One had attracted notice or incurred reproof from his elders for omitting to salute the Lares on his goings-out and comings-in. He had for some time absented himself from the temples on holidays, and had not bowed his head when the statue of Jupiter or Isis was borne in procession through the streets. From Fraser's Magazine. his allegiance to the eagles; or at the præTHE OCTAVIUS OF MINUCIUS FELIX.* tor's tribunal, when some hardy convert reWE are grateful to Mr. Holden for this new jected the oath to the Genius of Cæsar. But edition of the Octavius of Minucius Felix. amid friends and in the home-circle, where To a carefully revised text, improved by con- the new creed, as its author had foretold, sultation of the best manuscripts, he has ap- had sown division of hearts, more temperate and among kinsfolk pended a learned introduction and compendi- discussions would occur; ous scholarly notes, which really elucidate and acquaintance who really esteemed one the author without vexing the reader by theo- another, may have been conducted and conlogical crudities or prejudices. And this is cluded with as little acrimony as the dispute no mean recommendation in an age when in this elegant Dialogue of Minucius. we will suppose an patristic literature is so often employed as a member of the familyweapon of offence in religious frays. Minu- imaginary case cius Felix was, on many accounts, worth the pains of a new edition. If not one of the most powerful or original of the Christian apologists, he is one of the most pleasant to read. More compact and graceful than the treatise of Arnolius, Adversus Gentes, less rhetorical and tedious than the Institutes of His singularity had been reLactantius, his Octavius sets before us the marked by the Flamen, and talked about at the general points of the Christian controversy prætor's table. Marcus, it was whispered, with Paganism in a fair and lucid form. had become a denier of the gods; had even Minucius, indeed, is no Boanerges like Ter- gone frequently of late to a Jews' chapel on tullian, yet he is an abler defender of the the river's side, and had been seen standing cause which he advocates than was the soph-up to his waist in the water, while the Jewist Libanius, or his imperial pupil Julian, ish priest muttered over him some unintelligiof their decrepit Paganism. The heathen ble words. Marcus, too, was ever and anon Caecilius might perhaps make a better fight repeating to himself a kind of charm-car- but so far as the words of the charm for his Olympian friends, and the Christian men Octavius might hit straighter blows. Celsus had any discoverable meaning, they referred neither resembled and Origen, Faustus and Agustine, Jerome, to neither love nor war, and Rufinus, handled their swords less like any of the hymns which were sung in the dancers. Yet Octavius and Cæcilius quarrel, temples at the calends, the ides, or the spring Nay, more, Marcus on the whole, with earnestness; and their and autumn festivals. controversy, as recorded in this Dialogue, seemed to have taken to evil courses; for he may be taken as a fair sample of the discus- had been traced to an obscure house in the sions between the old law and the new which suburbs, where, in an upper chamber, some must often have occurred under the porticoes of the rabble were wont to assemble after of a Roman villa, or in the studious retire-sunset- - for what purpose no respectable ment of Athens. The burden and heat of person could say; they could only surmise it the strife were borne in other scenes in the was for no good one, since the doors of the market-place, when some zealous neophyte chambers were opened only at a certain passdenounced the procession of the Salian priests word. With Marcus, accordingly, it had on the Martian calends; in the fore-court of become high time to talk seriously, for the the temples, when some stern enthusiast re- credit of the family. Prying eyes were fused to throw incense upon the altar of Ju- around them; the priest of Jupiter had even piter; in the theatre, when some outraged condescended to speak with the priest of Isis moralist raised his voice against the pollution on the subject, and the prefect of the nightof the games of Flora; in the camp, when watch. the præfectus vigilum—had threatsome scarred and grizzled centurion abjured ened to bring the case, on the next Nundines, before the sitting ædile. Yet, when Marcus The Octavius of Minucius Felix; with an English Introduction, Commentary, Indices, and was questioned or reproved, his defence of Analysis. By the Rev. H. A. Holden, M. A., Fellow of Trinity College. Edited for the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. London : John W. Parker and Son, West Strand. 