circle. A writer of great seriousness and depth could doubtless have given us a better insight into the measure of good or evil which was to be found in one or another part of that vast field. But Lucian's keen intelligence, with its wide outlook, sheds a vivid light on the general situation. The broad fact which Lucian brings out is that the pagan world, in the latter half of the second century, contained no central and commanding force, religious, intellectual, or moral. Such forces as existed were moribund, mutually conflicting, and either wholly ineffectual, or effective only within small areas. Christianity, now about to exchange the aloofness of the primitive Church for a more active position in the Roman world, had yet to undergo a struggle with the State. But, though pagan festivals could still delight the populace, and though philosophic or mystic sects could still claim ardent disciples, Christianity had no longer a rival in its power to quicken the spiritual life of men, to satisfy their higher aspirations, to give life a zest which would have been incomprehensible to the Epicurean, to inspire a fortitude in the presence of suffering and death which transcended the teaching of the Porch, to concentrate unselfish energies on noble aims, and to sustain them by an ideal loftier than any which had been presented to the ancient world by religion, by patriotism, or by speculative thought.
