1875.] Human Levitation. 49 
Christianity (viii., 33), ‘‘the spirit of the Lord caught away 
Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more, and he went on 
his way rejoicing: but Philip was found at Azotus;” this 
phrase, instead of ‘‘ found himself,” seeming to imply that 
he alighted among friends, as in most other recorded cases 
of the kind. 
Whether we read Christian, Jewish, or Pagan accounts, 
the first Christian century abounds in thaums beyond any 
other. False Christs were to arise, and to “‘ show great 
signs and wenders.” The most typical instance of these 
doubtless was Philip’s original rival, Simen Magus, the 
mere beginning of whose career the Acts do but touch. 
For a whole generation he travelled and proclaimed himself 
both the Hebrew Messiah, and an incarnation of each 
people’s chief deity; basing all his claims on a series of 
prodigies which no contemporary, friend or foe, seems to 
have ever denied. In the ‘‘ Recognitions,” a work soon 
after ascribed to Clement, and certainly current in the next 
century, his translations through the air figure among these ; 
and another Clementine (or, as now held, pseudp-Clemen- 
tine) book, the ‘‘ Apostolic Canons or Constitutions,” con- 
tains the professedly earliest account of his end at Rome, 
by a public display of this faculty, in defiance of one or two 
Christian apostles; at whose prayer that he might fall—but 
not fatally—he is related to have so fallen as to break both 
legs, and then, from shame, to have committed suicide. If 
one of his opponents was Paul, and the other unnamed, 
nothing was more natural than for a dramatic instinct to fix 
on his first rebuker, Peter, as having thus re-encountered 
him ; and this may have originated the whole momentous 
legend that brings Peter to Rome, the first traces of which 
appear in the Patristic repetitions of this adventure. 
An equally attested zthrobat of that century, whose long 
life was held indeed nearly to fill it, was Apollonius of 
Tyana, the most famous and closest of all imitators of Py- 
thagoras. His life, by Philostratus, a work of some bulk, 
and written, Dr. Newman says, with elegance, has the rare 
advantages of being certainly drawn up within a century of 
his death, and from all the materials that a literary empress, 
the wife of Severus, could collect ;—the philosopher’s own 
writings, a diary of his favourite and constant companion, 
Damis, memoirs by his chief earlier acquaintance, and 
the archives of the numerous cities that had received and 
honoured him. A century later, this book was made the 
basis of an attack on Christianity, answered by Eusebius, 
and now lost; but there is no evidence of Philostratus 
VOL. V. (N.S.) H 
