These worthy Christians of the common kind, who knew not the force of
spiritual exaltation for good and for evil, and only did their duty to
their neighbours and said their prayers in the simple, old-fashioned
manner, tried in vain to restrain the zealots. They perceived that these
continued insults and swift-following punishments must at last end in
real persecution. Eulogius, on the contrary, who set himself to answer
their objections with texts out of the Bible and the Lives of the
Saints, coveted such a result, and the zealots desired nothing better
than the fire of persecution. The ecclesiastical authorities, worked
upon by the moderate party, and also by the Moorish government, could
not permit the spirit of revolt to continue much longer unreproved; the
bishops met in council under the presidentship of the Metropolitan of
Seville, and though they could not precisely repudiate the former
"martyrdoms," since the Church had already canonized the sufferers, yet
they ordained that no more exhibitions of the kind should be made, and
in furtherance of this decision the leaders of the zealots were thrown
into prison. Here Eulogius met Flora again. She had been praying
earnestly one day in a church, when she saw beside her a
fellow-enthusiast, a sister of that monk Isaac who had been one of the
earliest "martyrs." Mary wanted to join her brother in the kingdom of
heaven, and Flora resolved to accompany her. They went before the Kādy
and did their best to excite his anger by blaspheming the name of
Mohammed and his religion. Two young and beautiful girls, professing
most sincerely the religion of "peace on earth and goodwill towards
men," stood before the magistrate with lips full of cursing and
bitterness, reviling his faith as "the work of the devil." But the good
judge was not to be roused so easily. He was weary of all this
hysterical mania, and had many a time pretended to be deaf when people
thrust themselves upon death; he thought it was a pity of these two
girls, and wished they would not be so foolish. He would try to induce
them to retract, or make as though he had not heard. But they persisted
in their heroic purpose, and he had to put them in prison.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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