ielding no quarter, foreseeing no
issue save that one of the twain--Jupiter or Christ, Deus Optimus Maximus
or the carpenter's son of Nazareth--must go under.

It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all struggles must between
adversaries so tremendous. To-day, in Dr Smith's "Classical Dictionary,"
Origen rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Tertullian reposes cheek by
jowl with Terpsichore. But we are not concerned, here, with what happened
in the end. We are concerned with what these forthright Christian
fighters had in their minds--to trample out the old literature _because_
of the false religion. Milton understood this, and was thinking of it
when he wrote of the effect of Christ's Nativity--

The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No mighty trance, or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

as Swinburne understands and expresses it in his "Hymn to Proserpine,"
supposed to be chanted by a Roman of the 'old profession' on the morrow
of Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith--

O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!
From your wrath is the world released, redeem'd from your chains,
men say.
New Gods are crown'd in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were...
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in
the brake;
Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from
thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

'Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean!' However the struggle might sway
in this or that other part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to
her knees, and sti