superstition, and _privileged by secrecy_, come forward to countersign such hopes, many more would have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodier would have been the blood-polluted line of the imperial successions. Prudence, therefore, it was, and state policy, not the power of Christianity, which gave the _final_ shock (of the _original_ shock we shall speak elsewhere) to the grander functions of the Delphic Oracle. But, in the mean time, the humbler and more domestic offices of this oracle, though naturally making no noise at a distance, seem long to have survived its state relations. And, apart from the sort of galvanism notoriously applied by Hadrian, surely the fathers could not have seen Plutarch's account of its condition, already a century later than our Saviour's nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from _him_, had by that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no longer a princess in the land--a change which was proximately due to the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence; still held in respect; still trained, though at inferior cost, to her difficult and showy ministrations. And the whole establishment of the Delphic god, if necessarily contracted from that scale which had been suitable when great kings and commonwealths were constant suitors within the gates of Delphi, still clung (like the Venice of modern centuries) to her old ancestral honors, and kept up that decent household of ministers which corresponded to the altered ministrations of her temple. In fact, the evidences on behalf of Delphi as a princely house, that had indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, but naturally was all the prouder from the irritating contrast of her great remembrances, are so plentifully dispersed through books, that the fathers must have been willingly duped. That in some way they _were_ duped is too notorious from the facts, and might be suspected even from their own occasional language; take, as one instance, amongst a whole _harmony_ of similar expressions, this short passage from Eusebius--_hoi Hellenes homologentes ekleloipenai auton ta chresteria_: the Greeks admitting that their Oracles have failed. (There is, however, a disingenuous vagueness in the very word _ekleloipenai_), _ed' allote pote ex aionos_--and when? why, at no other crisis through the total range of their existence--_e kata tes chrones tes euangelikes didaskalias_--than precisely at the epoch of the evangelical dispensation, etc. Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be entirely satisfied with the Christian representations upon this point. And in such indeterminate phrases as _kata tes chrones_ (which might mean indifferently the entire three centuries then accomplished from the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically that narrow punctual limit of the earliest promulgation), it is easy to trace an ambidextrous artifice of compromise between what would satisfy his own brethren,