the sea. All poetry is thus allegorical. The wind will always have wings until it ceases to blow. These myths are simply poetic moulds of thought, in which vague sentiments, ideas, and facts are wrought together into an express shape. Think what your own literature or thought would be without the old Grecian poems. Let the reason reject them as it will, and drive them out into the cold, the imagination will run forth and bring them back again to warm and cherish them on its breast. Facts, as facts, are but dead husks. The spirit cannot live upon them. Besides, are not our myths enchanting? Could anything take their place? Can science, peering into all things, ever find the secrets of nature? After all its explorations, the final element of life, the motive and inspiring element that is the essence of all the organism it uses and without which all is mere material, mere machinery, flees utterly beyond its reach, and leaves it at last with only dust in its hands. Does not the little child that makes playmates of the flowers, and the brooks, and the sands, find God there better than any of us? The subtle divinity hides anywhere, entices everywhere, is just out of reach everywhere. We catch glimpses of it, breathe its odor, hear its dim voice, see the last flutter of its robe, pursue it endlessly, and never can seize it. The poet is poet because he loves this spirit in nature, and comes nearer it; but he cannot grasp it; and for all his pursuit he comes back laden at last with a secret he cannot quite tell, and shapes us a myth to express it as well as he may.”

“But surely,” I answered, “we should distinguish between mere poetry and fact—between science and fancy. So long as we admit the unreality of merely fanciful creations and explanations of facts, we may be pleased with them; but let us not be misled by them into a belief of their scientific truth.”

“Ah, ’tis the old story! The little child has a bit of wood, which to her, in the free play of her imagination, is a person with good and bad qualities, who acts well or ill, whom she loves or despises. She whips it; she caresses it; she scolds it; she sends it to school or to bed; she forgives it and fondles it. All is real to the child; more real, perhaps, than to the nurse who stands beside her and laughs at her, and says, ‘How silly! come away! it is only a stick!’ Which is right? The Greeks were the child, and you are the nurse. What is truth, which is always on our lips—truth of history, truth of science, truth of any kind? Who knows—history? Two persons standing together see the same occurrence; is it the same to both? Far from it. The literal friend is amazed to hear what the imaginative friend saw. Yet both may be right in their report, only one saw what the other had no senses to perceive. We only see and feel according to our natures. What we are modifies what we see. Out of the camomile flower the physician makes a decoction, and the poet a song. History is but a dried herbarium of withered facts, unless the imagination interpret them. I cannot but smile at what is called history; and of all history, that of our own Roman world seems the strangest, because, perhaps, I know it best.”

“Ah!” I broke in, “how one wishes you had written us familiar memoirs of your time, and given us some intimate insight into your life, your thoughts, your daily doings. We have so to grope about in the dark for any knowledge of you. And then, in the history of art, what dreadful blanks! I do not feel assured, except from your ‘Meditations,’ as we call them, and your letters, that we really know anything accurately about you. About the Thundering Legion, for instance,—what is the truth?”

“There,” he answered, “is an instance of the ease with which a fable is made, and how a simple fact may be tortured into an untruth merely to suit a purpose. When I was on my campaign against the Quadi, in the year 174, the incident to which you refer happened. The spring had been cold and late, and suddenly the heats of summer overtook us in the enemy’s country. After a long and difficult march on a very hot day, we suddenly came upon the enemy, who, descending from the mountains, attacked us, overcome with fatigue, in the plains. The battle went against us for some time, for my army suffered so from thirst and heat and exhaustion that they were unable to repel the attack, and were forced back. While they were in full retreat and confusion, suddenly the sky became clouded over, and a drenching shower poured upon us. My men, who were dying of thirst, stopped fighting, took off their helmets and reversed their shields to catch the rain, and while they were thus engaged the enemy renewed their assault with double fury. All seemed lost, when suddenly, as sometimes occurs among the mountains, a fierce wind swept down with terrible peals of thunder and vivid flashes of lightning; the rain changed into hail, which was blown and driven with such a fury into the faces of the enemy that they were confounded and confused, and began in their turn to fall back. My own men, having the storm only on their backs, refreshed by the rain they had drunken from their shields and helmets, and cooled by their bath, now anew attacked, and, pouring upon their foe with fury, cut them to pieces. Among my soldiers at this time there was an old legion, organized in the time of Augustus, named the Fulminata, from the fact that they bore on their shields a thunderbolt; upon this simple fact was founded the story, repeated by many early writers in the Christian Church, that this legion was composed of Christians only, that the storm was a miraculous interposition of their God in answer to their prayer, and that they then received the name of Fulminata, in commemoration of this miracle. This is the simple truth of the case. My men said that Jupiter Pluvius came to their aid, and they sacrificed to him in gratitude; and on the column afterwards dedicated to me by the Senate in commemoration of my services, you will see the sculptured figure of Jupiter Pluvius, from whose beard, arms, and head the water is streaming to refresh my soldiers, while his thunderbolts are flashing against the barbarians.”

