This philosophical and sublime piety is one of the most singular monuments of the first century. But it is somewhat strange that, at the end of the Similitudes, the shepherd gives him very good-natured maidens--_valde affabiles_--to take care of his house and declares to him that he cannot fulfil God's commandments without these maidens, who, it is plain, typify the virtues. This list would become immense if we were to enter into every detail. We will carry it no further, but conclude with the Sibyls. XXX. The Sibyls.--What is most apocryphal in the primitive church is the prodigious number of verses in favor of the Christian religion attributed to the ancient sibyls. Diodorus Siculus knew of only one, who was taken at Thebes by the Epigoni, and placed at Delphos before the Trojan war. Ten sibyls--that is, ten prophetesses, were soon made from this one. She of Cuma had most credit among the Romans, and the sibyl Erythrea among the Greeks. As all oracles were delivered in verse, none of the sibyls could fail to make verses; and to give them greater authority they sometimes made them in acrostics also. Several Christians who had not a zeal according to knowledge not only misinterpreted the ancient verses supposed to have been written by the sibyls, but also made some themselves, and which is worse, in acrostics, not dreaming that this difficult artifice of acrosticizing had no resemblance whatever to the inspiration and enthusiasm of a prophetess. They resolved to support the best of causes by the most awkward fraud. They accordingly made bad Greek verses, the initials of which signified in Greek--Jesus, Christ, Son, Saviour, and these verses said that with five loaves and two fishes He should feed five thousand men in the desert and that with the fragments that remained He should fill twelve baskets. The millennium and the New Jerusalem, which Justin had seen in the air for forty nights, were, of course, foretold by the sibyls. In the fourth century Lactantius collected almost all the verses attributed to the sibyls and considered them as convincing proofs. The opinion was so well authorized and so long held that we still sing hymns in which the testimony of the sibyls is joined with the predictions of David: _Solvet sæclum in favilla,_ _Teste David cum Sibylla._ This catalogue of errors and frauds has been carried quite far enough. A hundred might be repeated, so constantly has the world been composed of deceivers and of people fond of being deceived.