Ch. 25 - The Temple and the Church - Page 2

In
the far provinces, where the enemies of the gods approach to profane the
sacred groves, behold the scattered people congregating by night to
journey to the shrine of Serapis! Adoring thousands kneel beneath the
lofty porticoes, while within, in the secret hall where the light is
dim, where the air quivers round the breathing deities on their
pedestals of gold, the high priest Ulpius reads the destinies of the
future, that are unrolled before his eyes like a book!'

As he ceased, and, still holding the hands of his captives, looked on
them fixedly as ever, his eyes brightened and dilated again; but they
expressed not the slightest recognition either of father or daughter.
The delirium of his imagination had transported him to the temple at
Alexandria; the days were revived when his glory had risen to its
culminating point, when the Christians trembled before him as their
fiercest enemy, and the Pagans surrounded him as their last hope. The
victims of his former and forgotten treachery were but as two among the
throng of votaries allured by the fame of his eloquence, by the
triumphant notoriety of his power to protect the adherents of the
ancient creed.

But it was not always thus that his madness declared itself: there were
moments when it rose to appalling frenzy. Then he imagined himself to
be again hurling the Christian assailants from the topmost walls of the
besieged temple, in that past time when the image of Serapis was doomed
by the Bishop of Alexandria to be destroyed. His yells of fury, his
frantic execrations of defiance were heard afar, in the solemn silence
of pestilence-stricken Rome. Those who, during the most fatal days of
the Gothic blockade, dropped famished on the pavement before the little
temple, as they endeavoured to pass it on their onward way, presented a
dread reality of death, to embody the madman's visions of battle and
slaughter. As these victims of famine lay expiring in the street, they
heard above them his raving voice cursing them for Christians,
triumphing over them as defeated enemies destroyed by his hand,
exhorting his imaginary adherents to fling the slain above on the dead
below, until the bodies of the besiegers of the temple were piled, as
barriers against their living comrades, round its walls. Sometimes his
frenzy gloried in the fancied revival of the foul and sanguinary
ceremonies of Pagan superstition. Then he bared his arms, and shouted
aloud for the sacrifice; he committed dark and nameless atrocities--for
now again the dead and the dying lay before him, to give substance to
the shadow of his evil thoughts; and Plague and Hunger were as creatures
of his will, and slew the victim for the altar ready to his hands.

At other times, when the raving