As he spoke these words, a flash of lightning, so intense as to blind the lamps, gleamed through the room, followed by a startling peal of thunder, which seemed to shake not only the house but the sky above us.

He smiled and said, “We should have said in older time that Jupiter affirmed the truth of my statement; but you are above such puerilities, I suppose.”

“Certainly I should not say it was a sign from Jupiter. The thunder was on the left, and that was considered by you a good omen, was it not?

“This thunder on the left was considered a good omen. But what was it you said after you asked the question? You seemed to be making a quotation in a strange tongue—at least a tongue I never heard.”

“That was Latin,” I answered, blushing a little, “and from Virgil—Virgilius, perhaps I ought to say, or perhaps Maro.”

“Ah! Latin, was it?” he said. “I beg your pardon; I thought it might have been a charm to avert the Evil Eye that you were uttering.”

“As difficult to understand as the Eleusinian mysteries,” I said. “And, by the way, what were the Eleusinian mysteries?”

“They were mysteries! I can merely say to you that they concealed under formal rites the worship of the spirit of nature, as symbolized in Demeter and Persephone and Dionysos. In their purest and hidden meaning, they represented the transformation, purification, and resurrection of humanity in a new form and in another existence. But I am not at liberty to say more than this. The outward rites were for the multitude, the inner meaning for the highest and most developed minds. Were it permitted to me to explain them to you, I think you would not take so low a view of our religious philosophy as you now seem to have. What you hear and read of was merely the outward and mystical drama, with its lustrations and fasting, and cakes of sesame and honey, and processions—as symbolical in its way as your mass and baptism, and having as pure a significance.

“But,” he continued, “to revert to the questions which we were previously discussing. It seems to me that in certain respects your faith is not even so satisfactory as ours; for its tendency is to degrade the present in view of the future, and to debase humanity in its own view. With us life was not considered disgraceful, nor man a mean and contemptible creature. We did not systematically humiliate ourselves and cringe before the divine powers, but strove to stand erect, and not to forget that we were made by God after his own image. We did not affect that false humility which in the view of the ancient philosophers was contemptible—nay, even we thought that the pride of humility was of all the most despicable. We sought to keep ourselves just, obedient to our best instincts, temperate and simple, looking upon life as a noble gift of the gods, to be used for noble purposes. We believed, beside this, that virtue should be practiced for itself, and not through any hope of reward or any fear of punishment here or hereafter. To act up to our highest idea of what was right was our principle, not out of terror or in the hope of conciliating God, but because it was right; and to look calmly on death, not as an evil, but as a step onward to another existence. To desire nothing too much; to hold one’s self equal to any fate; to keep one’s self in harmony with nature and with one’s own nature; calmly to endure what is inevitable, steadily to abstain from all that is wrong; to remember that there is no such thing as misfortune to the brave and wise, but only phantasms that falsely assume these shapes to shake the mind; that when what we wish does not happen, we should wish what does happen; that God hath given us courage, magnanimity, and fortitude, so that we may stand up against invasions of evil and bear misfortune,—such were our principles, and they enabled us to live heroic lives, vindicating the nobility of human nature, and not despising it as base and lost; believing in the justice of God and not in his caprice and enmity to any of us, and having no ignoble fear of the future.”

“But are not these principles for the most part ours?” I answered. “Do we not believe that virtue is the grand duty of man? Do none of us seek to live heroic lives, and sacrifice ourselves to do good to the world and to our brothers?”

