Bishop, however, seemed to care for
neither dissent nor approval, and it was in brief and cutting terms,
with no flourish of rhetoric, that he laid it down that wood and stone
had nothing to do with the divine Majesty, even though they were made
in the image of all that was Holy and worshipful or were most lavishly
beautified by the hand of man with the foul splendors of perishable
wealth. The greater the power ascribed by superstition to the base
material--whatever form it bore--the more odious must it be to the
Christian. Any man who should believe that a daemon could turn even a
breath of the Most High to its own will and purpose, would do well to
beware of idolatry, for Satan had already laid his clutches somewhere on
his robe.

At this sweeping accusation many a cheek colored wrathfully, and not
a word was spoken when the Bishop proceeded to require of his hearers
that, if the Serapeum should fall into the hands of the Imperial troops,
it should be at once and ruthlessly destroyed, and that his hearers
should not cease from the work of ruin till this scandal of the city
should be swept from the face of the earth.

"If then the world crumbles to atoms!" he cried, "well and good--the
heathen are right and we are wrong, and in that case it were better
to perish; but as surely as I sit on this throne by the grace of God,
Serapis is the vain imagining of fools and blind, and there is no god
but the God whose minister I am!"

"Whose Kingdom is everlasting, Amen!" chanted an old priest; and
Cynegius rose to explain that he should do nothing to hinder the total
overthrow of the temple and image.

Then the Comes spoke in defence of the Bishop's resolution to allow
the races to be held, as usual, on the morrow. He sketched a striking
picture of the shallow, unstable nature of the Alexandrians, a people
wholly given over to enjoyment. The troops at his command were few in
number in comparison with the heathen population of the city, and it was
a very important matter to keep a large proportion of the worshippers
of Serapis occupied elsewhere at the moment of the decisive onset.
Gladiator-fights were prohibited, and the people were tired of wild
beasts; but races, in which heathen and Christian alike might enter
their horses for competition, must certainly prove most attractive just
at this time of bitter rivalry and oppugnancy between the two religions,
and would draw thousands of the most able-bodied idolaters to the
Hi