The rich and powerful pagans, as well as the low and vulgar, thus encouraged by the example of the king and the court, began to assail the Christians with new malignity. The disciples were everywhere insulted, persecuted, mobbed. To call one a Christian became the severest term of reproach. Then, as now, there were vast multitudes who had no independent faith of their own. These unthinking ones drifted along with the popular current. Julian condescended himself to write lampoons against Christianity. In one of these, ridiculing the Christian doctrine, that any man who repents of sin and trusts in the Saviour may be forgiven, he represents, in a satire entitled “The Cæsars,” his Christian uncle, the Emperor Constantine, going on a mission to the shades of the infernals. There the emperor gathers around him all the foul fiends of the pit, and, addressing them, says,―― “Whoever is a profligate, a murderer, a guilty man of any kind, let him come boldly to me: I will wash him in the water of baptism, and make him instantly pure. And should you fall into the same crime again, and only beat your breast, and say, ‘I am sorry,’ you shall again be perfectly holy.” It would be difficult anywhere to find a more interesting illustration of the fact, that there is often but a hair’s breadth between the most debasing error and the most ennobling truth. The Christian doctrine of forgiveness through repentance, and trust in the atonement, which our Saviour has made, very nearly resembles this burlesque of the doctrine as uttered by Julian; and yet one is true, and the other false. Salvation through faith in the sufferings and death of Jesus is described by the pen of inspiration as “the mighty power of God” for the redemption of a lost world. What is the Christian doctrine of forgiveness through faith in Jesus? It is this:―― Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has made atonement for all sin upon the cross of Calvary. Whoever now will abandon sin, trust in this Saviour, and earnestly and prayerfully commence the Christlike life, persevering to the end, shall be forgiven. Now, how small is the _verbal_ difference between this Christian doctrine of salvation through faith in an atoning Saviour and Julian’s gross perversion of that only truth by which a sinner may be saved! Some may wonder how it was possible for such a man as Julian, highly educated, and endowed by nature with great intellectual abilities, to advocate idol worship. The following extracts from a treatise of instructions which he drew up for the use of the pagan priests will show with how much plausibility such a man could argue in support of a bad cause:―― “Let no one accuse us,” he says, “of holding the gods to be wood, stone, brass. When we look at the images of the gods, we ought not to see in them stone and wood, neither ought we to see the gods themselves.