“Certainly, you lead heroic lives; but your great principle is humility—your great motive, reward or fear. You profess to look on this life as mean and miserable, and on yourselves as creatures of the dust; and you declare that you have no claim to be saved from eternal damnation by leading a just life, but only by a capricious election hereafter. You profess that your God is a God of love, and you attribute to Him enmity and injustice of which you yourself would be ashamed. You think you are to be saved because Christ died on the cross for you, and you are not sure of it even then. But with us every one deserved to be tried on his own merits, and to expiate his own errors and crimes.”

“It is supposed by some that you were half a Christian yourself. Is this so?”

“If you mean that I reverenced the life and doctrines of Christ, and saw in Him a pure man, I certainly did. But in my principles I was a Stoic purely, and it is only as a philosopher that I admired the character of Christ. You think the principles He preached were new; they were really as old as the world, almost. His life was blameless, and He sacrificed his life for his principles; and for this I reverence Him, but no further. His followers, however, were far less pure and self-denying, and they sought power and endeavored to overthrow the state.”

“Was it for this you persecuted them?” I said.

“I did not persecute them,” he answered. “As Christians they were perfectly free in Rome. All religions were free, and all admitted. No one was interfered with merely for his religious belief and worship, whether it were that of Isis, of Mithras, of Jehovah, or of any other deity. It was only when the Christians endeavored to attain to power and provoke disturbance in the state, to abuse authority and set at defiance the laws, that it became necessary—or at all events was considered necessary—to stop them. When they were not content with worshiping according to their own creed, but aggressively denounced the popular worship as damnable, and sought to cast public contempt on all gods but their own, they outraged the public sense as much as if any one now should denounce Christ as a vagabond, and seek by abuse to overthrow your church by all sorts of blasphemous language. Nor would it matter in the least in your own time that any person so outraging decency should be absolutely honest in his intentions, and assured in his own mind of the truth of his own doctrines. Suppose one step further,—that any set of men should not only undertake to turn Christ into ridicule publicly, but should also abuse the government and conspire to overthrow the monarchy. You would then have a case similar to that of the Christians in my day. At all events, it was believed that it was a settled plan with them to overthrow the empire, and it was for this that they were, as you call it, persecuted. For my own part, I was sorry for it, deeming in such matters it was better to take no measures so severe; but I personally had nothing to do with it. It was the fanatical zeal of the government, who, acting without my commands, took advantage of ancient laws to punish the Christians; and this your own Tertullian will prove to you. They undoubtedly supposed that the Christians were endeavoring to create a political and social revolution,—that they were in fact Communists, as you would now call them, intent upon overthrowing the state. I confess that there was a good deal of color given to such a judgment by the conduct of the Christians. But as for myself, as I said, I was opposed to any movement against them, believing them all to be honest of purpose, though perhaps somewhat excited and fanatical.”

“Why did you think that they were Communists?” I asked. “Had you any sufficient grounds for such a belief?”

“Surely; the most ample grounds in the very teachings of Christ himself. His system was essentially communistic, and nothing else. His followers and disciples were all Communists; they all lived in common, had a common purse, and no one was allowed to own anything. They were ordered by Christ not to labor, but to live from day to day, and take no heed of the future, and lay up nothing, but to sell all they had, and live like the ravens. Christ himself denounced riches constantly—not the wrong use of riches, but the mere possession of them; and said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of heaven,—not a bad rich man, observe, but any rich man. So, too, his story of Lazarus and Dives turns on the same point. It does not appear that Lazarus was good, but only that he was poor; nor does it appear that Dives was bad, but only that he was rich; and when Dives in Hades prays for a drop of water, he is told that he had the good things in his lifetime, and Lazarus the evil things, and that therefore he is now tormented, and Lazarus is comforted.”

“But, surely,” I answered, “it was intended to mean that Dives had not used his riches properly?”

“Nothing is said of the kind, or even intimated; for all that appears, Dives may have been a good man, and Lazarus not. The only apparent virtue of Lazarus is, that he was a beggar; the only fault of Dives, that he was rich. Do you not remember, also, the rich young man who desired to become one of Christ’s followers, and asked what he should do to be saved? Christ told him that doing the commandments, and being virtuous and honest, was not enough; but that he must sell all that he had, and give it to the poor, and then he could follow Him, and not otherwise; and the rich good man was very sorrowful, and went away. What does all this mean but Communism? Yes; the system He would carry out was community of goods, and He would permit no one to have possessions of his own. This struck at the roots of all established law and rights of property, and naturally made his sect feared and hated among certain classes in Rome.”

