With the fourth century the Christian faith began to assert itself as never before. Its persecution, off and on, for three centuries, and its triumph need a little study. Why was it that the Roman system could tolerate the excesses of the licentious Eleusinian and Bacchic orgies and the foul superstitions of Egypt, but could find no charity for a pure and gentle faith? Because Christianity was itself righteously intolerant. Very early in the history of the empire it became the fashion and then the law that the genius of the emperor should be adored. To the already polytheistic citizen of the empire this was no added hardship. One god more made no difference to him, and the cynical Roman magistrate could not understand why the wretched Christian was so stubborn about a pinch of incense in honor of the emperor. It meant so little to him religiously--but everything to the Christian. And so the Christians died by thousands. Yet the persecuted faith spread apace, drawing into its fold of hope and inward peace the wayworn travelers upon the cruel road of life in those weary years. Then came the conversion of Constantine and the gradual disintegration of paganism. For a study of the brighter side of pagan life and a proof that the whole Roman world, as so often taught, was not thoroughly rotten, read Pater’s “Marius, the Epicurean,” and Dill’s “Roman life in the Fourth Century.” The Barbarians. It is surprising to the judicious what can be the effect of a word or phrase. Probably the term “barbarian” has caused as much confusion in the minds of young students of history as any other term. It signifies to him at least a semi-savage. Yet we know that to the Greek it meant only a non-Hellene. In the later Roman times it meant Goth or German. And yet, long before these people finally disrupted the Western Empire, they had ceased to be barbarian in any common conception of the term. If we substitute for the word migration the longer word immigration, it will give a better idea of their earlier comings, to which allusion has already been made. Humbler neighbors from without the pale, they slowly crept into the southern space and glow out of their crowded and unlovely north. With no ideas of conquest at first, but seeking betterment for themselves, as to-day come the peoples from the same Russia; or, pressed out of their own hunting grounds by the atrocious Hun, they poured steadily in. And long before they became a menace, most of them had become at least half civilized by contact with the finer south. Their men had many of them served in the Roman legions. And Christianity had early made way among them. And at length, when the weakness of the West made it an easy prey to their greater vigor, it was not as bands of whooping savages falling upon a peaceful white settlement that they came, but they simply took up the scepter of destiny which nerveless and unworthy hands had let fall. Emerton’s