re of Pelusium, (l. i. epist. 25, p. 8.) As the
letter is not of the most creditable sort, Tillemont, less sincere than
the Bollandists, affects a doubt whether this Cyril is the nephew of
Theophilus, (Mem. Eccles. tom. xiv. p. 268.)]

[Footnote 22: A grammarian is named by Socrates (l. vii. c. 13).]

[Footnote 23: See the youth and promotion of Cyril, in Socrates, (l.
vii. c. 7) and Renaudot, (Hist. Patriarchs. Alexandrin. p. 106, 108.)
The Abbe Renaudot drew his materials from the Arabic history of Severus,
bishop of Hermopolis Magma, or Ashmunein, in the xth century, who can
never be trusted, unless our assent is extorted by the internal evidence
of facts.]

Chapter XLVII: Ecclesiastical Discord.--Part II.

The prize was not unworthy of his ambition. At a distance from the
court, and at the head of an immense capital, the patriarch, as he was
now styled, of Alexandria had gradually usurped the state and authority
of a civil magistrate. The public and private charities of the city were
blindly obeyed by his numerous and fanatic parabolani, [24] familiarized
in their daily office with scenes of death; and the praefects of Egypt
were awed or provoked by the temporal power of these Christian pontiffs.
Ardent in the prosecution of heresy, Cyril auspiciously opened his
reign by oppressing the Novatians, the most innocent and harmless of the
sectaries. The interdiction of their religious worship appeared in his
eyes a just and meritorious act; and he confiscated their holy vessels,
without apprehending the guilt of sacrilege. The toleration, and even
the privileges of the Jews, who had multiplied to the number of forty
thousand, were secured by the laws of the Caesars and Ptolemies, and
a long prescription of seven hundred years since the foundation of
Alexandria. Without any legal sentence, without any royal mandate, the
patriarch, at the dawn of day, led a seditious multitude to the attack
of the synagogues. Unarmed and unprepared, the Jews were incapable of
resistance; their houses of prayer were levelled with the ground, and
the episcopal warrior, after-rewarding his troops with the plunder
of their goods, expelled from the city the remnant of the unbelieving
nation. Perhaps he might plead the insolence of their prosperity, and
their deadly hatred of the Christians, whose blood they had recently
shed in a malicious or accidental tumult.

Such crimes would have deserved the animadversion of the magistrate;
but