Gregory a luminous cross surrounded by a circle § 4. JULIAN TUE APOSTATE. 57 ■workjnen eltlier perished in the flames, or fled from the devoted spot in terror and despair. Thus, instead of deprivuig the Christians of a support of their faith, Julian only furnished them a new argument in the ruins of this fruitless lai ur. The providential frustration of this project is a s\ nibul of the whole reign of Julian, which suon afterward sank iuiu an early grave. As CiEsar he had conquered the baibaiian enemies of the Roman empire in the West; and now he | re- posed, as I'uler of the world, to humble its enemies in the East, and by the conquest of Persia to win the renown of a second Alexander. He proudly rejected all proposals of peace ; crossed the Tigris at the head of an army ol sixty -five thousand men, after wintering in Antioch, and after solemn consultation of the oracle; took several fortitieci towns in Mesopotamia ; exposed himself to every hardship and peril of war ; restored at the same time, wherever he could, the worship of the heathen gods ; but brought the army into a most critical position, and, in an unimportant nocturnal skirmish, received from a hostile arrow a mortal wound. He died soon after, on the 27th of June, 363, in the thirty -second year of his life ; according to heathen testimony, in the proud repose and dignity of a Stoic philosopher, conversing of the glory of the soul (the immortality of which, however, he con- appeared in the sky, nay, crosses were impressed upon the bodies of the persons present, which were shining by night (Rufinus), and would not wash out (Socrates). Of these writers however, Gregory alone is strictly a contemporary witness, relating the event in the year of its occurrence, 363, and that with the assurance that even the heathens did not call it in question. (Orat. iv. p. 110-113). Next to him come Ambrose, and Chrysostom, who speaks of this event several times. The Greek and Roman church historians, and Warburton, Mosheim, Schrockh, Neander, Guericke, Kurtz, Newman, Robertson, and others, of the Protestant, vindicate the miraculous, or at least providential, character of the remarkable event. Comp. also J. H. New- man (since gone over to Romanism) : " Essay on the Miracles recorded in ecclesiastical history," prefixed to the Oxford Tractarian translation of Fleury's Eccles. Hist, from 381-400 (Oxford, 1842) I. p. clxxv.-clxxxv. Warburton and Newman defend even the crosses, and refer to similar cases, for instance one in England in 1610, where marks of a cross of a phosphoric nature and resembling meteoric phenomena ap- peared in connection with lightning and produced by electricity. In Julian's case they a^umed that the immediate cause which set all these various physical agents in motion, as in the case of the destruction of Sodom, was supernatural. 58 THIRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590. sideredat best an Tincertain opinion);' but according to later and