LAST DAYS OF HEATHENISM.--When Christianity had become powerful, its disciples forgot the precepts of their Master, and sometimes persecuted the heathen. Christian mobs demolished the old temples. The great temple of _Serapis_ in _Alexandria_ was destroyed, and the statue of the god was broken in pieces. _Theodosius I._ (379-395) made the celebration of heathen rites a capital offense, and confiscated the property by which heathen worship had been supported. Arians, too, he persecuted, but with less harshness. The Eastern emperor, _Justinian_, suppressed the school of New Platonic philosophers at Athens, and banished the teachers (529). Heathenism lingered in remote districts, and was hence called _paganism_, or the religion of rustics. The last adherents of the ancient religion inhabited in the seventh century remote valleys of the Italian islands. The oracles were for ever dumb. The old divinities were never more to be invoked. But it was not by force that heathenism was extirpated. If it had not lost its vitality, it would have survived the penal laws against it. It perished by the expulsive energy of a better faith. CAUSES OF THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY.--The causes of the spread and triumph of Christianity lie ultimately in the need which men feel of religion, especially in times of dread and distress, and in the intrinsic excellence which was felt to belong to Christianity. In the first and second centuries the dreary feeling engendered by the hollow skepticism that prevailed was favorable to the Christian cause. There was a void to be filled, and the gospel came to fill it. In the third century, when the progress of Christianity was specially rapid, there was a perceptible revival of religious feeling among the heathen; and this, too, operated to the advantage of the gospel. At least it must have done so in numerous instances. In that century the terrible plagues which desolated the empire, with the sufferings that sprung from wild anarchy and misgovernment, made the church a welcome asylum for the afflicted. In the _first_ place, Christianity was a religion. It was neither a merely speculative nor a merely moral system. It took hold of the supernatural. _Secondly_, it presented to a corrupt society a moral ideal of spotless perfection. _Thirdly_, it offered, in the doctrine of the cross, a welcome solace,--consolation in life, with a sense of reconciliation, and the hope of everlasting good. Other causes, such as _Gibbon_ enumerates, were operative. But these are themselves mostly _effects_ or _aspects_ of the gospel; or they were _auxiliary_, not _principal_, causes.