feeling, both for and against, had always, of course, been rife here; but
to-day they were manifest in an acuter form--hatred had added its taint
and lent virulence to every emotion. The heathen were oppressed and
angered, their rights abridged and defied; they saw the Christians
triumphant at every point, and hatred is a protean monster which rages
most fiercely and most venomously when it has lurked in the foul career
of envy.

The Christians could hate, too, and they hated the idolaters who gloried
with haughty self-sufficiency in their intellectual inheritance; the
traditions of a brilliant past. They, who had been persecuted and
contemned, now had the upper hand; they were in power, and the more
insolently they treated their opponents, the more injustice they did
them, and the less the victimized heathen were able to revenge
themselves, the more bitterly did the Christians detest the party they
contemned as superstitious idolaters. In their care for the soul--the
spiritual and divine part--the Christians had hitherto neglected the
graces of the body; thus the heathen had remained the undisputed masters
of the palaestra and the hippodrome. In the gymnasium the Christian
refused even to compete, for the exhibition of his naked body he regarded
as an abomination; but on the race-course he had lately been willing to
display his horses, and many times had disputed the crown with the
hereditary victors, so that, even here, the heathen felt his time-honored
and undisputed supremacy endangered. This was intolerable--this must be
averted--the mere thought of being beaten on this ground roused the
idolaters to wrath and malice. They displayed their color in wreaths of
scarlet poppies, pomegranate flowers and red roses, with crimson ribbands
and dresses; white and green, the colors formerly adopted by the
competitors, were abandoned; for all the heathen were unanimous in
combining their forces against the common foe. The ladies used red sun-