Since the erection of the famous church of Saint Sophia--the final effort of the genius of Byzantine architecture--that art had fallen into desuetude, and such of the famous structures of the ancients as survived were used as quarries, whence were derived the materials for the basilica and the palaces of the wealthy and luxurious patriarch and bishop. But this, unhappily, was not the worst of the prevalent evils of the time. An organized conspiracy against learning existed, and was most active in those quarters where education, however imperfect, should at least have suggested the importance of preserving the priceless remains of antiquity. The art of making parchment had, with many other useful inventions, been lost, and, in consequence, writing materials had become rare and expensive. The monk, too idle to invent, but ever ready to destroy, soon devised means for supplying this deficiency. Invading the public libraries, he diligently collected all the available manuscripts upon which were inscribed the thoughts of classic writers--of whom many are now only known to us by name--and, erasing the characters, used their pages to record the legends of his spurious saints and apocryphal martyrs. It is not beyond the range of probability that the original books of the New Testament, falling during these evil days into the hands of persons ignorant of Greek, may have undergone a similar fate; which hypothesis may also account for the thirty thousand different readings of which learned divines admit that the Gospels and Epistles are susceptible. The manifold and prodigious achievements of Roman civilization--its palaces, its temples, its amphitheatres, its aqueducts, its triumphal arches; its majestic forums, with their colonnades of snowy marble adorned with the statues of the heroes, the philosophers, the legislators of antiquity; its military roads; its marvels of mechanical engineering; its magnificent works of art; its eternal monuments of literature; the graceful legends of its mythology, perpetuated by the genius of the sculptor in creations of unrivalled excellence; the glowing words of its orators which stir the blood after the lapse of twenty centuries; the prestige of its conquests; the wise principles of its civil polity, generally enlightened, often audacious, always successful--were but trifles in the eyes of the debased Byzantine when compared with a fragment of the true cross, or a homily preached by some unclean and fanatic anchorite upon the metaphysical subtleties of the Trinity or the theological value of a diphthong.