In the first romance of the three the new Christian spirit is seen invading the soul of Julian himself, the last champion of expiring Paganism. It can even be seen in the little treatises, _The Sun King_ and the _Mother of the Gods_, which Julian wrote in his feverish nights to defend his lost cause. Soon there remained to this singular man of all that first ardour but a feeling of impotent rage and unbridled pride--the Napoleonic lust of conquering the world. And so we see him in this book, in the midst of the mad expedition against Persia, where he was to meet his death, oversetting the altar of the gods who had betrayed him, and exclaiming: "_The gods are no more; or rather, the gods do not yet exist. They are not. But they will be. We shall all be gods. We have but to dare!_" A few days later he falls, vanquished by the Galilean, whose image haunts his deathbed. But at that last hour it is not the fierce God of the Arians (who educated Julian the Emperor) that he sees. He whom delirium calls up is Christus Pastophorus,--the Good Shepherd,--the Spirit of gentleness and love. It is that Spirit who has dethroned the Olympians. But the gods do not perish utterly. Centuries pass, and from the bosom of the waters, like Aphrodite, from the bosom of the earth, like Cybele, they come forth again, serene and impassive. Popes, kings, great nobles, simple Florentine merchants welcome them, brought by galleys from the coasts of Hellas, or discovered by patient excavators of the antique soil. Their marble glory shines anew. The rays of Helios penetrate the soul of artists. The fires of Dionysus kindle the blood of the young men and the young women. It is the dawn of the _Renaissance_. Has then the God-Man conquered the Man-God? No; because, see, Savonarola is defying the gods of Olympus and the gods of the earth. The latter destroy him, but the Christ has reappeared, and the problem of the two forms of wisdom continues to be set in a form more august and more painful than ever before. This is the subject of the _Renaissance of the Gods_, a romance of which the distinguished critic in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, M. Theodore de Wyzewa, says that it "far surpasses the mass of the romances published in Russia during the last twenty-five years." And since then, as before then, as at all times, at every fresh crisis, at every renewal of the creative process taking place within human consciousness, the two principles reappear. They struggle too in the soul of the strongest. Look at Peter the Great, whom old believers used to call "The Anti-Christ." He will be the hero of the third romance of the trilogy. We shall see therein the tragedy of the gentle Tsarevitch Alexis, servant of the Galilean and immolated victim of the new god; victim, that is, of human will incarnate in the genius of Peter, lifting itself above good and evil.