only words which were immensely simple, devoid of every
ornament. He was astonished only by the mute attention with which the
crowd listened.

But the old man spoke on to those people sunk in listening,--told them
to be kind, poor, peaceful, just, and pure; not that they might have
peace during life, but that they might live eternally with Christ after
death, in such joy and such glory, in such health and delight, as no one
on earth had attained at any time. And here Vinicius, though predisposed
unfavorably, could not but notice that still there was a difference
between the teaching of the old man and that of the Cynics, Stoics, and
other philosophers; for they enjoin good and virtue as reasonable, and
the only thing practical in life, while he promised immortality,
and that not some kind of hapless immortality beneath the earth, in
wretchedness, emptiness, and want, but a magnificent life, equal to that
of the gods almost. He spoke meanwhile of it as of a thing perfectly
certain; hence, in view of such a faith, virtue acquired a value simply
measureless, and the misfortunes of this life became incomparably
trivial. To suffer temporally for inexhaustible happiness is a thing
absolutely different from suffering because such is the order of nature.
But the old man said further that virtue and truth should be loved
for themselves, since the highest eternal good and the virtue existing
before ages is God; whoso therefore loves them loves God, and by that
same becomes a cherished child of His.

Vinicius did not understand this well, but he knew previously, from
words spoken by Pomponia Graecina to Petronius, that, according to the
belief of Christians, God was one and almighty; when, therefore,
he heard now again that He is all good and all just, he thought
involuntarily that, in presence of such a demiurge, Jupiter, Saturn,
Apollo, Juno, Vesta, and Venus would seem like some vain and noisy
rabble, in which all were interfering at once, and each on his or her
own account.

But the greatest astonishment seized him when the old man declared
that God was universal love also; hence he who loves man fulfils God's
supreme command. But it is not enough to love men of one's own nation,
for the God-man shed his blood for all, and found among pagans such
elect of his as Cornelius the Centurion; it is not enough either to love
those who do good to us, for Christ forgave the Jews who delivered him
to death, and the Roman soldiers wh