Arnobius.

        At Sicca, in North Africa, there lived at the close of the third century a teacher of rhetoric and oratory named Arnobius. He was for a long time a pagan and a vigorous opponent of Christi anity but was at length converted. Jerome says that when he asked to be admitted to the church the local bishop demanded proof of his sincerity, and he responded by writing a work Against the Heathen, in seven books, and was accepted forthwith. Whatever may be thought of this quaint story, from Jerom's Chronicle for the year ***2343, or A.D. 327, Against the Heathen does seem to have been rather hastily written and shows very little acquaintance with the Bible, except the Gospels. Arnobius had read Plato and Cicero, however, and he also knew Clement's Address to the Greeks (the Protrepticus). It is not unlikely that he was an elderly man when he was converted, and that was why the bishop was doubtful and why later hearers of his story were so impressed.

        Arnobius' book was evidently written when Diocletian's persecution was still in progress, probably in A.D- 3o4-io. In fact, it is a defense of Christianity, an apology. In Books i and ii he presents Christianity, and in the rest he attacks paganism. Book i takes up the argument that Christianity had brought disaster upon the world; but there had always been wars and famines before Christianity came. In fact, Christianity gives some hope of remedying such things, for war, at least, would be done away with, if Cristianity prevailed. The gods should not be displeased with the Christians, for Christianity teaches the fear of God. He discusses the points brought against Christianity-that Christ was a man and that he died on a cross, both of which Arnobius seeks to reconcile with Christ's divine nature. Book ii maintains that Christ introduced the true religion and develops Arnobius' curious doctrine of the soul as not necessarily of divine origin or immortal unless it knows God and throws itself on his mercy.

        Book iii meets the charge that Christians do not worship the national gods by saying that their worship of God the Creator and Father of all covers the whole ground. Book iv deals with the absurdities, trivialities, and indecencies of pagan mythology. Book v declares that these myths cannot be dismissed as mere poetic fancies, for the historians, too, have dealt with them. The mysteries are described and bitingly analyzed. Book vi deals with the temples and their idols, and Book vu with the futility of material sacrifice. The work seems to break off rather than to reach a finished end. The whole forms a bewildering series of glimpses of ancient mythologies and religious practices from the pagan world of the third and fourth centuries.

        Arnobius' book seems to have been little read; Lactantius, who is said by Jerome to have been his pupil, doubtless while Arnobius was still a pagan (On Illustrious Men 80), shows no particular acquaintance with it in his works, sime of them written a few years later, and its subsequent influence is slight; Jerome is about the only writer who read it and speaks of it, but he does so several times. Only one manuscript of it has ever been found, written early in the ninth century, but many a better work of Christian literature has fared even worse, as we have seen. And it was as the eighth (octavus) book of Arnobius' Against the Heathen, it will be remembered, that the Octavius of Minucius Felix was preserved and has come down to us. In the “Gelasian Decree” on books to be received and those not to be received, really a work of the sixth century, Arnobius' work is designated as apocryphal.