met his views.

He, who, at the Museum, was counted among the skeptics, liked biblical
sentences, such as "All is vanity," and "We know but in part." The
command to love your neighbor, to seek peace, to thirst after truth, the
injunction to judge the tree by its fruit, and to fear more for the soul
than the body, were quite to his mind.

He was so rich that the gifts of the visitors to the temple, which his
predecessors had insisted on, were of no importance to him. Thus he
mingled a great deal that was Christian with the faith of which he was
chief minister and guardian. Only the conviction with which men like
Clemens and Origen, who were friends of his wife, declared that the
doctrine to which they adhered was the only right one--was, in fact, the
truth itself--seemed to the skeptic "foolishness."

His wife's friends had converted his brother Zeno to Christianity; but
he had no need to fear lest Euryale should follow them. She loved him
too much, and was too quiet and sensible, to be baptized, and thus
expose him, the heathen high-priest, to the danger of being deprived of
the power which she knew to be necessary to his happiness.

Every Alexandrian was free to belong to any other than the heathen
creeds, and no one had taken offence at his skeptical writings. When
Euryale acted like the best of the Christian women, he could not take
it amiss; and he would have scorned to blame her preference for the
teaching of the crucified God.

As to Caesar's character he had not yet made up his mind.

He had expected to find him a half-crazy villain, and his rage after
he had heard the epigram against himself, left with the rope, had
strengthened the chief priest's opinion. But since then he had heard of
much that was good in him; and Timotheus felt sure that his judgment
was unbiased by the high esteem Caesar showed to him, while he treated
others like slaves. His improved opinion had been raised by the
intercourse he had held with Caesar. The much-abused man had on these
occasions shown that he was not only well educated but also thoughtful;
and yesterday evening, before Caracalla had gone to rest exhausted, the
high-priest, with his wise experience, had received exactly the same
impressions as the easily influenced artist; for Caesar had bewailed his
sad fate in pathetic terms, and confessed himself indeed deeply guilty,
but declared that he had intended to act for the best, had sacrificed
fortune, peace of mind, and co