days that produce no great artists--since then, I say, he speaks of me as
if I were a heathen--"

"And yet he esteems you highly, that I know," interrupted Dame Dorothea.

"I fully return his good opinion," replied Petrus, "and it is no ordinary
matter that estranges. He thinks that he only holds the true faith, and
ought to fight for it; he calls all artistic work a heathen abomination;
he never felt the purifying influence of the beautiful, and regards all
pictures and statues as tending to idolatry. Still he allows himself to
admire Polykarp's figures of angels and the Good Shepherd, but the lions
put the old warrior in a rage. 'Accursed idols and works of the devil,'
are what he calls them."

"But there were lions even in the temple of Solomon," cried Dorothea.

"I urged that, and also that in the schools of the catechists, and in the
educational history of animals which we possess and teach from, the
Saviour himself is compared to a lion, and that Mark, the evangelist, who
brought the doctrine of the gospel to Alexandria, is represented with a
lion. But he withstood me more and more violently, saying that
Polykarp's works were to adorn no sacred place, but the Caesareum, and
that to him is nothing but a heathen edifice, and the noble works of the
Greeks that are preserved there he calls revolting images by which Satan
ensnares the souls of Christian men. The other senators can understand
his hard words, but they cannot follow mine; and so they vote with him,
and my motion to construct the roadway was thrown over, because it did
not become a Christian assembly to promote idolatry, and to smooth a way
for the devil."