; and if he
still connived at their precarious stay, they were deprived, under
his iron yoke, not only of the benefits of society, but of the common
birth-right of men and Christians. At the end of four hundred years, the
Montanists of Phrygia still breathed the wild enthusiasm of perfection
and prophecy which they had imbibed from their male and female apostles,
the special organs of the Paraclete. On the approach of the Catholic
priests and soldiers, they grasped with alacrity the crown of martyrdom
the conventicle and the congregation perished in the flames, but these
primitive fanatics were not extinguished three hundred years after
the death of their tyrant. Under the protection of their Gothic
confederates, the church of the Arians at Constantinople had braved the
severity of the laws: their clergy equalled the wealth and magnificence
of the senate; and the gold and silver which were seized by the
rapacious hand of Justinian might perhaps be claimed as the spoils of
the provinces, and the trophies of the Barbarians. A secret remnant of
Pagans, who still lurked in the most refined and most rustic conditions
of mankind, excited the indignation of the Christians, who were perhaps
unwilling that any strangers should be the witnesses of their intestine
quarrels. A bishop was named as the inquisitor of the faith, and his
diligence soon discovered, in the court and city, the magistrates,
lawyers, physicians, and sophists, who still cherished the superstition
of the Greeks. They were sternly informed that they must choose without
delay between the displeasure of Jupiter or Justinian, and that their
aversion to the gospel could no longer be distinguished under the
scandalous mask of indifference or impiety. The patrician Photius,
perhaps, alone was resolved to live and to die like his ancestors: he
enfranchised himself with the stroke of a dagger, and left his tyrant
the poor consolation of exposing with ignominy the lifeless corpse of
the fugitive. His weaker brethren submitted to their earthly monarch,
underwent the ceremony of baptism, and labored, by their extraordinary
zeal, to erase the suspicion, or to expiate the guilt, of idolatry.
The native country of Homer, and the theatre of the Trojan war, still
retained the last sparks of his mythology: by the care of the same
bishop, seventy thousand Pagans were detected and converted in Asia,
Phrygia, Lydia, and Caria; ninety-six churches were built for the new
proselytes;