Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 3 (1897).djvu/228

 208 THE DECLINE AND FALL The worship of the Chrlttian Uartyrs suaded by their superiors to direct their vows to the reigning deities of the age ; and will insensibly imbibe an ardent zeal for the support and propagation of the new doctrine, which spiritual hunger at first compelled them to accept. The generation that arose in the world after the promulgation of the Imperial laws was attracted within the pale of the Catholic church : and so rapid, yet so gentle, was the fall of Paganism that only twenty- eight years after the death of Theodosius the faint and minute vestiges were no longer visible to the eye of the legislator."* The ruin of the Pagan religion is described by the sophists as a dreadful and amazing prodigy which covered the earth with darkness and restored the ancient dominion of chaos and of night. They relate, in solemn and pathetic strains, that the temples were converted into sepulchres, and that the holy places, which had been adorned by the statues of the gods, were basely polluted by the relics of Christian martyrs. "The monks '' (a race of filthy animals, to whom Eunapius is tempted to refuse the name of men) " are the authors of the new worship, which, in the place of one of those deities, who are conceived by the understanding, has substituted the meanest and most contemptible slaves. The heads, salted and pickled, of those infamous malefactors, who for the multitude of their crimes have suffered a just and ignominious death ; their bodies, still marked by the impression of the lash, and the scars of those tortures which were inflicted by the sentence of the magistrate ; such " (continues Eunapius) " are the gods which the earth produces in our days ; such are the martjTs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the Deity, whose tombs are now conse- crated as the objects of the veneration of the people." "^ With- out approving the malice, it is natural enough to share the surprise, of the Sophist, the spectator of a revolution which raised those obscure victims of the laws of Rome to the rank of celestial and invisible protectors of the Roman empire. The grateful respect of the Christians for the martyrs of the faith Avas exalted, by time and victory, into religious adoration ; and the most illustrious of the saints and prophets were deservedly associated to the honours of the martyrs. One hundred and fifty years after the glorious deaths of St. Peter and St. Paul, '■' Paganos qui siipersunt, quanquam jam nullos esse credamus, &c. Cod. Theodos. 1. xvi. tit. x. leg. 22, A.D. 423. The younger Theodosius was afterwards satisfied that his judgment had been somewhat premature. ■-"See Eunapius, in the life of the sophist .itdesius [p. 65, ed. Commelin] ; in that of Eustathius he foretells the ruin of Paganism, «<»* n fiueiSej, koX itUit «rKOTos Tvpavioja-et to. ivrl yijs KciAAnrro.