And so Thecla lived to the great age of ninety years and her memory is kept sacred on September 24, to this day. Without dancing girls for the Love Temples of Daphne Gardens, all the beauty and lure of the place failed to hold the wintering pleasure seekers of Antioch. The very winter that Onesimus passed over the Roman Road to become Bishop of Ephesus, the great Love Temples of Venus were destroyed by fire. The Christians said they had been struck by lightning as a manifestation of God’s vengeance for the attempt on the Thecla Community, even as lightning had once before delivered her from the Adversary. The merchants of Antioch, who yearly spent a hundred thousand talents to draw the pleasure seekers from Rome to winter in Daphne Gardens, said the Christians had set them on fire; but the lure of Daphne Gardens fell off from that year. To this day, you can find signs of the Cross and inscriptions by the early Christians in the grottos and caverns, between Antioch and the sea; but of Daphne Gardens, hardly enough remains to mark the site, did we not know it was ten miles in circumference, and five miles from the four hundred crumbling marble towers of Antioch. War and plunder broke the power of Antioch; and what war and plunder could not destroy, the earthquake threw down; but the Faith kept holy in the grotto is reënacted to-day wherever “the new wine bursts the old bottles” and the Loving Cup goes round to commemorate Him who first broke women’s fetters. CHAPTER V “AND THERE SHALL BE NO MORE DEATH” The Bishop of Ephesus sat dreaming in the garden between his church and his house. It was the glad season now known as Easter, some fifty years after the death and ascension of our Lord. The sunshine of the Ægean Sea was a luminous glory that clothed all the world of spring in garments of pure light. The city square swam in a transparent gold that dazzled the eye. Across the square, the aërial arches between the columns of the Great Temple to Diana gave glimpses of a sea that was by turns turquoise blue and emerald green, with a fret of snowy waves whose mermaid hair danced rainbows in the sunlight. Between the arcades of the Temple columns, the Bishop could catch hints of the surrounding circle of snowy mountains; and they, too, swam opal jewels in a mirage of morning light. The years had touched Onesimus lightly. He was stouter, stronger, more robust; but few silver hairs intermingled with his gold curls, though an austere strength now stamped face and figure, as of a man, whose shoulders had grown the broader for their load. But the gladness of the day brought back memories of his youth, this morning.