Augustine, has provided in his scheme of the house with many
mansions. A sincere old Roman piety had urged his fortunately
constituted nature to no mistakes, no offences against humanity. And
of his entire freedom from guile one reward had been this singular
happiness, that under his rule there was no shedding of Christian
blood. To him belonged that half-humorous placidity of soul, of a
kind illustrated later very effectively by Montaigne, which, starting
with an instinct of mere fairness towards human nature and the world,
seems at last actually to qualify its possessor to be almost the
friend of the people of Christ. Amiable, in its own nature, and full
of a reasonable gaiety, Christianity has often had its advantage of
characters such as that. The geniality of Antoninus Pius, like the
geniality of the earth itself, had permitted the church, as being in
truth no alien from that old mother earth, to expand and thrive for a
season as by natural process. And that charmed period under the
Antonines, extending to the later years of the [120] reign of
Aurelius (beautiful, brief, chapter of ecclesiastical history!),
contains, as one of its motives of interest, the earliest development
of Christian ritual under the presidence of the church of Rome.

Again as in one of those mystical, quaint visions of the Shepherd of
Hermas, "the aged woman was become by degrees more and more youthful.
And in the third vision she was quite young, and radiant with beauty:
only her hair was that of an aged woman. And at the last she was
joyous, and seated upon a throne--seated upon a throne, because her
position is a strong one." The subterranean worship of the church
belonged properly to those years of her early history in which it was
illegal for her to worship at all. But, hiding herself for awhile as
conflict grew violent, she resumed, when there was felt to be no more
than ordinary risk, her natural freedom. And the kind of outward