ment for the use of the funds of the State in buying back Church property for the Christians. Julian's whole influence leaned heavily on the pagan side. All the court favour was for men of the old religion; and under an absolute despotism this must have meant much, quite apart from any change of legislation. Knowing which way the wind blew, the enemies of the Christians ventured on many an act of violence in various localities, and always with impunity, and these local outbreaks led to cases of martyrdom, reminding people of the dark days of the Diocletian persecution. Thus, for insulting the sacrifices, Basil of Ancyra was flayed alive, slowly, seven strips of skin being peeled off at a time. Modern psychology will lend some credit to the story of a young man named Theodore who was tortured at Antioch by the reluctant prefect under orders from Julian to punish those people who had been most prominent in the procession that had transported the coffin of the martyr Babylas from Daphne, where its sacred contents were supposed to have silenced the oracle when Julian was consulting it, much to the emperor's annoyance. Rufinus got the story direct from the lips of its hero,[1] who in reply to a question whether in the process of scourging and racking he had not suffered the most intense pain, said that he felt the pain but a very little while, for a young man stood by him wiping off the sweat and so strengthening him that his time of trial was a season of rapture.
Later in his reign, Julian, annoyed at the failure of his attempts to galvanise the corpse of the old paganism into life again, began a subtle attack on the Christians by forbidding them to teach the classics in the schools, on the theory that the bible of paganism should only be taught by those who believed in it. So he said of them, "If they feel they have gone astray concerning the gods, let them go to the churches of the Galileeans and expound Matthew and Luke." To meet this severe blow at the culture of the Church, the two Apollinarises—father and son—set them-
