and linen vestments, Bibles, and liturgies, and vases of
gold and silver, were supplied by the pious munificence of Justinian.
The Jews, who had been gradually stripped of their immunities, were
oppressed by a vexatious law, which compelled them to observe the
festival of Easter the same day on which it was celebrated by the
Christians. And they might complain with the more reason, since the
Catholics themselves did not agree with the astronomical calculations of
their sovereign: the people of Constantinople delayed the beginning of
their Lent a whole week after it had been ordained by authority; and
they had the pleasure of fasting seven days, while meat was exposed for
sale by the command of the emperor. The Samaritans of Palestine were a
motley race, an ambiguous sect, rejected as Jews by the Pagans, by the
Jews as schismatics, and by the Christians as idolaters. The abomination
of the cross had already been planted on their holy mount of Garizim,
but the persecution of Justinian offered only the alternative of baptism
or rebellion. They chose the latter: under the standard of a desperate
leader, they rose in arms, and retaliated their wrongs on the lives, the
property, and the temples, of a defenceless people. The Samaritans were
finally subdued by the regular forces of the East: twenty thousand were
slain, twenty thousand were sold by the Arabs to the infidels of Persia
and India, and the remains of that unhappy nation atoned for the crime
of treason by the sin of hypocrisy. It has been computed that one
hundred thousand Roman subjects were extirpated in the Samaritan war,
which converted the once fruitful province into a desolate and smoking
wilderness. But in the creed of Justinian, the guilt of murder could not
be applied to the slaughter of unbelievers; and he piously labored to
establish with fire and sword the unity of the Christian faith.

With these sentiments, it was incumbent on him, at least, to be always
in the right. In the first years of his administration, he signalized
his zeal as the disciple and patron of orthodoxy: the reconciliation of
the Greeks and Latins established the _tome_ of St. Leo as the creed of
the emperor and the empire; the Nestorians and Eutychians were exposed.
on either side, to the double edge of persecution; and the four synods
of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and _Chalcedon_, were ratified by the
code of a Catholic lawgiver. But while Justinian strove to maintain the
uniformi