id not
cease till idolatry was abolished, though they had lost their credit for
a considerable time before the coming of Christ. It was concerning this
more common and general sort of oracles that Minutius Felix said, they
began to discontinue their responses, according as men began to be more
polite. But, howsoever decried oracles were, impostors always found
dupes; the grossest cheats having never failed.

Daniel discovered the imposture of the priests of Bel, who had a private
way of getting into the temple, to take away the offered meats, and made
the king believe that the idol consumed them. Mundus, being in love with
Paulina, the eldest of the priestesses of Isis, went and told her that
the god Anubis, being passionately fond of her, commanded her to give
him a meeting. She was afterwards shut up in a dark room, where her
lover Mundus (whom she believed to be the god Anubis,) was concealed.
This imposture having been discovered, Tiberius ordered those detestable
priests and priestesses to be crucified, and with them Iolea Mundus's
free woman, who had conducted the whole intrigue. He also commanded the
temple of Isis to be levelled with the ground, her statue to be thrown
into the Tiber, and, as to Mundus, he contented himself with sending him
into banishment.

Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, not only destroyed the temples of the
gods, but discovered the cheats of the priests, by shewing that the
statues, some of which were of brass, and others of wood, were hollow
within, and led into dark passages made in the wall.

Lucius in discovering the impostures of the false prophet Alexander,
says, that the oracles were chiefly afraid of the subtilties of the
Epicureans and Christians. The false prophet Alexander sometimes feigned
himself seized with a divine fury, and by means of the herb sopewort,
which he chewed, frothed at the mouth in so extraordinary a manner, that
the ignorant people attributed it to the power of the god he was
possessed by. He had long before prepared the head of a dragon made of
linen, which opened and shut its mouth by means of a horses hair. He
went by night to a place where the foundations of a temple were digging,
and having found water, either of a spring or rain that had settled
there, he hid in it a goose egg, in which he had inclosed a little
serpent that had just been hatched. The next day, very early in the
morning, he came quite naked into the street, having only a scarf about
his