are neither of them mentioned by name in the work.
One thing which is undeniably certain is that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were equally mistaken when they pronounced the work of Philostratus to be decidedly and essentially hostile to Christianity. It contains no evidences either of indifference or hostility to Christianity, but rather of jealousy. It is inspired by a desire to turn the advantages and the superiority possessed by Christianity over ordinary Paganism to the profit of a reformed Paganism, and if we consider the following words of the Bishop of Avranches, "Ne quid ethnici Christianis invidere possent" (that the Pagans may have no cause to envy the Christians in anything), apart from the stronger expressions of feeling which accompany them in the passage already quoted, they will be found to express the exact truth. To have indicated with such nicety the true nature of the book and its many varying and changeful shades is one more proof of that character for learning to which Professor Baur of Tubingen is so
