The spectacle of the Sacrament adds its deep impression, "bread and wine especially--pure wheaten bread, the pure white wine of the Tusculan vineyards. There was here a veritable consecration, hopeful and animating, of the earth's gifts, of old dead and dark matter itself, now in some way redeemed at last, of all that we can touch and see, in the midst of a jaded world that had lost the true sense of such things."
The sense of youth in it all was perhaps the dominating impression--the youth that was yet old as the world in experience and discovery of the true meaning of life. The young Christ was rejuvenating the world, and all things were being made new by him.
This is the climax of the book. He meets Lucian the aged, who for a moment darkens his dawning faith, but that which has come to him has been no casual emotion, no forced or spectacular conviction. He does not leap to the recognition of Christianity at first sight, but very quietly realises and accepts it as that secret after which his pagan idealism had been all the time groping. The story closes amid scenes of plague and earthquake and martyrdom in which he and Cornelius are taken prisoners, and he dies at last a Christian. "It was the same people who, in the grey, austere evening of that day, took up his remains, and buried them secretly, with their accustomed prayers; but with joy also, holding his death, according to their generous view in this matter, to have been of the nature of a martyrdom; and martyrdom, as the Church had always said, was a kind of Sacrament with plenary grace."
Such is some very brief and inadequate conception of one of the most remarkable books of our time, a book "written to illustrate the highest ideal of the æsthetic life, and to prove that beauty may be made the object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere as any that asceticism inspires. _Marius_ is an apology for the highest Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture which the author has embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and passion. Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than this noble dream of a pursuit through life of the spirit of heavenly beauty." Nothing could be more true, so far as it goes, than this admirable paragraph, yet Pater's book is more than that. The main drift of it is the reconciliation of Hellenism with Christianity in the experience of a man "bent on living in the full stream of refined sensation," who finds Christianity in every point fulfilling the ideals of Epicureanism at its best.