Chapter I: Remains of Paganism in Christianity

Preliminary Survey--An Imaginary Past--Issue between Protestantism
and Romanism--General Testimony Relative to Pagan Elements in
Christianity, from Dyer, Lord, Tiele, Baronius, Polydore Virgil,
Fauchet, Mussard, De Choul, Wiseman, Middleton, Max Müller,
Priestley, Thebaud, Hardwick, Maitland, Seymore, Renan, Killen,
Farrar, Merivale, Westropp and Wake, and Lechler.

A preliminary survey is the more necessary lest the general reader fail to grant the facts of history a competent hearing and a just consideration. Unconsciously men think of the earliest Christianity as being like that which they profess. They measure the early centuries by their own. Their Church, its doctrines, forms, creeds and customs, stands as the representative of all Christianity. It seems like a “rude awakening” to ask men to believe that there is a “pagan residuum” in their faith, or in the customs of their fathers. The average Christian must pass through a broadening process, before he can justly consider such a question. Unhappily, there are too many who are unwilling to undergo such an enlargement of their religious and historical horizon as will make them competent to consider those facts which every earnest student of history must face. But the Christian who believes in the immortality of truth, and in the certainty of its triumph, will welcome all facts, even though they may modify the creed he has hitherto accepted.

A writer in the _Edinburgh Review and Critical Journal_, commenting on the revised volumes of Bishop Lightfoot on _Ignatius_ and _Polycarp_, speaking of the tendency to judge the early centuries by our own, thus vitiating our conclusions, says:

“The danger of such inquiries lies in the difficulty of resisting the
temptation to frame pictures of an imaginary past; and the passion
for transferring to the past the peculiarities of later times may be
best corrected by keeping in view the total unlikeness of the first,
second, or third centuries to anything which now exists in any part
of the world.”

Protestants in the United States are poorly prepared to consider so great a question as that which this book passes under review, because they have not carefully considered the facts touching their relations to Roman Catholicism. The Anglo-Romish controversy, in England, in the earlier part of the present century made the question of paganism in Christianity prominent for a time. But the discussion was so strongly partisan and controversial that it could not produce the best results. Truth was much obscured by the determined effort of Protestant writers to show that the pagan residuum was all in the Catholic Church; whereas the facts show that there could have been no Roman Catholic Church had not paganism first prepared the way for its development by corrupting the earliest Christianity. The facts show, with equal vividness, that Protestantism has retained much of paganism, by inheritance. Protestantism, theoretically, means the entire elimination of the pagan residuum; practically, that work is but fairly begun. It must be pushed, or the inevitable backward drift, the historical “undertow” will re-Romanize the Protestant movement. The expectations and purposes of Roman Catholicism all point towards such a result.

This chapter will make a general survey of the field, as it is seen by men of different schools, that the reader may be the better prepared for a more specific treatment of the subject.

DYER says:

“The first Roman converts to Christianity appear to have had very
inadequate ideas of the sublime purity of the gospel, and to have
entertained a strange medley of pagan idolatry and Christian truth.
The emperor Alexander Severus, who had imbibed from his mother,
Mammæa, a singular regard for the Christian religion, is said to have
placed in his domestic chapel the images of Abraham, of Orpheus, of
Apollonius, and of Christ, as the four chief sages who had instructed
mankind in the methods of adoring the Supreme Deity. Constantine
himself, the first Christian emperor, was deeply imbued with the
superstitions of paganism; he had been Pontifex Maximus, and it was
only a little while before his death that he was formally received
by baptism into the Christian Church. He was particularly devoted to
Apollo, and he attempted to conciliate his pagan and his Christian
subjects by the respect which he appeared to entertain for both. An
edict enjoining the solemn observance of Sunday was balanced in the
same year[1] by another directing that when the palace or any other
public building should be struck by lightning, the haruspices should
be regularly consulted.”[2]

In a similar strain Professor LORD speaks yet more strongly:

