st august lay preacher the Church has ever known. The
legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus strikingly illustrates the
wondrous transformation of society. These Christian brothers, taking
shelter in a cave during the Decian persecution, awoke, according to the
legend, after a slumber of over a century, to find Christianity
everywhere dominant, and a Christian Emperor on the throne of the
C[ae]sars.[59] The doctrines of Christ, like the rays of the sun, quickly
irradiated the world. With choirs and hymns, in cities and villages, in
the highways and markets, the praises of the Almighty were sung. The
enemies of God were as though they had not been.[60] The Lord brought up
the vine of Christianity from a far country, and cast out the heathen,
and planted and watered it, till it twined round the sceptre of the
C[ae]sars, wreathed the columns of the Capitol, and filled the whole land.
The heathen fanes were deserted, the gods discrowned, and the pagan
flamen no longer offered sacrifice to the Capitoline Jove, Rome, which
had dragged so many conquered deities in triumph at its chariot wheels,
at length yielded to a mightier than all the gods of Olympus. The old
faiths faded from the firmament of human thought as the stars of
midnight at the dawn of day. The banished deities forsook their ancient
seats. They walked no longer in the vale of Tempe nor in the grove of
Daphne. The naiads bathed not in Scamander's stream nor Simois, nor the
nereids in the waters of the bright [AE]gean Sea. The nymphs and dryads
ceased to haunt the sylvan solitudes. The oriads walked no more in light
on Ida's lofty top.

O ye vain false gods of Hellas!
Ye are vanished evermore!

Long before the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the
empire, its influence had been felt permeating the entire community.
Amid the disintegration of society it was the sole conservative
element--the salt which preserved it from corruption. In the midst of
anarchy and confusion a community was being organized on a principle
previously unknown in the heathen world, ruling not by terror but by
love; by moral power, not by physical force; inspired by lofty faith
amid a world of unbelief, and cultivating moral purity amid the reeking
abominations of a sensual age.

We should do scant justice to the blameless character, simple dignity,
and moral purity of the primitive Christians, if we forgot the
thoroughly effete and corrupt society by which they were