“I am astonished,” I said, “to find that you have so carefully studied the records of the teachings and doctrines of Christ.”

“Is it not the duty of any man,” he answered, “especially of one in a responsible position, carefully to consider the arguments and doctrines of all who are sincere and earnest in their convictions, and, however averse they may be from our preconceived opinions, to weigh them, as far as possible, calmly, and without prejudice, and see what they really are and what truth there may be in them? and was not this peculiarly incumbent on me in the case of so noble and spiritual a teacher as Christ? Was it not my duty to endeavor, as far as in me lay, first to recognize the great principles of his teaching, and then in their light to examine and weigh his very words as far as they are authentically reported to us by his followers? It is this fixed notion, from which we cannot easily free ourselves, that we in our own views alone can be right, that shuts up the mind and encrusts our faith with superstitions. We at our best are merely men, subject to errors, short-sighted, fixed in prejudices, and seeing but a part of anything. No system of religion ever embraced all truth; no system is without gleams of it; all recognize a higher power above us and beyond our comprehension; and nothing is more unbecoming than to scorn what we have not even striven to understand, or to shut our ears and our minds to any doctrine or faith which is earnestly, seriously propounded and accepted by others. Unfortunately, it is this narrow-mindedness and arrogance of opinion which has always impeded the growth and development of truth. There is nothing so bitter as religious controversy,—nothing which has so petrified our intelligence or has begotten such crimes and such persecutions. Therefore it was that I deemed it my duty to study and endeavor to understand the doctrine and belief of all sincere minds, whether of those who worshiped Jehovah or Zeus, Mithras or Christ, and not to reject them as wicked or erroneous simply because they were averse from the faith in which I had been educated. Will you excuse me if I say that what amazes me in regard to the Christian faith is, that while it is claimed that Christ is God, and therefore to be implicitly obeyed in all his commands, so little intelligence is shown in studying those commands, and such willful perversion in avoiding them even when they are plainly enunciated; and again, that while claiming that love and forgiveness are the very corner-stone of your faith, you Christians none the less not only accept war and battle as arbitraments of right, but in the name of your great founder,—nay, of your very God,—have endeavored at times to enforce those doctrines by the most hideous of crimes, and by wholesale slaughter of those who differed from you in minor particulars of faith; and still more, do constantly even now exhibit such narrow-minded adherence to mere words and texts, without consideration of the great principles which underlie them and in the light of which surely they are to be interpreted. You are all Christians now, in Rome. You profess absolute faith in the teaching of Christ. You profess to consider his life as the great exemplar for all men. Do you follow it? Do you, for instance, think it in accordance with his teaching or his example to devote your lives selfishly to the laying up of riches for your own individual luxuries, to clothe yourselves in purple and fine linen, to make broad your phylacteries, or to use vain repetitions in your prayers as the heathen do, standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, and to play the part of Dives while Lazarus is starving at your gates? Are you any better than we heathens, as you call us, in all this? Do you think Christ would have done thus, or smiled approval on all you do in his name? Ah! you say, it would be impossible for us strictly to carry out this system of Christ. It is beautiful, but ideal, and for us, in the present state of the world, absolutely impracticable. But have you ever tried it? Have you ever even sought to try it, and to hold a common purse for the interest of all?”

I had to bow my head, and admit that in that high sense we are not Christians. “But,” I said, “to follow exactly all these commands, to carry out all these doctrines, even to imitate his example as set before us in his life, would be to revolutionize the world.”

“But does not the world need revolutionizing,” he said, “according to your own principles?”

“We do what we can, at least we endeavor to do so, as far as we are able.”

“Are you sure even of that?” he replied. “Are you sure it is not mammon that you really worship, and not Christ? But I will say no more. You are but mortal men as we were; and man is fallible and weak, and our knowledge is but half-knowledge at best, and our love and faith have but feeble wings to lift us above the earth on which we dwell. Look upon us, therefore, as you would be looked upon yourselves, and be not too stern on our shortcomings. We had our vices and faults and deficiencies as you have yours, but we had also our virtues, and were on the whole as high of purpose, as self-sacrificing, as pure even as you; but man neither then nor now has led an ideal life.

