the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions.

In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the
Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever
found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively
excites the fear and jealousy of the common people. When, in the third
century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying
the "Pagan" temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses
from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with
brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their
precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who
had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous
sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human
enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with
oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all
their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those
fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that
thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred
vessels of divine dreams. Who would not

rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,--
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in
the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid
all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor