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 wretchednes, 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 Græcina 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