Note 5 — INTRODUCTION.

I may, perhaps, be excused for quoting at this point an extract from a review of Negri’s Julian the Apostate, in which I tried to summarise the reasons of Julian’s hatred of Christianity: “Firstly, he was unmoved by the merits of the Christian ethic, even where it coincided with his own, because he saw it so flagrantly ignored by the corrupt Christianity of his day. A puritan in the purple, he was morally too Christian to be a Christian of the fourth-century Church. Secondly, he hated the pessimism of Christianity—that very throwing-forward of its hopes to the life beyond the grave which so eminently fitted it to a period of social catastrophe and dissolution. He found its heaven and hell vulgar and contemptible, and regarded the average Christian as a sort of spiritual brandy-tippler, who rejected, for a crude stimulant and anodyne, the delicate lemonade of Neo-Platonic polytheism. Thirdly, he resented what he called the ‘atheism’ of Christianity, its elimination of the divine from Nature, leaving it inanimate and chilly. Fourthly, like the earlier Emperors, he deemed Christianity anti-social, and the Christian potentially and probably, if not actually, a bad citizen of the Empire. Fifthly, he hated the aggressive intolerance of Christianity, its inability to live and let live, its polemical paroxysms, and iconoclastic frenzies.... These were the main elements in his anti-Christianity; and yet they are not, taken together, quite sufficient to account for the measureless scorn with which he invariably speaks of ‘Galileans.’ One cannot but feel that Christianity must have done him some personal injury, not clearly known to us. Was he simply humiliated by the hypocrisy he had had to practise in his boyhood and youth? Or was Ibsen right in divining some painful mystery behind his certainly unsatisfactory relations with his Christian consort, Helena?”