1853. these proceedings made matters ten times worse in the eyes of all right-thinking men. He not only neglected, but defied Jupiter. He maintained his statue to be a block of metropolis for the quiet shore and marine stone, his altar an abomination, his flamen baths of Ostia. Minucius dwells upon the an impostor, his worshippers dupes, and his freshness of the morning, and the gentle ospretensions to prayers and frankincense as culations of the sea and the sand, and the hollow as the pedestal which supported him, delight of leisure and congenial companyhis eagle, and thunderbolts. Marcus averred" the feast of reason and the flow of soul.” that, for his part, he adored a mysterious, He had earned his relish for these sterling and sublime, and beneficent Being, who had pleasures by assiduous attendance in the neither statue, nor altar, nor pompous tem- courts of law during a July spent in Rome. ple, but who had proved his divine authority But lawyers, even in vacations, are an arguby tokens more astounding than even the mentative race. Sir Matthew Hale used to mysteries or the oracles, and who had given "put cases" to his children in their country to mankind a written record of himself, older walks; Lord Keeper North would read the than the Night and Chaos of the Boeotian" Reports" in an arbor opening on his minstrel, Hesion. And with such power, and bowling-green; and Lord Eldon is said to withal such gentleness, did Marcus explain his have drawn a case of trespass - in re Dougnovel doctrines, that before long the priest of las versus Northumberland — upon the eviJupiter suffered further losses in his congre- dence afforded by "Chevy-Chase." So long gation. The household of Marcus came no as Minucius and his learned friends converse more to the temple. about things in general, "all goes merry as The Dialogue of Minucius represents one a marriage-bell." But a controversy soon of these milder forms of conversion to Chris- springs up. It seems that upon that tianity. Its plot is simple; its dramatis per- Ostian shore was erected a temple, or at sonæ are three only in number-Minucius least a statue of Serapis, who, after his mihimself, the Christian Octavius, and the hea-gration from the kingdom of Pontus to Alexthen Cæcilius; the arguments are drawn from the surface of the conflicting creeds, and the language in which they are canvassed would have won an approving smile from Cicero, as a well-intended copy of his own philosophical dialogues. The form and accessories of the Octavius are remarkably graceful. From Plato the ancient writers of imaginary conversations learned the art of prefixing to phil-in his chapel. But whatever his business may osophical discussions a pictorial proscenium have been, there and then Serapis was; and Cæof woodland, and running waters, and cool cilius paid his compliments, in passing, to the green valleys yielding prospect of "towered Pontic deity by kissing the tips of his own fincities." In the Octavius, the beach of Ostia, gers. This harmless mark of respect — upon a and the "blue Mediterranean," whispering par with Madame de Sevigné's going to mass among the shingle, and the distant hum of par polittesse― stirs, however, the bile of the the port of Rome, and the measured chant Christian Octavius, and he forthwith reproves of fishermen pushing off their boats, and the Minucius for allowing his friend to continue laughter of children skimming smooth peb- in such heathen ignorance. The rebuke, albles on the surface of the waves- we have though uttered half-aside, reaches the ears played at "duck and drake" ourselves, to and wounds the pride of Cæcilius. He turns our great contentment are the pictorial ad- sulky for a few minutes, and, "after short juncts of the scene. It is the autumn of a silence," challenges Octavius to maintain his year-early, Mr. Holden thinks, in the incivility by a formal argument in defence of reign of the good Alexander Severus, the his new-fangled creed. Cæcilius and Octacosmopolite emperor who placed statuettes of vius respectively plead the cause of the deAbraham and of Jesus in his cabinet- and clining and the ascendant faith. Minucius throughout Campania, and on the sunny acts as 'judicious bottle-holder" to the slopes of the Falernian hills the in-gathering combatants, and the Pagan champion, as was of the grapes is proceeding busily. At this preordained by the author of the dialogue, season three Roman gentlemen of the bar" gives in" at last, and politely thanks the leave the smoke and noise and pomp of the instrument of his conversion. andria, in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus, had moved further westward, and had become a fashionable deity in the Italian peninsula. We do not know whether he had supplanted Neptune, or whether the Italian mariners saluted him on leaving and returning to port, or whether those who had escaped the sirocco were wont to suspend votive tablets We shall not recapitulate their arguments; | practicable breaches in the strongest forts of they are drawn from the common stock of philosophy. the Christian apologists, and many of them Most fair indeed, in the eyes of contempohad long before been stored in the quivers of raries, was the aspect of Paganism during the philosophical schools. Plato and Epi- the first two centuries of the Roman empire. curus and Lucian barbed some of the keen- War, at