Church were able to enjoy the good things of the world, and to look back on the dark days of their fathers as a horror of the past.
Too often when the sunshine of worldly prosperity has shone on the Church, this has been almost fatal to her spiritual life and character. This appears to have been the case under the Fatimite complacent rule. Thus the patriarch Philotheus is charged with the sin of simony, of which we hear so much in the annals of the Church in Egypt, but without the excuse of his predecessors in the old hard times; for he is said to have lived in luxury, and to have devoted himself to the pleasures of the table and the bath like any effete Oriental, ignoring the duties of his office and neglecting his flock.
This time of unusual good fortune for the Church in material affairs was followed by the very reverse, a more terrible persecution than any from which it had hitherto suffered under the yoke of Islam—the violent outbreak of the mad Caliph Hakim, to which attention was directed in an earlier part of this volume.[1] Egypt came in for her full share of suffering. Unhappily the Church was in a deplorable condition at the time, owing to quarrels among the clergy. One of these quarrels brought about the interference of the government, and so precipitated the persecution. John, a priest of Abunefer, a village near the monastery of St. Macarius, who had already paid for his ambition wlien he was seeking a bishopric, by being thrown into a pit by an angry prelate, had extracted a promise from the patriarch Zacharias that he should receive appointment to another bishopric. Furious at the non-fulfilment of this promise, he appealed to El-Hakim. The caliph was only too glad to have an excuse for attacking the head of the Church in Egypt. He had Zacharias arrested, and,—as the story which the Arab historian Makrizi accepted, runs,—thrown into a den of lions, who were miraculously restrained from
