But the Emperor was not merely a furious bigot. There is evidence that he fully recognised the wonderful strength of the Christian ecclesiastical organisation and contrasted it with the essential weakness of the pagan system. In this he anticipated the Emperor Julian. Paganism was anything but a church. Its framework was loose and disconnected. There were various colleges of priests, some of which were powerful and had branches throughout the Empire, but there was little connection between them save that of a common ritual. There was also little doctrine save in the special mysteries, where membership was preceded by formal initiation. Maximin sought to institute a pagan clergy based upon the Christian model, with a definite hierarchy from the highest to the lowest. There were already chief priests of the various provinces, who had borne for long the titles of Asiarch, Pontarch, Galatarch, and Ciliciarch in their respective provinces. Maximin developed their powers on the model of those of the Christian bishops, giving them authority over subordinates and entrusting them with the duty of seeing that the sacrifices were duly and regularly offered. He tried to raise the standard of the priesthood by choosing its members from the best families, by insisting on the priests wearing white flowing robes, by giving them a guard of soldiers and full powers of search and arrest. Evidently, Maximin was something more than the lustful, bloodthirsty tyrant who appears in the pages of Lactantius and the ecclesiastical historians. He dealt the Church much shrewder—though not less ineffectual—blows than his colleagues in persecution. With such an Emperor another appeal to the faggot and the sword was inevitable, and the death of Galerius was the signal for a renewal of the persecution. This time Maximin struck directly at the most conspicuous figures in the Christian Church and counted among his victims Peter, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and three other Egyptian bishops—Methodus, Bishop of Tyre, Basiliscus, Bishop of Comana in Bithynia, and Silvanus, Bishop of Emesa in Phœnicia. In Egypt the persecution was so sharp that it drew Saint Antony from his hermit’s cell in the desert to succour the unfortunate in Alexandria. He escaped with his life, probably because he was overlooked or disdained, or because the mighty influence which he was to exercise upon the Church had not yet declared itself. This persecution was followed by a terrible drought, famine, and pestilence. Eusebius,[69] in a vigorous chapter, describes how parents were driven by hunger to sell not only their lands but also their children, how whole families were wiped out, how the pestilence seemed to mark down the rich for its special vengeance, and how in certain townships the inhabitants were driven to kill all the dogs within their walls that they might not feed on the bodies of the unburied dead. Amid these horrors the Christians alone remained calm. They alone displayed the