least upon the scale of the unceasest shafts for the Christian archers. More- ing and absorbing wars of the Commonover, the dialogue itself is short and agree-wealth, had died down. The frontiers of the able to read, and Mr. Holden's commentary Rhine and the Euphrates, indeed, bristled will increase the pleasure as well as the profit with the summer and winter camps of the of perusing it. We shall rather attempt to legions, and the Parthians and Germans ocdirect the reader's attention for a few min-casionally swept off the harvests and wheeled utes to the controversy itself, and to some of around the fortresses of the northern and the social and ethical phenomena appertaining the eastern provinces. But these calamities to it. touched upon the verge only of the Roman The struggle between Paganism and Chris- world. Within its ample circumference the tianity, even if surveyed in its intellectual Pax Romana abode securely. The capiaspect alone, is one of absorbing interest. tals of ancient kingdoms, which the consuls As respects its general form, there can scarce- had laid in ashes, were restored by the emly be imagined a more striking contrast than perors to their original grandeur and beauty; that between the rude vigor of the earlier the rude villages and towns of Gaul and Christian manifestoes, and the polished art Iberia were replaced by stately and flourishand erudition of the philosophical treatises ing cities; and if Greece and Asia Minor of Cicero and Seneca. Unfortunately, we were somewhat shorn of their early splenpossess scarcely any means of nearer comparison, since the bigotry of their opponents has left fragments only of the Pagan apologists, as they chanced to be accidentally imbedded in the writings of their foes. As respects their subject-matter, there can hardly be a more marked distinction than that between the impulsive earnestness of Paul of Tarsus, Ignatius, or Justin Martyr, and the dexterous gladiatorial fencing of the later heathen moralists. The former write as with authority," and seldom regard the laws of logical combat; the latter build up their arguments with the polished and plausible eloquence of men who are making the best of their case, without being vitally convinced the slumber of approaching dissolution. The of its truth. With the one it is a matter of only living principle throughout its inert mass life or death spiritually; with the other, a was Christianity, and that was directly stake of skill and reputation intellectually. hostile to the perpetuity of Rome. It was The one fight like men leading a forlorn hope; hostile to the Caesars, because they assumed the other, like men who are maintaining their in life and in death the honors due to Christ ground in a fortress planned by Vauban, and alone; it was hostile to the established religimpregnable while assailed only by the ordi- ion as "the doctrine of devils ;" to philosnary rules of war. Until the fields of Mor-ophy as a tissue of errors, if not of fraud; garten and Nancy had proved the contrary, to literature, as the sounding brass or the no one dreamed that the chivalry of Bur- tinkling cymbals of pride or impurity; to gundy would bend as reeds before the pike- the arts and recreations of society, as the men of Soleure and Lucerne; and in the sec- garnish of idolatry or the ministers of sensuond century, it seemed as incredible that the ality; to the general tenor of ethnic manners assertions of a few Galilean peasants, even and morals, as inconsistent with the precepts when backed by a pupil of Gamaliel, would of their lawgiver. It is not, indeed, easy shiver the dialectics of centuries, and make for us, whose social system presumes, even dor, western Europe was brought within the pale of Hellenic civilization. Rome, indeed, for the most part, made large compensations to the world for the independence it suppressed, and for the sufferings which it had inflicted. In its material aspects the evening of Pagandom was calm and even august; and to the superficial observer its moral surface presented no signal tokens of decrepitude and decay. Yet the perpetuity which its poets, orators, and panegyrists promised to Rome -and promised probably without insincerity or misgivings-rested on a hollow basis. Its great mutations had been acted. Its serenity was where it does not exhibit the influence of ing them such copartners in their incense the Gospel, to realize the feeling with which a Christian of the second century contemplated the world around him. The features of Paganism, which we, standing apart from them, regard with interest, were to him foul and hideous deformities. We painfully unroll the rolls of papyrus, and preserve in museums the storied urns and mutilated busts; he would have flung the Eneid back into the flames, to which its author on his death-bed had recommended it, and would have shattered the Apollo, even as Josiah purged the valley of Hinnom from the abominations of the Zidonians. As difficult is it to represent to ourselves the surprise and indignation with which even