e of his enemy to restore
St. Cyril to his see. He shortly after made him an eye-witness to the
miraculous manifestation of his power, by which he covered his
blaspheming enemies with confusion. The following most authentic history
of that remarkable event is gathered from the original records, and
vindicated against the exceptions of certain skeptics by Tillemont,[15]
and by our most learned Mr. Warburton, in his Julian. In vain had the
most furious tyrants exerted the utmost cruelty, and bent the whole
power which the empire of the world put into their hands, to extirpate,
if it had been possible, the Christian name. The faith increased under
axes, and the blood of martyrs was a fruitful seed, which multiplied
{610} the Church over all nations. The experience how weak and
ineffectual a means brute force was to this purpose, moved the emperor
Julian, the most implacable, the most crafty, and the most dangerous
instrument which the devil ever employed in that design, to shift his
ground, and change his artillery and manner of assault. He affected a
show of great moderation, and in words disclaimed open persecution; but
he sought by every foul and indirect means to undermine the faith, and
sap the foundations of the Christian religion. For this purpose he had
recourse to every base art of falsehood and dissimulation, in which he
was the most complete master. He had played off the round of his
machines to no purpose, and seemed reduced to his last expedient of the
pacific kind, the discrediting the Christian religion by bringing the
scandal of imposture upon its divine author. This he attempted to do by
a project of rebuilding the Jewish temple--which, if he could have
compassed, it would have sufficiently answered his wicked design; Christ
and the prophet Daniel having in express terms foretold not only its
destruction, which was effected by the Romans under Titus, but its final
ruin and desolation.

The Jewish religion was a temporary dispensation, intended by its divine
author, God himself, to prefigure one more complete and perfect, and
prepare men to embrace it. It not only essentially required bloody
sacrifices, but it enjoined a fixed and certain place for them to be
performed in; this was the temple at Jerusalem. Hence the final
destruction of this temple was he abolition of the sacrifices, which
annihilated the whole system of this religious institution. Whence St.
Chrysostom[16] shows that the destruction of Jer