32 How the Church Has Changed the World bishop’s very home was to be open to all travelers. That was the command, and the practice lived up to it. The apostate emperor Julian famously wrote, in envy, that the Christians put his fellow pagans to shame, because they did a better job taking care of pagans than the pagans themselves did! The Christians did so in homage to Christ the Healer, of whom Asclepius was but a shadowy allegory, as Saint Justin had said almost two hundred years before. Jesus had gone about Galilee and Judea healing the sick, and his disciples and Apostles would do the same, and if someone was dying, said Saint James, then the priest should lay his hands upon him and anoint him, and confer healing, if not of the body, then of the sin-sick soul. We remember the Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, who went down into the ditch by the roadside to take up the man who had fallen among thieves, to clean his flesh with wine and oil, and to bind up his wounds with his own hands. Hands—not mere money, but hands. The city rises Basil called it the Ptochotrephion, the House for Care of the Poor, but others soon called it the Basiliad, or simply the New City. Imagine separate buildings for those who were afflicted by the plague, for those who were recovering, for the lepers whom no self-respecting pagan
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