conscientious heathens of the same period regarded their Christian neighbors. From mere humanity, or sentiments of neighborhood and friendship, they would not join in the cry of the multitude, Christianos ad leones; yet they might fairly think that such perverse offenders against law and custom were legitimate objects for coercion by the magistrate. Now and then we read in our police-reports of some crack-brained fanatic's dashing to pieces the storied window of a cathedral, or scoring with his knife a picture of the Trinity, and thinking that he is doing the Lord's work by so much wilful damage. But such outrages, which among ourselves may not happen once a year, were of ordinary occurrence in the earlier ages of Christianity, and were not perpetrated by fanatics only. Yet they were not the less inexplicable to heathen observers because they might be frequent. They would infer from the conduct and conversation of such neighbors and there have been many inferences less just -a rooted malignity, or at least a most incomprehensible perverseness of nature. "What,' they may be supposed to have said, "would these people have? The state-machine moves smoothly; the taxes might be lighter, yet, at all events, they are no longer jobbed,' by companies or individual publicani, but collected regularly by Caesar's procurators. The conscription no longer decimates the people, for there are no wars, and the soldier is as likely to die in his bed as by a Parthian arrow. It were better if the poor were employed; meanwhile they are fed by the government; and if the theatre does not conduce to good morals, it is not worse than it was a hundred years ago, when none found fault with it. As for our religion, it sufficed our ancestors, and they were wise, and honest, and brave men; and he whom the oracle pronounced the wisest among them, especially enjoined his hearers to respect the creed and rituals of the state. In worshipping the Cæsars we indeed sometimes pay but a scurvy compliment to the gods by giv and oblations. Yet, even in this matter, we are hardly innovators; for did not the old Romans make a god of Romulus? and the Egyptians, whom in their obstinacy these Galileans much resemble, deified their Pharaohs and Ptolemies. As for our householdlife, it is not more lax than was that of Carthage, Athens, or Syracuse, while our literature is at least as decorous as it was in the time of Ovid or Martial. And yet, forsooth, these peevish puritans would persuade us that the world is coming to an end through the transcendent wickedness of this our generation. They would fain mend all things according to their own fancies, and their mending would be some such work as that of drunken Flaccus the tailor, who yesterday, putting a new border to my prætexta, rent the whole gown from top to bottom. A murrain on him and them! They would displace the Caesars, throw down the statues of the gods, shut up the theatres, stop processions on the calends, and even put out the lamp on Vesta's altar, because they have picked up notions from the Jews' books that such observances are displeasing to the gods. Nay, these pestilent meddlers are not even content with vilifying our rites and opinions; but claim our homage for a Galilean peasant whom one of our procurators put to death more than a century and a half ago. Our divinities, they allege, are evil demons in human shape; or if, as Euhemerus supposed them to be, once mere men, they were men of the worst character, who for their crimes merited a carnifex, rather than a pontifex, to wait upon them. Now, neither my friend Sossius Senecio, the philosopher, nor my good neighbor and kinsman Lucius, the ædile of the markets, a worthy common-place person enough, yet no fool, believes that Jupiter really bestrides a ridge of Olympus, or wears such ambrosial curls as Homer and Pheidias ascribe to him. Yet neither of them scruples flinging a few grains of incense upon his altar, or occasionally buying a kid heifer for his Flamen to kill and eat. For so did our fathers five hundred years back; and the gods prospered the work of their hands, and gave them wit and valor enough to win this empire which we now possess in security, and might with comfort, were it not for these cavillers of yesterday. It was a good deed of the old emperor Tiberius, to pack four thousand of them off at once to Sardinia, where the marsh fever gave them something to grumble for." We have endeavored to exhibit in a somewhat dramatic form the opposite views which a Christian and heathen respectively would take of the moral and social world in the age of Alexander Severus, and about the time when Minucius probably composed his dia logue of Octavius. To our fancied interlocu-proaches; for subsequently the king of diators we have ascribed the opinions which monds has been trimmed and polished, and Minucius and the Christian apologists in has come forth from this process "much imgeneral attribute to their opponents, or adopt proved." Now, to the metaphysicians of for themselves. We now proceed to examine the third