After this attack upon the pagans, their religion was no longer openly taught in Alexandria.  Some of the more zealous professors withdrew from the capital to Canopus, about ten miles distant, where the ancient priestly learning was still taught, unpersecuted because unnoticed; and there, under the pretence of studying hieroglyphics, a school was opened for teaching magic and other forbidden rites.  When the pagan worship ceased throughout Egypt, the temples were very much used as churches, and in some cases received in their ample courtyard a smaller church of Greek architecture, as in that of Medinet Abu.  In other cases Christian ornaments were added to the old walls, as in the rock temple of Kneph, opposite to Abu Simbel, where the figure of the Saviour with a glory round his head has been painted on the ceiling.  The Christians, in order to remove from before their eyes the memorials of the old superstition, covered up the sculpture on the walls with mud from the Nile and white plaster.  This coating we now take away, at a time when the idolatrous figures are no longer dangerous to religion, and we find the sculpture and painting fresh as when covered up fourteen hundred years ago.

[Illustration:  248.jpg CHRISTIAN PICTURE AT ABU SIMBE]

It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, upon embracing Christianity, at once threw off all of their pagan rites.  Among other customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the bodies of the dead.  St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body, beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible.  St. Augustine, on the other hand, well understanding that the immortality of the soul without the body was little likely to be understood or valued by the ignorant, praises the Egyptians for that very practice, and says that they were the only Christians who really believed in the resurrection from the dead.  The tapers burnt before the altars were from the earliest times used to light up the splendours of the Egyptian altars, in the darkness of their temples, and had been burnt in still greater numbers in the yearly festival of the candles.  The playful custom of giving away sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our twentieth of January, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier, and it still marks the Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth-night.  The division of the people into clergy and laity, which was unknown to Greeks and Romans, was introduced into Christianity in the fourth century by the Egyptians.  While the rest of Christendom were clothed in woollen, linen, the common dress of the Egyptians, was universally adopted by the clergy as more becoming to the purity of their manners.  At the same time the clergy copied the Egyptian priests in the custom of shaving the crown of the head bald.