y from the unchristian
contentions for dominion and supremacy which reigned among those who set
themselves up for the fathers and defenders of the Church" (p. 123).

Learning during this century fell lower and lower, in spite of the
schools established and fostered by the emperors, and while knowledge
diminished, vice increased. "The vices of the clergy were now carried to
the most enormous lengths; and all the writers of this century, whose
probity and virtue render them worthy of credit, are unanimous in their
accounts of the luxury, arrogance, avarice, and voluptuousness of the
sacerdotal orders. The bishops, particularly those of the first rank,
created various delegates or ministers, who managed for them the affairs
of their dioceses, and a sort of courts were gradually formed, where
these pompous ecclesiastics gave audience, and received the homage of a
cringing multitude" (p. 123). Superstition performed its maddest freak
in the Stylites, men "who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;" the
original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent
thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty
cubits high. Another of the same class spent sixty-eight years in this
useful manner (see pp. 128, 129, and _note_). The Agapae were abolished,
and auricular confession was established, during this century.

Among the bishops of this century, one name deserves an immortality of
infamy. It is that of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria. Under his rule took
place the terrible murder of Hypatia, that pure and beautiful Platonic
teacher, who was dragged by a fanatic mob, headed by Peter the Reader,
into the great church of Alexandria, and tortured to death on the steps
of the high altar. Cyril's "hold upon the audiences of the giddy city
[Alexandria] was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of
Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her
expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her
comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers. Each day,
before her academy, stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was
crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria.... Hypatia and Cyril!
Philosophy and bigotry. They cannot exist together. So Cyril felt, and
on that feeling he acted. As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was
assaulted by Cyril's mob--a mob of many monks. Stripped naked in the
street, she was dragged into a church, and there