The next incident recorded in the life of S. Cyril is his alleged prediction of the failure of Julian’s attempt to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem.  “The vain and ambitious mind of Julian,” says Gibbon, “might aspire to restore the ancient glory of the Temple of Jerusalem.  As the Christians were firmly persuaded that a sentence of everlasting destruction had been pronounced against the whole fabric of the Mosaic law, the Imperial sophist would have converted the success of his undertaking into a specious argument against the faith of prophecy and the truth of revelation.”  Again he writes:  “The Christians entertained a natural and pious expectation, that in this memorable contest, the honour of religion would be vindicated by some signal miracle Gibbon, c. xxiii..”  That such an expectation may have been shared by Cyril is not impossible:  but there is no satisfactory evidence that he ventured to foretell any miraculous interposition.  According to the account of Rufinus Hist. i. 37., “lime and cement had been brought, and all was ready for destroying the old foundations and laying new on the next day.  But Cyril remained undismayed, and after careful consideration either of what he had read in Daniel’s prophecy concerning the ‘times,’ or of our Lord’s predictions in the Gospels, persisted that it was impossible that one stone should ever there be laid upon another by the Jews.”  This account of Cyril’s expectation, though probable enough in itself, seems to be little more than a conjecture founded on his statement (Cat. xv. 15), that “Antichrist will come at the time when there shall not be left one stone upon another in the Temple of the Jews.”  That doom was not completed in Cyril’s time, nor did he expect it to be fulfilled until the coming of the Jewish Antichrist, who was to restore the Temple shortly before the end of the world.  It was impossible for Cyril to see in Julian such an Antichrist as he has described; and therefore, without any gift or pretence of prophecy, he might very well express a firm conviction that the attempted restoration at that time must fail.  Though Gibbon is even more cynical and contemptuous than usual in his examination of the alleged miracles, he does not attempt to deny the main facts of the story See Gibbon’s remarks on the testimony of Ammianus, “a contemporary and a Pagan,” and on the explanation from natural causes suggested by Michaelis.:  with their miraculous character we are not here concerned, but only with Cyril’s conduct on so remarkable an occasion.