and chose rather to receive his appointment from some of the Homoousian bishops who were living in banishment in the Thebaid.  After this advance of the barbarians the interesting city of Petra, which since the time of Trajan had been in the power or the friendship of Rome or Constantinople, was lost to the civilised world.  This rocky fastness, which was ornamented with temples, a triumphal arch, and a theatre, and had been a bishop’s see, was henceforth closed against all travellers; it had no place in the map till it was discovered by Burckhardt in our own days without a human being dwelling in it, with oleanders and tamarisks choking up its entrance through the cliff, and with brambles trailing their branches over the rock-hewn temples.

[Illustration:  243.jpg TEMPLE COURTYARD, MEDINET ABU]

The reign of Theodosius, which extended from 379 to 395, is remarkable for the blow then given to paganism.  The old religion had been sinking even before Christianity had become the religion of the emperors; it had been discouraged by Constantine, who had closed many of the temples; but Theodosius made a law in the first year of his reign that the whole of the empire should be Christian, and should receive the trinitarian faith.  He soon afterwards ordered that Sunday should be kept holy, and forbade all work and law-proceedings on that day; and he sent Cynegius, the prefect of the palace, into Egypt, to see these laws carried into effect in that province.

The wishes of the emperor were ably followed up by Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria.  He cleansed the temple of Mithra, and overthrew the statues in the celebrated temple of Serapis, which seemed the very citadel of paganism.  He also exposed to public ridicule the mystic ornaments and statues which a large part of his fellow-citizens still regarded as sacred.  It was not, however, to be supposed that this could be peaceably borne by a people so irritable as the Alexandrians.  The students in the schools of philosophy put themselves at the head of the mob to stop the work of destruction, and to revenge themselves upon their assailants, and several battles were fought in the streets between the pagans and the Christians, in which both parties lost many lives; but as the Christians were supported by the power of the prefect, the pagans were routed, and many whose rank would have made them objects of punishment were forced to fly from Alexandria.

No sooner had the troops under the command of the prefect put down the pagan opposition than the work of destruction was again carried forward by the zeal of the bishop.  The temples were broken open, their ornaments destroyed, and the statues of the gods melted for the use of the Alexandrian church.  One statue of an Egyptian god was alone saved from the wreck, and was set up in mockery of those who had worshipped it; and this ridicule of their religion was a cause of greater anger to the pagans than even the destruction of the other statues.  The great statue of Serapis, which was made of wood covered with plates of metal, was knocked to pieces by the axes of the soldiers.  The head and limbs were broken off, and the wooden trunk was burnt in the amphitheatre amid the shouts and jeers of the bystanders.  A conjectured fragment of this statue is now in the British Museum.