At first, indeed, he slipped into the Christian churches, from a habit of conscience.

But habits soon grow sleepy; the fear of discovery and recapture made his attendance more and more of a labour.
And keeping himself apart as much as possible from the congregation, as a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from them in heart as in daily life.

He felt that they, and even more than they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself.

Besides, he never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings seemed to avoid him--whether from modesty or terror, he could not tell; and cut off thus from the outward 'communion of saints,' he found himself fast parting away from the inward one.

So he went no more to church, and looked the other way, he hardly knew why, whenever he passed the Caesareum; and Cyril, and all his mighty organisation, became to him another world, with which he had even less to do than with those planets over his head, whose mysterious movements, and symbolisms, and influences Hypatia's lectures on astronomy were just opening before his bewildered imagination.
Hypatia watched all this with growing self-satisfaction, and fed herself with the dream that through Philammon she might see her wildest hopes realised.