as Xonna, Anthusa, and Monica, and such extraordinary saints of the desert as Anthony, Paehomius, and Benedict. iS^ew enemies and dangers called forth new duties and virtues, which could now unfold them- selves on a larger stage, and therefore also on a grander scale. Besides, it must not be forgotten, that the tendency to seculari- zation is by no means to be ascribed only to Constantino and the influence of the state, but to the deeper source of the corrupt heart of man, and did reveal itself, in fact, though within a nnich narrower compass, long before, under the hea- then emperors, especially in the intervals of repose, when the earnestness and zeal of Christian life slumbered and gave scope to a worldly spirit. The difference between the age after Constantino and the age before consists, therefore, not at all in the cessation of true Christianity and the entrance of false, but in the preponder- ance of the one over the other. The field of the church was no\r much larger, but with much good soil it included far more that was stony, barren, and overgrown with weeds. The line between church and world, between regenerate and un- regenerate, between those who were Christians in name and those who were Christians in heart, was more or less oblitei'at- ed, and in place of the former hostility between the two parties there came a fusion of them in the same outward communion of baptism and confession. Tins brought the conflict between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, Christ and antichrist, into the bosom of Christendom itselK~7 § 23. WOBLDLINESS AND EXTRAVAGANCE. 127 § 23. Worldliness and Extravagance. The secularization of the church appeared most strikingly in the prevalence of mammon worship and luxury compared with the poverty and simplicity of the primitive Christians. The aristocracy of the later empire had a morbid passion for outward display and the sensual enjoyments of "vrealth, without the taste, the politeness, or the culture of true civil- ization. The gentlemen measured their fortune by the number of their marble palaces, baths, slaves, and gilded carriages ; the ladies indulged in raiment of silk and gold ornamented with secular or religious figures, and in heavy golden necklaces, bracelets, and rings, and went to church in the same flaunting dress as to the theatre.' Chrysostom addresses a patrician of Antioch : " You count so and so many acres of land, ten or twenty palaces, as many baths, a thousand or two thousand slaves, carriages plated with silver and gold."* Gregory Nazianzen, who presided for a time in the second ecumenical council of Constantinople in 3S1, gives us the following j)icture, evidently rhetorically colored, yet drawn from life, of the lux- ury of the degenerate civilization of that period : " We repose in splendor on high and sumptuous cushions, upon the most exquisite covers, which one is almost afraid to touch, and are vexed if we but hear the voice of a moaning pauper ; our