Julian had been thoroughly instructed in Christianity. He had been nominally a Christian. He had deliberately apostatized from the faith, with the determination to reinstate paganism. He consecrated all the resources of his brilliant mind to invest paganism with some of the intellectual grace and dignity of Christianity. To rescue paganism from the contempt into which it had fallen, he endeavored to introduce into the idol worship some of the moral elements which he hadpurloined from the teachings of Jesus. In one of the attacks of this envenomed foe upon Christianity, he unwittingly uttered the noblest eulogy upon the early Christians.
“As children,” he wrote, “are coaxed with cake, so have these Christians enticed the poor to join them by kindness. Strangers they have secured by hospitality. By affecting brotherly love, great moral purity, and honoring their dead, they have won the multitude.”
This is a beautiful tribute to the character of the early disciples of our Saviour from the pen of a foe. Julian gave the idolatrous priests the excellent advice, to endeavor to win the people back to the pagan shrines by the same measures. He distributed large sums of money among the priests to aid them in their work. In his earnest appeal to them, he says that the pagan poor obtained no assistance from their own people; while the Christians support all of their own poor, and assist also many of those who worship the gods.
The idols were reinstated, with great ceremonial pomp, in temples from which they had disappeared. The unstable populace, ever swinging to and fro, and naturally inclined to a religion which demanded no holiness either of heart or life, drifted over in large numbers to the pagan party. In one of Julian’s appeals in behalf of the gods, he wrote,—
“I am a worshipper of the God of Abraham, who is a great and mighty God. You Christians do not follow Abraham: you erect no altars to his God, neither do you worship him as Abraham did with sacrifices.”
Julian was perfectly willing to place the statue of Jehovah, as one of the gods, by the side of Jupiter and Bacchus and Diana and Venus. In his zeal against Christianity, he endeavored to revive ancient Judaism. He had invited the Jews to co-operate with him in his unavailing attempt to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. He even stooped to ignoble trickery, that he might put a moral compulsion upon the Christians to do homage to the idols.
The emperor’s statue stood in all public places. It was customary for every one, in passing, to bow to it as to the emperor.Julian placed by the side of his statue, in closest proximity, several statues of the gods. Thus no one could respectfully bow the head to the image of the emperor without apparently doing homage to the idols. Not to bow to the statue of the emperor was a penal offence. Thus, and in many other ways too numerous to mention, Julian the apostate endeavored to reinstate paganism.
But all the artifice and imperial power of Julian could not restore a religion which had no elevated doctrines of theology, no ennobling principles of morality, which presented no lofty motives of action, and which unfolded no realms of a glorious immortality beyond the grave.
It is a necessity of man’s nature that Christianity should finally triumph; for the religion of Jesus alone meets and satisfies the deepest yearnings of the human soul: it inspires to purity of life and to noble deeds as nothing else conceivable can inspire; it irradiates the realms beyond the grave with light and love and eternal joy; it is indeed good news,—glad tidings to all people.
Many attempts have been made to build up Christian virtues without Christian principles. All such efforts have failed. Human passion is so strong in its bias to sin, that it can be restrained by no power less potent than the gospel of Jesus Christ. The doctrine of the cross, though to the Jew a stumbling-block and to the Greek foolishness, is, to them that are saved, the wisdom of God and the power of God.