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His declamations against worldly luxury and ornament in the sumptuous pages of the De Cultu Feminarum are not more sweeping or less sincere than those of Horace or Juvenal; but the violent attack made on education and on literature itself in the De Idololatria shows the growth of that persecuting spirit which, as it gathered material force, destroyed ancient art and literature wherever it found them, and which led Pope Gregory, four hundred years later, to burn the magnificent library founded by Augustus.
This first sort of idolothites Pareus calls the sacrifices of idols; and from such, he saith, the Apostle dissuadeth by this argument, Participare epulis idolorum, est idololatria. Of the second sort of idolothites, the Apostle begins to speak in ver. 23. The Corinthians moved a question, Whether they might lawfully eat things sacrificed to idols? In privatis conviviis, saith Pareus.
And since the pulling down of those churches wanted neither this happy intent not happy event, I must say that the bitter invectives given forth against it, by some who carry a favourable eye to the pompous bravery of the Romish whore, and have deformed too much of that which was by them reformed, are to be detested by all such as wish the eternal exile of idolatrous monuments out of the Lord’s land, yet let these Momus-like spirits understand that their censorious verdicts do also reflect upon those ancient Christians of whom we read, that with their own hands they destroyed the temples of idols, and upon Chrysostom, who stirred up some monks, and sent them into Phœnicia, together with workmen, and sustained them on the expences and charges of certain godly women, that they might destroy the temples of idols, as the Magdeburgians have marked out of Theodoret, likewise upon them of the religion in France, of whom Thuanus recordeth, that templa confractis ac disjectis statuis et altaribus, expilaverant, lastly, upon foreign divines, who teach, that not only idola, but idolia also, and omnia idololatria instrumenta should be abolished.
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