a professed votary of the old Paganism. It is not the theological
treatises coming from a man in his position which are hard to account
for; it is the apparently non-Christian tone of the 'Consolation.'

The fragment now before us shows that the old-fashioned belief in
Boethius as a theologian was well founded. 'He wrote a book concerning
the Holy Trinity, and certain dogmatic chapters, and a book against
Nestorius.' That is a sufficiently accurate _resumé_ of the four
theological treatises enumerated above. Here Usener also observes--and
I am inclined to agree with him--that there is a certain resemblance
between the style of thought of these treatises and that of the
'Consolation' itself. They are, after all, philosophical rather than
religious; one of the earliest samples of that kind of logical
discussion of theological dogmas which the Schoolmen of the Middle
Ages so delighted to indulge in. The young philosopher, hearing at his
father-in-law's table the discussions between Chalcedonian and
Monophysite with which all Rome resounded, on account of the prolonged
strife with the Church of Constantinople, set himself down to discuss
the same topics which they were wrangling over by the light--to him so
clear and precious--of the Greek philosophy. There was perhaps in this
employment neither reverence nor irreverence. He had not St.
Augustine's intense and almost passionate conviction of the truth of
Christianity; but he was quite willing to accept it and to discourse
upon it, as he discoursed on Arithmetic, Music, and Geometry.

But when premature old age, solitude, and the loss of liberty befell
him, it was not to the highly elaborated Christian theology of the
Sixth Century that he turned for support and consolation. Probably
enough the very fact that he knew some of the pitfalls in the way
deterred him from that dangerous journey, where the slightest