most abstruse points of the controversy concerning the Nature of
Christ, without apparently one wavering thought as to the Deity of the
Son of Mary. There, in the 'Consolation,' a book written in prison and
in disgrace, with death at the executioner's hands impending over
him--a book in which above all others we should have expected a man
possessing the Christian faith to dwell upon the promises of
Christianity--the name of Christ is never once mentioned, the tone,
though religious and reverential, is that of a Theist only; and from
beginning to end, except one or two sentences in which an obscure
allusion may possibly be detected to the Christian revelation, there
is nothing which might not have been written by a Greek philosopher
ignorant of the very name of Christianity. Of the various attempts
which have been made to solve this riddle perhaps the most ingenious
is that of M. Charles Jourdain, who, in a monograph devoted to the
subject[109], seeks to prove that the author of the theological
treatises referred to was a certain Boethus, an African Bishop of the
Byzacene Province, who was banished to Sardinia about the year 504 by
the Vandal King Thrasamond.

[Footnote 109: De l'Origine des Traditions sur le Christianisme de
Boèce (Paris, 1861.)]

Not thus, however, as it now appears, is the knot to be cut. And after
all, M. Jourdain, in arguing, as he seems disposed to argue, against
any external profession of Christianity on the part of Boethius,
introduces contradictions greater than any that his theory would
remove. To any person acquainted with the thoughts and words of the
little coterie of Roman nobles to which Boethius belonged, it will
seem absolutely impossible that the son-in-law of Symmachus, the
receiver of the praises of Ennodius and Cassiodorus, should have been