In such a time it was a psychological certainty that among the other Eastern ideas which were coming to the fore, would be those ideas about animals which are roughly classed under the head of Pythagoreanism. The apostles of Christ in their journeys East or West might have met a singular individual who was carrying on an apostolate of his own, the one clear and unyielding point of which was the abolition of animal sacrifices. This was Apollonius, of Tyana, our knowledge of whom is derived from the biography, in part perhaps fanciful, written by Philostratus in the third century to please the Empress Julia Domna, who was interested in occult matters. Apollonius worked wonders as well attested as those, for instance, of the Russian Father John, but he seems to have considered his power the naturally produced result of an austere life and abstinence from flesh and wine which is a thoroughly Buddhist or Jaina theory. He was a theosophist who refrained from attacking the outward forms and observances of established religion when they did not seem to him either to be cruel or else incongruous to the degree of preventing a reverential spirit. He did not entirely understand that this degree is movable, any more than do those persons who want to substitute Gregorian chants for opera airs in rural Italian churches. He did not mind the Greek statues which appealed to the imagination by suggestions of beauty, but he blamed the Egyptians for representing deity as a dog or an ibis; if they disliked images of stone why not have a temple where there were no images of any kind—where all was left to the inner vision of the worshipper? In which question, almost accidentally, Apollonius throws out a hint of the highest form of spiritual worship. [Illustration: _Photo:_ _Alinari._ LAMBS. (_Relief on fifth century tomb at Ravenna._)] The keenly intellectual thinkers whom we call the Fathers of the Church saw that the majority of the ideas then agitating men’s minds might find a quietus in Christian dogma which suited them a great deal better than the vague and often grotesque shape they had worn hitherto. But there was a residuum of which they felt an instinctive fear, and peculiar notions about animals had the ill-luck of being placed at the head of these. It could not have been a fortunate coincidence that two of the most prominent men who held them in the early centuries were declared foes of the new faith—Celsus and Porphyry.