Publisher's Synopsis
'Julian the Apostate' is one version, 'Julian the Philosopher' is another: the first is an error with an animus; the second is a truth with a bias. Julian was, in no true sense, an apostate, and he was not first of all a philosopher. He was an admirable specimen of a grand intellectual pagan. Hence the very pertinent sub-title of the book, 'The last struggle of Paganism against Christianity.' In that struggle, Paganism lost because Paganism had shriveled into a mere survival, just as Christianity will lose and shrivel up, dying from inanition, if it is not renewed with fresh forces from modern human tides.
This book is one of the 'Heroes of the Nations' series, and not the least notable one. Its author, Miss Alice Gardner, the learned lecturer on ancient history in Newnham College, has made it a strong as well as a charming book. It has hitherto been hardly possible to find or tell the truth about this really heroic character. Christianity (or, rather, its army of managers) has much to answer for, as an obscuring agent in relation to many reputations.
We cannot resist a strong feeling of sympathy with Julian. He was an honest pagan who could not bear to see the sweeping away of the old poetry and symbolism by a Christianity that was not always beautiful. Fancy it being left to Frederic Harrison to say whether England should be captured by the Salvation Army! The concluding paragraph of this book seems to us to beautifully adjust the balance in recognizing the blending of Greek culture and Christian ideals Hellenism neither lost nor won; it was merged. 'Julian's cause, ' says Miss Gardner, ' has ultimately triumphed, not by the suppression of Christian institutions, as Julian vainly hoped, still less by the extinction of the Christian spirit as a motive power in the world, but by the permeation of society, speculation and practical life with the most permanent elements of Greek culture. If Juli in was mistaken in thinking that the religious ideas litely coma from Palestine would soon pale before the revived glories of Greece, no less short-sighted were those who thought th it Hellenism was buried in the Emperor's grave. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, the two streams have blended, till it is now hard to conceive what either might have been apart from the other. We cannot feel that the triumphal cry of Julian's enemies, which has seamed ever to echo round his death-bed, 'has been fully justified at the bar of history. It is the Christ, not the Galilean, that has conquered.'
Miss Gardner is as nearly unbiased as anyone could be, and we cordially commend her finely written story to our readers. The illustrations are unusually telling. Excellent in themselves as works of art, they are valuable as genuine illustrations, -- illustrations which illustrate, to use her own keen phrase.
--The Coming Day, Vol. 5
