form of lunacy would only have alienated the very people he was striving so hard to win. It was in the method he failed, not in the conception, for monotheism was continually gaining ground; Paganism was obviously falling asleep quite gently; Isis was giving way to Mary, apotheosis to canonisation, and saints succeeding divinities. Antonine, with the true Eastern conception of religion, strove to impress men with his vivid monotheism by means of the magnificence of the worship, the prodigal expenditure of a gorgeous pageant. This he gave the world right royally, but it was precisely this that the austere Roman could not understand was mean to be connected with the simple philosophy of his Western religion. Antonine thought to make his God great by means of a pompous show. He succeeded in presenting him as a low comedian in the last act of a puerile melodrama; unfortunately not the first, or last, deity who has been thus presented before the eyes of an astonished world.
It had long been a Roman custom to commemorate the greatest of her victories by the erection of gigantic columns in the forums of the city; Antonine proposed to build the most magnificent that had yet greeted human eyes. It was to be a memorial to the triumph of the Lord over the deities of chance and circumstance. Its summit, which he designed should be reached by a stairway inside, was to support the great meteorite. Death intervened to spoil the plan and to deprive Rome of a monument surpassing in grandeur any that the
