se "beliefs, without which life
itself must be almost impossible, principles which had their sufficient
ground of evidence in that very fact." So far Marcus Aurelius. But the
conviction of some august yet friendly companionship in life beyond the
veil of things seen, took form for Marius in a way far more picturesque.
The passage which describes it is one of the finest in the book, and may
be given at length.

"Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another
life, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes,
passing from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various
dangers. That prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively
gratitude: it was as if he must look round for some one else to share
his joy with: for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own
relief. Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this
way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or
another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey. And was it
only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through
his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not
been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude
which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved best of all
things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side
throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of
his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?" One can
see in this sense of constant companionship the untranslated and indeed
the unexamined Christian doctrine of God. And, because this God is
responsive to all the many-sided human experience which reveals Him, it
will be an actual preparation not for Theism only, but for that
complexity in unity known as the Christian Trinity. Nothing could better
summarise this whole achievement in religion than Pater's apt sentence,
"To have apprehended the _Great Ideal_, so palpably that it defined
personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid
the shadows of the world."

The third essential development of Marius' thought is that of the City
of God, which for him assumes the shape of a perfec