the historian of the “Decline and Fall,” “were impoverished by the
unjust and almost universal monopoly which he acquired of nitre, salt,
paper, funerals, &c., and the spiritual father of a great people
condescended to practise the vile and pernicious arts of an informer.
He seems to have had as sharp an eye after the profit to be derived
from burials, as a certain archdeacon, who thinks intramural burial
of the dead a very sanitary measure for the living, and particularly
profitable to the clergy. Thus the example of St. George would seem
to influence very “venerable” as well as very “martial” gentlemen.
The Cappadocian most especially disgusted the Alexandrians by levying
a house tax, of his own motion, and as he pillaged the pagan temples
as well, all parties rose at length against the common oppressor and
“under the reign of Constantine he was expelled by the fury and justice
of the people.” He was restored only again to fall. The accession of
Julian brought destruction upon the archbishop and many of his friends,
who, after an imprisonment of three weeks, were dragged from their
dungeons by a wild and cruel populace, and murdered in the streets.
The bodies were paraded in triumph upon camels (as that of Condé was
by his Catholic opponents, after the battle of Jarnac, on an ass), and
they were ultimately cast into the sea. This last measure was adopted
in order that, if the sufferers were to be accounted as martyrs, there
should at least be no relics of them for men to worship. Gibbon thus
concludes: “The fears of the Pagans were just, and their precautions
ineffectual. The meritorious death of the archbishop obliterated the
memory of his life. The rival of Athanasius was dear and sacred to the
Arians, and the seeming conversion of those sectaries introduced his
worship into the bosom of the Catholic church. The odious stranger,
disguising every circumstance of time and place, assumed the rank of
a martyr, a saint, and a Christian hero; and the infamous George of
Cappadocia has been transformed into the famous St. George of England,
the patron of arms, of chivalry, and of the garter.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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