‘Scarcely anything,’ she said. ‘You know the Christians are mostly very poor, and some of them quite illiterate. But there is a great Christian teacher named Paulus of Tarsus, and many who have heard him preach in Ephesus and in Philippi, and even in Athens and Corinth, say that his words are like things of life. My friend Sergius Paulus, the late Proconsul of Cyprus, has met him, and spoke of him with enthusiastic reverence. He has written nothing as yet except two short letters to the Christians in Thessalonica. They are only casual _letters_, and do not enter into the life of Jesus the Christ, or the general belief of Christians. But I have them here, and will read parts of them to you if you like.’ She read to him the opening salutation, and on his expressing astonishment that he could join ‘much affliction’ with ‘joy,’ she explained to him that this was the divine paradox of all Christianity, in which sorrow never destroyed joy, but sometimes brought out a deeper joy, even as there are flowers which pour forth their sweetest perfumes in the midnight. Then she read him the exhortations to purity and holiness,[22] and asked him ‘whether that sounded like the teaching of men who practised the evil deeds of which the Christians were accused by the popular voice.’ He sat silent, and she read him the passage about the coming day of the Lord, and the sons of light, and the armour of righteousness.[23] Lastly, she read him the concluding part of the Second Letter, with its exhortations to diligence and order. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that in one passage Paulus may perhaps refer in a mysterious way to your father, the late Emperor. He is speaking of the coming of some lawless tyrant and enemy of God before the day of the Lord; and he adds, “only _he who letteth_ will let, until he be taken away.”’ ‘The Greek words ὁ κατέχων,’ she said, ‘might be rendered in Latin _qui claudit_. The Christians are so surrounded by enemies that they are sometimes obliged to express themselves in cryptograms, and Linus tells me that some Christians see in the words _qui claudit_ an allusion to your father, Claudius. If so, Paulus seems to think that the day of the Lord’s return is very near.’ The young prince, though he had but a dim sense of what some of the phrases meant, was struck with what he had heard. There was something in the morality more vivid and more searching than anything which Epictetus had reported, or than Sosibius had read to him out of Zeno and Chrysippus. And besides the high morality there were tones which caused a more thrilling chord to vibrate within him than anything of which he had yet dreamed. The morality seemed to be elevated to a purer region of life and hope, and, in spite of the strange style, to be transfused through and through with a divine emotion.