After Theodosius had thus established the Nicene faith, so far as imperial authority, in conjunction with that of the great prelates, could do so, he closed the final contest with Paganism itself.  His laws against Pagan sacrifices were severe.  It was death to inspect the entrails of victims for sacrifice; and all other sacrifices, in the year 392, were made a capital offence.  He even demolished the Pagan temples, as the Scots destroyed the abbeys and convents which were the great monuments of Mediaeval piety.  The revenues of the temples were confiscated.  Among the great works of ancient art which were destroyed, but might have been left or converted into Christian use, were the magnificent temple of Edessa and the serapis of Alexandria, uniting the colossal grandeur of Egyptian with the graceful harmony of Grecian art.  At Rome not only was the property of the temples confiscated, but also all privileges of the priesthood.  The Vestal virgins passed unhonored in the streets.  Whoever permitted any Pagan rite—­even the hanging of a chaplet on a tree—­forfeited his estate.  The temples of Rome were not destroyed, as in Syria and Egypt; but as all their revenues were confiscated, public worship declined before the superior pomps of a sensuous and even idolatrous Christianity.  The Theodosian code, published by Theodosius the Younger, A.D. 438, while it incorporated Christian usages and laws in the legislation of the Empire, did not, however, disturb the relation of master and slave; and when the Empire fell, slavery still continued as it was in the times of Augustus and Diocletian.  Nor did Christianity elevate imperial despotism into a wise and beneficent rule.  It did not change perceptibly the habits of the aristocracy.  The most vivid picture we have of the vices of the leading classes of Roman society are painted by a contemporaneous Pagan historian,—­Ammianus Marcellinus,—­and many a Christian matron adorned herself with the false and colored hair, the ornaments, the rouge, and the silks of the Pagan women of the time of Cleopatra.  Never was luxury more enervating, or magnificence more gorgeous, but without refinement, than in the generation that preceded the fall of Rome.  And coexistent with the vices which prepared the way for the conquests of the barbarians was the wealth of the Christian clergy, who vied with the expiring Paganism in the splendor of their churches, in the ornaments of their altars, and in the imposing ceremonial of their worship.  The bishop became a great worldly potentate, and the strictest union was formed between the Church and State.  The greatest beneficent change which the Church effected was in relation to divorce,—­the facility for which disgraced the old Pagan civilization; but Christianity invested marriage with the utmost solemnity, so that it became a holy and indissoluble sacrament,—­to which the Catholic Church, in the days of deepest degeneracy has ever clung, leaving to the Protestants the restoration of this old Pagan custom of divorce, as well as the encouragement and laudation of a material civilization.