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 perfected and purified
Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This
is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as
the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves
inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in
social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house
of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find
a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand
to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world's seers--from
Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante--the ideal of the City of
God. It is but little developed in the book which we are now
considering, for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and
inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this
"dear City of Zeus" shining in the clear light of the early Christian