century of the Christian era, phiother features of this memorable contest be-losophy was somewhat in the circumstances tween "old things and new. of the Koh-i-Noor. It was not shapely "Ac To every earnest mind the contemplation enough; it was not luminous enough; it of an outworn and decaying system of belief was flawed; it needed "soap and water;" is unutterably painful. Man, individually, it must be ground into fair and marketable remains much the same under any system of proportions. The Koh-i-Noor, we are inbelief. His youth is actuated by similar formed, has gained, by the lithotrical treatpassions; his manhood affected by similar ob- ment to which it has been subjected, greatly jects of desire; and his old age consoled or in splendor, and lost next to nothing in size. embittered with similar retrospects and re- Philosophy did not fare so well from the laxations of activity. But, in an age of so- raspings to which it was subjected. cial and moral decrepitude, the passions of commodate is a good word," but accommoyouth are more feebly controlled by law and dation of principles leads to much bungling by opinion; the aspirations of manhood work in philosophy, and does not succeed at have fewer definite aims; and the retrospects all better in religion. By its syncretic regiof age are less fraught with satisfactions de- men philosophy was attenuated more than it rived from the past. It is too late for great was refined; it was made to sparkle in senthoughts or great deeds; for the one there tentious epigrams rather than to emit a is no longer a proper centre for the other, steady brilliance. It had even degenerated no possible career. In the decline of Pagan- in form. No species of composition, except ism, and before Christianity had infused new the pure drama itself, is so dramatic as Plato's vigor into the principles of action, so much of dialogues. We become as anxious for the life as was not absorbed by sensual or selfish denouement of the dialectic plot as for the cares, must have been tinged with sadness - solution of the tragic or comic fable. The with the sadness which ever attends upon interlocutors are as proper personages as uncertainty. That it was so tinged, we Agamemnon and Antigone, and Socrates is may discern in the subdued tone of the later as amusing a character as the Demus or the ethical writers, in the good-natured Plu- sausage-seller themselves. But if we except tarch, in the sterner mood of Epictetus, and a few of Lucian's dialogues, we must convict even in the sarcastic humor of Lucian-who, in the mass the ethical dissertations of the by the way, is much misrepresented, when, later Greek and Roman philosophers for their on the ground of a few, and not the best of dulness and defect of dialectic power. The his writings, he is described as a mere scoffer. inferiority arose from the want of vital interThe philosophy which at the time Minucius est in any great philosophical truth. The was writing arrayed itself against Christian- great problems of psychology had all been ity, was both in its form and purpose syncre- mooted without being solved; the great exthat is, it aimed at a species of notion- periments in law and politics had all been al optimism, and attempted to harmonize all made, and had ended in despotism. Religion previous systems, and to extract from cach, had long been regarded as a conventional however discordant or however irreconcila- imposture, at which the very priests smiled ble, their joint or several stock of truth. in the streets, and which the magistrate had But, unluckily for this and all subsequent almost ceased to view as a useful auxiliary to and similar attempts, there is such a thing the police. It was to little purpose that the as over-truth, or truism; and truisms, or four leading philosophic sects were beginning general maxims which nobody questions and to abandon, in the presence of their common which nobody acts upon, were the unavoida- foe, their separative tenets, and to merge ble results of this syncretic process of filtra- their discrepancies in a superficial uniformition. ty. The life which had forsaken the parts could not be transferred into the whole. organic union a new centre and principle of psychological truth was requisite. tic Let us take a familiar illustration. In the realm of diamonds the Koh-i-Noor is the acknowledged king. Yet, of the many thousand spectators of this prince of gems who peered into his tabernacle of glass in 1851, few went away contented with his adamantine majesty. His form is clumsy,' said one party; "his lustre is feeble," said another; a third discovered specks on his surface; a fourth suggested "soap and water." There was ground, it seems, for these re For These were found in an unexpected quarter-in a suburb which philosophy had long regarded with as much disdain as the burghers of Warsaw and the Hanse Towns felt for the Jews' quarter in their cities. "Can any good thing come out from Galilee?" was once again superciliously asked, when the first obscure apologists presented to Trajan |