Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/102

Rh Christianity the honour of studying its doctrines with any degree of serious attention. What a light these strivings after a Pagan reform in the third century throw upon the great effort made by Julian in the fourth! It should be noticed here that this romantic Caesar only revived the schemes of Julia Domna, Philostratus, and the Alexandrians with a little more show of ill-will to Christianity—that is to say, that he tried to introduce some of the Christian vitality into the dried-up veins of the old corpse he wished to revive, and once more it was the sun, the venerable Helios, that was presented as a symbol and as a reality to the worshipful homage of the civilised world.

How paltry the results when compared with the vastness of the undertaking! What would have been the fate of our Western world if Christianity had not baptised it with a new spirit and animated it with a new life? Let us ask ourselves the question, and I think we can solve it without presumption by the following alternative: either the condition of barbarism would have been irremediable