tians, and astounded pagans, ascended the hundred steps leading up the mound, and penetrated into the faintly lighted sanctuary, from within which the Christians afterwards believed that Olympius, on the night before the evacuation, had heard a voice chanting "Alleluia" (Soz. vii. 15). There was the huge seated statue of Serapis, constructed of various metals, now dusky with age, and inlaid with various precious stones (Clem. Alex. Cohort 48). The successor of Athanasius gazed on this visible concentration of the power of Egyptian idolatry, no doubt the symbol to many Alexandrians of the principle of life and of the powers that ruled the underworld. It was a supreme moment; at last the church had her foot on the neck of her foe. Mutterings of superstitious fear were heard; to draw near the image was to cause an earthquake. The archbishop turned to a soldier who held an axe, and bade him "strike hard." The man obeyed. A shriek of terror burst from many; another and another blow followed, the head was lopped off, and there ran out a troop of mice, which had "dwelt within the god of the Egyptians." Misgiving and alarm gave way to noisy triumph; the body of Serapis was broken up and burned; the head was made a public show. At Canopus, 14 miles from Alexandria, temples were immediately laid low. The images were melted down into cauldrons and other vessels required in the eleemosynary work of the Alexandrian church. The one exception was an image of an ape, which Theophilus set up in a public place "in perpetuam rei memoriam," to the vexation of the pagan grammarian Ammonius, who lived to teach the young Socrates at Constantinople, and used to complain seriously of the injustice thus done to "Greek religion" (Socr. v. 16). During the demolition of various temples there were found hollow statues of bronze and wood, set against the walls, but capable of being entered by the priests, who thus carried on their impostures, which Theophilus explained to his pagan fellow-citizens (Theod. v. 22). But when the Nile-gauge was removed from the Serapeum to the church, the pagans asked, Would not the god avenge himself by withholding the yearly inundation his power had been wont to effect? It was, in fact, delayed. Murmurs swelled into remonstrances; the state of the city was becoming dangerous; the prefect had to consult his sovereign. Theodosius's answer was: "If the Nile would not rise except by means of enchantments or sacrifices, let Egypt remain unwatered." Forthwith the river began to rise with vehemence; the fear was now of a flood (Soz. vii. 20). We know not the nature of those concessions to the pagans which, according to a letter from Atticus to Theophilus's nephew Cyril, Theophilus made at this time for the sake of peace (Cyril, Epp. p. 202), but they did not prevent a pagan like Eunapius from abusing him. To Eunapius the temple-breakers were impious men who "threw everything into confusion, boasted of having conquered the gods," enriched themselves by the plunder, "brought into the sacred places the so-called monks, men in form but swinish in life," deified the, "bones and heads of worthless men who had been punished by the courts for their offences," and assigned to "bad slaves who had borne the marks of the lash the title of martyrs and intercessors with the gods."
In 391 or 392 Theophilus was named by the council of Capua as arbiter of the dispute between Flavian, as representing the Meletian succession to the see of Antioch, and Evagrius, whose claims, like those of his predecessor Paulinus, were upheld by the West. Theophilus undertook to examine the case with the aid of his suffragans. Evagrius soon died, but Flavian was not recognized by the West until Chrysostom primarily, and Theophilus secondarily, effected that result in 398 (Soz. viii. 3; cf. Tillem. x. 538).
In A.D. 394 we find Theophilus for the first time at Constantinople, at a council in the baptistery of the great church, on Sept. 29. He sat next to Nectarius of Constantinople, and there were present also Flavian, Gregory of Nyssa, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Theophilus was in close relations with the solitaries of Egypt. In the Sayings of the Fathers he appears as inviting some of them to be present. at the destruction of the temples, and again as visiting those of the famous Nitrian settlement, and penetrating to the more distant Scetis. Still more celebrated was his intimacy with four monks of Scetis, known as "the Tall Brothers." These years were the best in Theophilus's episcopate; and if it had lasted only ten years, he might have left the name, if not of a saint, at least of a good as well as an able and energetic prelate.
But in 395 the story of his life changes its character. He begins to justify the description afterwards given of him by an adversary "Naturally impulsive, headlong, intensely contentious, insatiable in grasping at his objects, awaiting in his own case neither trial nor inquiry, impatient of opposition, determined to carry out his own resolves " (Pallad. Dial. p. 76). In 395, at the request of bp. John of Jerusalem, he sent his friend Isidore, said to have been an Origenist, as his envoy into Palestine, to abate the strife between John and Jerome. Isidore visited Jerome three times, but would not give him a letter which Theophilus had written him (ib. 39); and his so-called mediation only produced a soreness on Theophilus's part towards Jerome, whose letters for some time he ignored. At last he wrote, coldly exhorting Jerome to respect the authority of the bp. of Jerusalem, and again in 399 (according to Vallarsi), urging Jerome to come to terms with John.
Theophilus had been throwing his whole weight against the extreme literalism of the Anthropomorphists, a coarse reaction from the Alexandrian allegorism. A number of ill-informed and enthusiastic monks recoiled even from the ordinary explanation of those O.T. economies by which, as Epiphanius himself held, the divine manifestation had been adapted to the capacities of human nature (Haer. 70. 7; see also Aug. Haer. 50 and 76; Theodoret, iv. 10). They took the scriptural expressions "as to eyes, face, and hands of God, as they found them, without examination " (Soz. viii. 11). Hence, when Theophilus, in his Paschal Letter for 399, in-
