Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/189

Rh he has classed them with "atheists and Epicureans;" but this is only so far as to show that they were all equally incredulous of the pretended miracles of that impostor.

Of the new Kingdom which had risen Lucian had in fact no conception. What opportunities he may have had, or may have missed, of making acquaintance with it, we cannot tell. Its silent growth seems to have been little noted by him. The contempt for death and indifference to riches professed by this new sect would seem to him only echoes of what he had long heard from the lips of those Stoic and Cynic pretenders whom he had made it his special business to unmask; the vagrant preachers of this new faith, supported by contributions, were confounded by him with the half-mendicant professors of philosophy whom he had known too well. He did not care enough about the Christians to hate them much. Their refusal to sacrifice to the national idols—the great testing-point of their martyrs under the reigning emperors—could have been no great crime in the eyes of the author of the "Dialogues of the Gods." Fanaticism in that direction was no worse than fanaticism in the other. His chief attention seems to have been concentrated on that remarkable revival of paganism which began under Hadrian and the Antonines, against which he protests with all the force of a keen intellect and a biting wit. But, far from being the enemy of Christianity, he was, however unintentionally