Julian was a Pagan now, but he carefully concealed the change. During the next ten years, until the death of Constantius, this cloak of dissimulation was never thrown aside. The immediate outward effect of his conduct was a stricter attention to the services of the Church. The old fable, said his heathen friend Libanius afterwards, was here reversed, and the lion was clothed in the ass's skin. Only one or two most intimate friends were in the secret, but it was more widely suspected. Ardent Pagans began to look to him as the future restorer of Paganism; old prophecies were banded about that Christianity was soon to come to an end. One such oracle fixed the limit of 365 years for the worship of Christ. The term was fast drawing to a close. I shall not undertake the task of arraigning Julian as before the bar of the Eternal Righteousness. All such attempts to anticipate the verdict of the Great Judge must be as vain as they are presumptuous; but it is due to the nobler features of his character--and these were neither few nor insignificant--to dwell on the extenuating circumstances of his case. And surely no man's education was more faulty, or more likely to produce a disastrous revulsion. Christianity was associated in his memory with everything that was gloomy, terrible, repulsive. Its champion, in his eyes, was his most deadly enemy, Constantius, who had shed the blood of his nearest kinsmen, and who was ready at any moment to shed his own blood when the occasion might demand. Writing of himself at a later date in apathetic allegory, he describes himself as a youth who, looking back upon the mass of evil that had befallen him from his own kinsmen and cousins, was so astounded that he resolved to throw himself down to Tartarus, but was rescued by Helios, the Sun God. This throws a flood of light on the personal influences which coloured his views of Christianity, and finally led to his apostasy. Moreover, the form of Christianity which was presented to him was not calculated to impress him deeply or favourably. The coldness of asceticism would take no firm hold of his ardent and enthusiastic nature. Its representatives, the Arian bishops, would not recommend the cause; the exceeding bitterness of theologic controversy called down his contempt, and the superstitious reverence for the bones of the martyrs aroused his disgust. In the allegory to which I have already alluded he speaks of himself as a child covered with filth and dirt, on whom the Sun God at length took pity. Whatever rays of light had burst the gloom of his earlier life were associated with the glories of nature.