suffered from an agonising disease; his wife had besought him that she might see with her own eyes the frightful ulcers that were its seat, saying that no physician would tell him so faithfully as she whether there was any hope of cure. She saw, and despaired; then she gave him her counsel—to die—and said that she would die with him; she bound him to her side, and they sprang together into the lake. The hopeless anguish of that incurable sufferer was but a type of the despair which preyed on many a Roman from whom bodily health could not avert the sickness of the spirit, whom riches could not reconcile to an existence without worthy objects of ambition, whom studious leisure could not compensate for the loss of political energy, or poetry console for the extinction of faith; the true companion who told him the worst, and, as she had helped him to bear his pain, so now exhorted him to end it with a constant mind, was the Stoic philosophy—not deserting him even on the brink of the dark lake, but nerving him with a resolution which was not his own, and yet which was not divine, to spring into the unknown depths.
Against such men, and such were the representatives of the highest moral fortitude that remained to Roman paganism, Christianity came in the strength of an enthusiastic hope, fearing death as little as the Roman feared it, but, unlike the Roman, not afraid to live. And then at last an hour arrived when the new religion was received as an indwelling spirit into the mighty fabric of the Empire, when the kingdom
