us; their profession
was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested in an
association, and exercised in privation and pain. They were from the
nature of the case proselytizing societies, for they were rising into
power; nor were they local, but vagrant, restless, intrusive, and
encroaching. Their pretensions to supernatural knowledge brought them
into easy connection with magic and astrology, which are as attractive
to the wealthy and luxurious as the more vulgar superstitions to the
populace.

The Christian, being at first accounted a kind of Jew, was even on that
score included in whatever odium, and whatever bad associations,
attended on the Jewish name. But in a little time his independence of
the rejected people was clearly understood, as even the persecutions
show; and he stood upon his own ground. Still his character did not
change in the eyes of the world; for favor or for reproach, he was still
associated with the votaries of secret and magical rites. The emperor
Hadrian, noted as he is for his inquisitive temper, and a partaker in so
many mysteries, still believed that the Christians of Egypt allowed
themselves in the worship of Serapis. They are brought into connection
with the magic of Egypt in the history of what is commonly called the
Thundering legion, so far as this, that the rain which relieved the
Emperor's army in the field, and which the Church ascribed to the
prayers of the Christian soldiers, is by Dio Cassius attributed to an
Egyptian magician, who obtained it by invoking Mercury and other
spirits. This war had been the occasion of one of the first recognitions
which the State had conceded to the oriental rites, though statesmen and
emperors, as private men, had long taken part in them. The emperor
Marcus had been urged by his fears of the Marcomanni to resort to these
foreign introductions, and is said to have employed Magi and Chaldaeans
in averting an unsuccessful issue of the war.

It is observable that, in the growing countenance which was extended to
these rites in the third century, Christianity came in for a share. The
chapel of Alexander Severus contained statues of Abraham, Orpheus,
Apollonius, Pythagoras, and our Lord. Here indeed, as in the case of
Zenobia's Judaism, an eclectic philosophy aided the comprehension of
religions. But, immediately before Alexander, Heliogabalus, who was no
philosopher, while he formally seated his Syrian idol in the Palatine,
while he obs