ght of love eternal. These Hellenes, like
the Egyptian sages of the times of the Pharaohs, divined and declared
that the soul was held responsible after death for all it had done of
good or evil in its mortal body. They distinguished virtue and sin by
the eternal law, which was written in the hearts even of the heathen, to
the end that they, by nature, might do the works of the law; nay, there
were some of their loftiest spirits who, though they knew not the
Lord, it is true, required the repentance in the sinner, in the name of
Serapis, and pronounced that it was good to give up the delusive joys
and vain pleasures of the flesh and to break away from the evil--whether
of body or of soul--which we are led into by the senses. They called
upon their disciples to hold meetings for meditation whereby they might
discern truth and the divinity; and the vast precincts of the Serapeum
contained cells and alcoves for penitents and devotees, in which many
a soul touched by grace, dead to the world and absorbed in the
contemplation of such things as they esteemed high and heavenly, has
ripened to old age and death.

"But, my beloved, the Light in which we rejoice, through no merits or
deserts of our own, had not yet been shed on the lost children of those
days of darkness; and all those noble, and indeed most admirable efforts
were polluted by an admixture, even here, of coarse superstition, bloody
sacrifices, and foolish adoration of perishable stone idols and beasts
without understanding; and in other places by the false and delusive
arts of Magians and sorcerers. Even the dim apprehension of true
salvation was darkened and distorted by the subtleties of a vain and
inconsistent philosophy, which held a theory as immutably true one day
and overthrew or denied it the next. Thus, by degrees, the temple of the
idol of Sinope degenerated into a stronghold of deceit and bloodshed,
of the basest superstition, the pleasures of the flesh, and abominations
that cried to Heaven. Learning, to be sure, was still cherished in the
halls of the Serapeum; but its disciples turned with hardened hearts
from the truth which was sent into the world by the grace of God, and
they remained the prophets of error. The doctrines which the sages had
associated with the idea of Serapis, debased and degraded by the most
contemptible trivialities; lost all their worth and dignity; and after
the great Apostle to whom this basilica is dedicated, had brought the