“But the church was not only impregnated with the errors of pagan
philosophy, but it adopted many of the ceremonials of Oriental
worship, which were both minute and magnificent. If anything marked
the primitive church it was the simplicity of worship, and the
absence of ceremonies and festivals and gorgeous rites. The churches
became in the fourth century as imposing as the old temples of
idolatry. The festivals became authoritative; at first they were
few in number and voluntary. It was supposed that when Christianity
superseded Judaism, the obligation to observe the ceremonies of
the Mosaic law was abrogated. Neither the apostles nor evangelists
imposed the yoke of servitude, but left Easter and every other
feast to be honored by the gratitude of the recipients of grace.
The change in opinion, in the fourth century, called out the severe
animadversion of the historian Socrates, but it was useless to stem
the current of the age. Festivals became frequent and imposing. The
people clung to them because they obtained a cessation from labor,
and obtained excitement. The ancient rubrics mention only those of
the Passion, of Easter, of Whitsuntide, Christmas, and the descent of
the Holy Spirit. But there followed the celebration of the death of
Stephen, the memorial of St. John, the commemoration of the slaughter
of the Innocents, the feasts of Epiphany, the feast of Purification,
and others, until the Catholic Church had some celebration for some
saint and martyr for every day in the year. They contributed to
create a craving for outward religion, which appealed to the sense
and the sensibilities rather than the heart. They led to innumerable
quarrels and controversies about unimportant points, especially in
relation to the celebration of Easter. They produced a delusive
persuasion respecting pilgrimages, the sign of the cross, and the
sanctifying effects of the sacraments. Veneration for martyrs ripened
into the introduction of images--a future source of popular idolatry.
Christianity was emblazoned in pompous ceremonies. The veneration of
saints approximated to their deification, and superstition exalted
the mother of our Lord into an object of absolute worship. Communion
tables became imposing altars typical of Jewish sacrifices, and the
relics of martyrs were preserved as sacred amulets....

“When Christianity itself was in such need of reform, when Christians
could scarcely be distinguished from pagans in love of display, and
in egotistical ends, how could it reform the world? When it was a
pageant, a ritualism, an arm of the state, a vain philosophy, a
superstition, a formula, how could it save if ever so dominant?
The corruptions of the Church in the fourth century are as well
authenticated as the purity and moral elevation of Christianity in
the second century. Isaac Taylor has presented a most mournful view
of the state of Christian society when the religion of the cross had
become the religion of the state, and the corruptions kept pace with
the outward triumph of the faith, especially when the pagans had
yielded to the supremacy of the cross.”[3]

Many of the corrupting elements which entered into early Christianity came from the Orient, by way of Greece and Rome. TIELE speaks of the influx of these in the following words:

“The Greek deities were followed by the Asiatic, such as the Great
Mother of the gods, whose image, consisting of an unhewn stone, was
brought at the expense of the state from Pessinus to Rome. On the
whole, it was not the best and loftiest features of the foreign
religions that were adopted, but rather their low and sensual
elements, and these too in their most corrupt form. An accidental
accusation brought to light in the year 186 B.C. a secret worship of
Bacchus which was accompanied by all kinds of abominations, and had
already made its way among thousands....

“The eyes of the multitude were always turned toward the East, from
which deliverance was expected to come forth, and secret rites
brought from there to Rome were sure of a number of devotees. But
they were only bastard children, or at any rate the late misshapen
offspring of the lofty religions which once flourished in the East,
an un-Persian Mithra worship, an un-Egyptian Serapis worship, an Isis
worship which only flattered the senses and was eagerly pursued by
the fine ladies, to say nothing of more loathsome practices. And yet
even these aberrations were the expression of a real and deep-seated
need of the human mind, which could find no satisfaction in the
state religion. Men longed for a God whom they could worship, heart
and soul, and with this God they longed to be reconciled. Their own
deities they had outgrown, and they listened eagerly therefore to
the priests of Serapis and of Mithra, who each proclaimed their God
as the sole-existing, the almighty, and the all-good, and they felt
especially attracted by the earnestness and strictness of the latter
_cultus_. And in order to be secure of the eradication of all guilt,
men lay down in a pit where the blood of the sacrificial animal
flowed all over them, in the conviction that they would then arise
entirely new-born.”[4]

Many Roman Catholic writers, with an honesty which all classes might well emulate, openly recognize the paganizing of the Church, which took place before the organization of the papacy.

BARONIUS says:

“It was permitted the Church to transfer to pious uses those
ceremonies which the pagans had wickedly applied in a superstitious
worship, after having purified them by consecration; so that,
to the greater contumely of the devil, all might honor Christ
with those rites which he intended for his own worship. Thus the
pagan festivals, laden with superstition, were changed into the
praiseworthy festivals of the martyrs; and the idolatrous temples
were changed to sacred churches, as Theodoret shows.”[5]

POLYDORE VIRGIL says:

“The Church has borrowed many customs from the religion of the Romans
and other pagans, but it has meliorated them and applied them to a
better use.”[6]

FAUCHET says:

“The bishops of this kingdom employ all means to gain men to Christ,
converting to their use some pagan ceremonies, as well as they did
the stones of their temples to the building of churches.”[7]

