It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, upon embracing Christianity, at once threw off all of their pagan rites. Among other customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the bodies of the dead. St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body, beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible. St. Augustine, on the other hand, well understanding that the immortality of the soul without the body was little likely to be understood or valued by the ignorant, praises the Egyptians for that very practice, and says that they were the only Christians who really believed in the resurrection from the dead. The tapers burnt before the altars were from the earliest times used to light up the splendours of the Egyptian altars, in the darkness of their temples, and had been burnt in still greater numbers in the yearly festival of the candles. The playful custom of giving away sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our twentieth of January, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier, and it still marks the Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth-night. The division of the people into clergy and laity, which was unknown to Greeks and Romans, was introduced into Christianity in the fourth century by the Egyptians. While the rest of Christendom were clothed in woollen, linen, the common dress of the Egyptians, was universally adopted by the clergy as more becoming to the purity of their manners. At the same time the clergy copied the Egyptian priests in the custom of shaving the crown of the head bald. The new law in favour of trinitarian Christianity was enforced with as great strictness against the Arians as against the pagans. The bishops and priests of that party wrere everywhere turned out of their churches, which were then given up to the Homoousians. Theodosius summoned a council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople, to re-enact the Nicene creed; and in the future religious rebellions of the Egyptians they always quoted against the Greeks this council of Constantinople, with that of Nicasa, as the foundation of their faith. By this religious policy, Theodosius did much to delay the fall of the empire. He won the friendship of his Egyptian subjects, as well as of their Saracen neighbours, all of whom, as far as they were Christian, held to the Nicene creed. Egypt became the safest of his provinces; and, when his armies had been recruited with so many barbarians that they could no longer be trusted, these new levies wrere marched into Egypt under the command of Hormisdas, and an equal number of Egyptians were drafted out of the army of Egypt, and led into Thessaly.