“Have that door shut!” called the magistrate. “It bangs in this evil wind, and I cannot even hear what my excellent friend Lucius Smerius is saying in my ear; how then can I catch what is said in court?” Then, turning to the pontiff, he said: “I detest this weather. Last year, about this time, I was struck with an evil blast, and lost all sense of smell and taste for nine months. I had pains in my loins and an ache in all my bones. I doubt if even the jests of Baubo could have made me laugh; I was in lower dumps than even Ceres. Even now, when seated far too long in this marble chair, I get an ache across my back that assures me I am no longer young. But I could endure that if my sense of taste had been fully restored. I do not relish good wine as of old, and that is piteous, and I really at times think of suicide.” “It was the work of enchantment,” said the pontiff. “These Christians, in their orgies, stick pins into images to produce pains in those the figures represent.” “How do you know this? Have you been initiated into their mysteries?” “I——! The Immortals preserve me therefrom.” “Then, by Pluto, you speak what you have heard of the gossips—old wives’ babble. I will tell you what my opinion is, Smerius. If you were to thrust your nose into the mysteries of the Bona Dea you would find—what? No more than did Clodius—nothing at all. My wife, she attends them, and comes home with her noddle full of all the tittle‐tattle of Nemausus. It is so with the Christian orgies. I would not give a snap of the fingers for all the secrets confided to the initiated—neither in Eleusis nor in the Serapium, nor among the Christians.” “These men are not like others; they are unsociable, brutish, arrogant.” “Unsociable I allow. Brutish! The word is inapt; for, on the contrary, I find them very simple, soft‐headed, pulp‐hearted folk. They abstain from all that is boisterous and cruel. Arrogant they may be. There I am at one with you. ‘Live and let live’ is my maxim. We have a score of gods, home made and foreign, and they all rub and tumble together without squabbling. Of late we have had Madame Isis over from Egypt, and the White Ladies,(11) and the Proxumes, Victoria Augusta, Venus, and Minerva, make room for her without even a frown on their divine faces. And imperial Rome sanctions all these devotions. Why, did not the god Augustus build a temple here to Nemausus and pay him divine honors, though he had never heard him named before? Now this Christian sect is exclusive. It will suffer no gods to stand beside Him whom they adore. He must reign alone. That I call illiberal, narrow‐minded, against the spirit of the age and the principle of Roman policy. That is the reason why I dislike these Christians.”