What Marius had been permitted to see was a realisation of such life higher still: and with--Yes! with a more effective sanction and motive than it had ever possessed before, in that fact, or series of facts, to be ascertained by those who would.
The central glory of the reign of the Antonines was that society had attained in it, though very imperfectly, and for the most part by cumbrous effort of law, many of those ends to which Christianity went straight, with the sufficiency, the success, of a direct and appropriate instinct.

Pagan Rome, too, had its touching charity-sermons on occasions of great public distress; its charity-children in long file, in memory of the elder empress Faustina; its prototype, under patronage of Aesculapius, of the modern hospital for the sick on the island of Saint Bartholomew.

But what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as if with the painful calculation of old age, the church was doing, almost without thinking about it, with all the liberal [113] enterprise of youth, because it was her very being thus to do.

"You fail to realise your own good intentions," she seems to say, to pagan virtue, pagan kindness.

She identified herself with those intentions and advanced them with an unparalleled freedom and largeness.