th at the executioner's hands impending over
him--a book in which above all others we should have expected a man
possessing the Christian faith to dwell upon the promises of
Christianity--the name of Christ is never once mentioned, the tone,
though religious and reverential, is that of a Theist only; and from
beginning to end, except one or two sentences in which an obscure
allusion may possibly be detected to the Christian revelation, there
is nothing which might not have been written by a Greek philosopher
ignorant of the very name of Christianity. Of the various attempts
which have been made to solve this riddle perhaps the most ingenious
is that of M. Charles Jourdain, who, in a monograph devoted to the
subject[109], seeks to prove that the author of the theological
treatises referred to was a certain Boethus, an African Bishop of the
Byzacene Province, who was banished to Sardinia about the year 504 by
the Vandal King Thrasamond.

[Footnote 109: De l'Origine des Traditions sur le Christianisme de
Boece (Paris, 1861.)]

Not thus, however, as it now appears, is the knot to be cut. And after
all, M. Jourdain, in arguing, as he seems disposed to argue, against
any external profession of Christianity on the part of Boethius,
introduces contradictions greater than any that his theory would
remove. To any person acquainted with the thoughts and words of the
little coterie of Roman nobles to which Boethius belonged, it will
seem absolutely impossible that the son-in-law of Symmachus, the
receiver of the praises of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, should have been
a professed votary of the old Paganism. It is not the theological
treatises coming from a man in his position which are hard to account
for; it is the apparently non-Christian tone of the 'Consolation.'

The fragment now before us shows that the old-fashioned belief in
Boethius as a theologian was well founded. 'He wrote a book concerning
the Holy Trinity, and certain dogmatic chapters, and a book against
Nestorius.' That is a sufficiently accurate _resume_ of the four
theological treatises enumerated above. Here Usener also observes--and
I am inclined to agree with him--that there is a certain resemblance
between the style of thought of these treatises and that of the
'Consolation' itself. They are, after all, philosophical rather than
religious; one of the earliest samples of that kind of logical
discussion of theological dogmas which the Schoolmen of the Middle
Ag