Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/91

86 Accordingly we find (and it is another proof of the connecting link which we think we have distinctly traced between the work of Philostratus and the progress of religions thought in the third century) that the same need of an incarnation of truth and holiness in a human life, and the same realisation of the power with which such an incarnation would imbue a religious ideal, are evidenced in the minds of the illustrious Pagans of Alexandria and of the favourite of the Empress Julia. This has been admirably noticed by Dr. Baur. The time was sure to come in the West as it had come many centuries before in the extreme East, with which Philostratus pretended to be familiar, when the old natural religion would struggle to become more moral. How was it that a transformation was taking place which was so completely opposed to its fundamental principle? It was evidently being effected through those liberating and healing gods, Apollo, Æsculapius, and Hercules, all of them sun-gods. Apollo, more especially in Pagan Greece, was the god of moral as well as of physical purification. The