we now take away, at a time when the idolatrous
figures are no longer dangerous to religion, and we find the sculpture
and painting fresh as when covered up fourteen hundred years ago.

[Illustration: 248.jpg CHRISTIAN PICTURE AT ABU SIMBE]

It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, upon embracing
Christianity, at once threw off all of their pagan rites. Among other
customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the
bodies of the dead. St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian
converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered
with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little
reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body,
beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible. St. Augustine, on the other
hand, well understanding that the immortality of the soul without the
body was little likely to be understood or valued by the ignorant,
praises the Egyptians for that very practice, and says that they were
the only Christians who really believed in the resurrection from the
dead. The tapers burnt before the altars were from the earliest times
used to light up the splendours of the Egyptian altars, in the darkness
of their temples, and had been burnt in still greater numbers in the
yearly festival of the candles. The playful custom of giving away
sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our
twentieth of January, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier,
and it still marks the Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth-night. The division
of the people into clergy and laity, which was unknown to Greeks and
Romans, was introduced into Christianity in the fourth century by the
Egyptians. While the rest of Christendom were clothed in woollen, linen,
the common dress of the Egyptians, was universally adopted by the clergy
as more becoming to the purity of their manners. At the same time the
clergy copied the Egyptian priests in the custom of shaving the crown of
the head bald.

The new law in favour of trinitarian Christianity was enforced with as
great strictness against the Arians as against the pagans. The bishops
and priests of that party wrere everywhere turned out of their churches,
which were then given up to the Homoousians. Theodosius summoned a
council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople, to re-enact
the Nicene creed; and in the future religious rebellions of the
Egyptians they always quoted agains