§ 42.3. =Julian the Apostate (A.D. 361-363).=--The sons of Constantine the Great began their reign in A.D. 337 with the murder of their male relatives. The brothers Julian and Gallus, nephews of Constantine, alone were spared; but in A.D. 345 they were banished to a Cappadocian castle where Julian officiated for a while as reader in the village church. Having at last obtained leave to study in Nicomedia, then in Ephesus, and finally in Athens, the chief representatives of paganism fostered in him the conviction that he was specially raised up by the gods to restore again the old religion of his fathers. As early as A.D. 351 in Nicomedia he formally though still secretly returned to paganism, and at Athens in A.D. 355 he took part in the Eleusinian mysteries. Soon thereafter Constantius, harassed by foreign wars, assigned to him the command of the army against the Germans. By affability, personal courage and high military talent, he soon won to himself the enthusiastic attachment of the soldiers. Constantius thought to weaken the evident power of his cousin which seemed to threaten his authority, by recalling the best of the legions, but the legions refused obedience and proclaimed Julian emperor. Then the emperor refused to ratify the election and treated Julian himself as a rebel. The latter advanced at the head of his army by forced marches upon the capital, but ere he reached the city, he received the tidings of the opposing emperor’s death. Acknowledged now as emperor throughout the whole empire without any opposition, Julian proceeded with zeal, enthusiasm and vigour to accomplish his long-cherished wish, the restoring of the glory of the old national religion. He used no violent measures for the subversion and overthrow of Christianity, nor did he punish Christian obstinacy with death, except where it seemed to him the maintenance of his supremacy required it. But he demanded that temples which had been converted into churches should be restored to the heathen worship, those destroyed should be restored at the cost of the church exchequer and the money for the state that had been applied to ecclesiastical purposes had to be repaid. He scornfully referred the clergy thus robbed of their revenues to the blessedness of evangelical poverty. He also fomented as much as possible dissension in the church, favoured all sectaries and heretics, excluded Christians from all the higher, and afterwards from all the lower, civil and military offices, and loaded them on every occasion with reproach and shame, and by these means he actually induced many to apostatise. In order to discredit Christ’s prophecy in Matt. xxiv. 2, he resolved on the restoration of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, but after having been begun it was destroyed by an earthquake. He excluded all Christian teachers from the public schools, and also