lly to unbelievers. "He is in heaven,"
he says, "looking at just and unjust, and causing actions to be entered
in books; and he will recompense all on a day which he has appointed."
Critias objects that he cannot make this consistent with the received
doctrine about the Fates, "even though he has perhaps been carried aloft
with his master, and initiated in unspeakable mysteries." He also asks
if the deeds of the Scythians are written in heaven for if so there must
be many scribes there.

Such was the language of paganism after Christianity had for fifty years
been exposed to the public gaze; after it had been before the world for
fifty more, St. Augustine had still to defend it against the charge of
being the cause of the calamities of the empire. And for the charge of
magic, when the Arian bishops were in formal disputations with the
Catholic, before Gungebald, Burgundian king of France, at the end of the
fifth century, we find still that they charged the Catholics with being
"_praestigiatores_," and worshipping a number of gods; and when the
Catholics proposed that the King should repair to the shrine of St.
Justus, where both parties might ask him concerning their respective
faiths, the Arians cried out that "they would not seek enchantments
like Saul, for Scripture was enough for them, which was more powerful
than all bewitchments." This was said, not against strangers of whom
they knew nothing, as Ethelbert might be suspicious of St. Augustine and
his brother missionaries, but against a body of men who lived among
them.

I do not think it can be doubted then that, had Tacitus, Suetonius, and
Pliny, Celsus, Porphyry, and the other opponents of Christianity lived
in the fourth century, their evidence concerning Christianity would be
very much the same as it has come down to us from the centuries before
it. In either case, a man of the world and a philosopher would have been
disgusted at the gloom and sadness of its profession, its
mysteriousness, its claim of miracles, the want of good sense imputable
to its rule of life, and the unsettlement and discord it was introducing
into the social and political world.

On the whole then I conclude as follows: If there is a form of
Christianity now in the world which is accused of gross superstition, of
borrowing its rites and customs from the heathen, and of ascribing to
forms and ceremonies an occult virtue; a religion which is considered to
burden and enslave the mind by