“But to return to what we were saying about our treatment of Christians. Let me add in my own justification that I for myself never had any hand in persecutions, either of Christians or of others, nor was I ever aware that they were persecuted. I knew that persons who happened to be Christians were punished for political offenses; and that was all, I think, that happened. Believe me, my soul was averse from all such things, nor would I ever allow even my enemies to be persecuted, much less those who merely differed from me on moral and philosophical theses. Nay, I may say they differed little from me even on these points, as you may well see if you read my letters on the subject of the proper treatment of one’s enemies, written to Lucius Verus, or if you will refer to that little diary of mine in Pannonia, wherein I was not so base as to lie to myself.”

“Indeed,” I cried; “that book is a precious record of the purest and highest morality.”

“’Tis a poor thing,” he answered, “but sincere. I strove to act up to my best principles; but life is difficult, and man is not wise, and our opinions are often incorrect. Still, I strove to act according to my nature; to do the things which were fit for me, and not to be diverted from them by fear of any blame; to keep the divine part in me tranquil and content; and to look upon death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure, as neither good nor evil in themselves, but only in the way in which we receive them. For fame I sought not; for what is fame but a smoke that vanishes, a river that runs dry, a lamp that soon is extinguished—a tale of a day, and scarcely even so much? Therefore, it benefits us not deeply to consider it, but to pass on through the little space assigned to us conformably to nature, and in content, and to leave it at last grateful for what we have received, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature which produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. So, also, it is our duty not to defile the divinity in our breast, but to follow it tranquilly and obediently as a god, saying nothing contrary to truth, and doing nothing contrary to justice. For our opinions are but running streams, flowing in various ways; but truth and justice are ever the same, and permanent, and our opinions break about them as the waves round a rock, while they stand firm forever. For every accident of life there is a corresponding virtue to exercise; and if we consult the divine within us, we know what it is. As we cannot avoid the inevitable, we should accept it without murmuring; for we cannot struggle against the gods without injuring ourselves. For the good we do to others, we have our immediate reward; for the evil that others do to us, if we cease to think of it, there is no evil to us. It is by accepting an offense, and entertaining it in our thoughts, that we increase it, and render ourselves unhappy, and veil our reason, and disturb our senses. As for our life, it should be given to proper objects, or it will not be decent in itself; for a man is the same in quality as the object that engages his thoughts. Our whole nature takes the color of our thoughts and actions. We should also be careful to keep ourselves from rash and premature judgments about men and things; for often a seeming wrong done to us is a wrong only through our misapprehension, and arising from our fault. And so, making life as honest as possible and calmly doing our duty in the present, as the hour and the act require, and not too curiously considering the future beyond us, standing ever erect, and believing that the gods are just, we may make our passage through this life no dishonor to the Power that placed us here. Throughout the early portion of my life, my father, Antoninus Pius,—I call him my father, for he was ever dear to me, and was like a father,—taught me to be laborious and assiduous, to be serene and just, to be sober and kind, to be brave and without envy or vanity; and on his death-bed, when he felt the shadow coming over him, he ordered the captain of the guard to transfer to me the golden statuette of Fortune, and gave him his last watchword of ‘Equanimity.’ From that day to the day when, in my turn, I left the cares of empire and of life, I ever kept that watchword in my heart—equanimity; nor do I know a better one for any man.”

“Oh, tell me, for you know,” I cried, “what is there behind this dark veil which we call death? You have told me of your opinions and thoughts and principles of life, here; but of that life hereafter you have not said a word. What is it?”

There was a blank silence. I looked up—the chair was empty! That noble figure was no longer there.

“Fool that I was!” I cried; “why did I discuss with him these narrow questions belonging to life and history, and leave that stupendous question unasked which torments us all, and of which he could have given the solution?” I rose from my chair, and after walking up and down the room several minutes, with the influence of him who had left me still filling my being as a refined and delicate odor, I went to the window, pushed wide the curtains, and looked out upon the night. The clouds were broken, and through a rift of deep, intense blue, the moon was looking out on the earth. Far away, the heavy and ragged storm was hovering over the mountains, sullen and black, and I recalled the words of St. Paul to the Romans:—

“When the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves;” and “the doers of the law shall be justified.”