Learning during this century fell lower and lower, in spite of the schools established and fostered by the emperors, and while knowledge diminished, vice increased.  “The vices of the clergy were now carried to the most enormous lengths; and all the writers of this century, whose probity and virtue render them worthy of credit, are unanimous in their accounts of the luxury, arrogance, avarice, and voluptuousness of the sacerdotal orders.  The bishops, particularly those of the first rank, created various delegates or ministers, who managed for them the affairs of their dioceses, and a sort of courts were gradually formed, where these pompous ecclesiastics gave audience, and received the homage of a cringing multitude” (p. 123).  Superstition performed its maddest freak in the Stylites, men “who stood motionless on the tops of pillars;” the original maniac being one Simon, a Syrian, who actually spent thirty-seven years of his life on pillars, the last of which was forty cubits high.  Another of the same class spent sixty-eight years in this useful manner (see pp. 128, 129, and note).  The Agapae were abolished, and auricular confession was established, during this century.

Among the bishops of this century, one name deserves an immortality of infamy.  It is that of Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria.  Under his rule took place the terrible murder of Hypatia, that pure and beautiful Platonic teacher, who was dragged by a fanatic mob, headed by Peter the Reader, into the great church of Alexandria, and tortured to death on the steps of the high altar.  Cyril’s “hold upon the audiences of the giddy city [Alexandria] was, however, much weakened by Hypatia, the daughter of Theon, the mathematician, who not only distinguished herself by her expositions of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, but also by her comments on the writings of Apollonius and other geometers.  Each day, before her academy, stood a long train of chariots; her lecture-room was crowded with the wealth and fashion of Alexandria....  Hypatia and Cyril!  Philosophy and bigotry.  They cannot exist together.  So Cyril felt, and on that feeling he acted.  As Hypatia repaired to her academy, she was assaulted by Cyril’s mob—­a mob of many monks.  Stripped naked in the street, she was dragged into a church, and there killed by the club of Peter the Reader [A.D. 415].  The corpse was cut to pieces, the flesh was scraped from the bones with shells, and the remnants cast into a fire.  For this frightful crime Cyril was never called to account.  It seemed to be admitted that the end sanctified the means” (Draper’s “Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 55).