PIERRE MUSSARD says:

“William de Choul,[8] counsellor to the king and bailiff of the
mountains, composed, an age ago, a treatise of the religion of the
ancient Romans, wherein he shows an entire conformity between old
Rome and new. On the point of religion he closes with these words[9]:
‘If we consider carefully,’ says he, ‘we shall see that many
institutions in our religion have been borrowed and transferred from
Egyptian and Pagan ceremonies, such as tunics and surplices, priestly
ornaments for the head, bowing at the altar, the solemnity at mass,
music in churches, prayers, supplications, processions, litanies, and
many other things. These our priests make use of in our mysteries,
and refer them to one only God, Jesus Christ, which the ignorance of
the heathen, their false religion, and foolish presumption perverted
to their false gods, and to dead men deified.’”[10]

During the Tractarian controversy in England, John Poynder wrote _Popery in Alliance with Heathenism_, to show that Roman Catholicism is essentially pagan. Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, then a professor in the University at Rome, replied under the title: _Letters to John Poynder, Esq., upon his Work Entitled “Popery in Alliance with Heathenism_,” London, 1836.

In Letter Second, WISEMAN says:

“I will, for a moment, grant you the full extent of your assumptions
and premises; I will concede that all the facts you have brought
forward are true, and all the parallels you have established between
our rites and those of paganism, correct; and I will join issue with
you on your conclusions, trying them by clearly applicable tests....
The first person who argued as you have done was Julian the Apostate,
who said that the Christians had borrowed their religion from the
heathens. This proves at once that even then the resemblance existed,
of which you complain as idolatrous. So that it is not the offspring
of modern corruption, but an inheritance of the ancient church. It
proves that the alliance between Christianity and heathenism existed
three hundred years after Christ, and that consequently so far popery
and ancient Christianity are identical. The Manichees also are
accused by St. Augustine, writing against Faustus, of having made the
same charge.”

Dr. Wiseman enumerates many items of resemblance which Poynder does not, and retorts by showing that the English Church yet retains the paganism which it inherited from papacy. He emphasizes the pagan characteristics which appear in the building, adornment, and services of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, claiming that if a Roman pagan were to be resurrected and brought to St. Paul’s he would recognize the likeness to his ancient faith on every hand. Dr. Wiseman’s testimony is of great value, since, as a defender of Romanism, he also defends the policy which corrupted early Christianity in the West, by conforming it to the popular paganism in order to secure a nominal conversion of the pagans.

CONYERS MIDDLETON, whose _Letter from Rome_ forms one of the standard authorities concerning the paganism of the early Church, says:

“Aringhus, in his account of _Subterraneous Rome_, acknowledges
this conformity between the pagan and popish rites, and defends the
admission of the ceremonies of heathenism into the service of the
Church, by the authority of their wisest popes and governors, who
found it necessary, he says, in the conversion of the Gentiles, to
dissemble and wink at many things, and yield to the times; and not
to use force against customs which the people were so obstinately
fond of; nor to think of extirpating at once everything that had
the appearance of profane; but to supersede in some measure the
obligation of the sacred laws, till these converts, convinced by
degrees, and informed of the whole truth by the suggestions of the
Holy Spirit, should be content to submit in earnest to the yoke of
Christ.”[11]

Further important testimony is found in the following. Writing of the first three centuries after Christ, MAX MÜLLER says:

“That age was characterized far more than all before it, by a
spirit of religious syncretism, an eager thirst for compromise.
To mould together thoughts which differed fundamentally, to grasp,
if possible, the common elements pervading all the multifarious
religions of the world, was deemed the proper business of philosophy,
both in the East and West. It was a period, one has lately said, of
mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, Babylonia and Greece, were
sitting together and gossiping like crazy old women, chattering with
toothless gums and silly brains about the dreams and joys of their
youth, yet unable to recall one single thought or feeling with that
vigor which once gave it light and truth.

“It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when
everything became everything, when Maya and Sophia, Mithra and
Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in
one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East
was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the
pure Christianity of the Teutonic nations.”[12]

Dr. JOSEPH PRIESTLEY says:

“The causes of the corruptions were almost wholly contained in
the established opinions of the heathen world, and especially the
philosophical part of it; so that when those heathens embraced
Christianity, they mixed their former tenets and prejudices with
it.... The abuse of the _positive institutions_ of Christianity,
monstrous as they were, naturally arose from the opinions of the
purifying and sanctifying virtue of rites and ceremonies, which was
the very basis of all the worship of the heathens.”[13]

THEBAUD says:

“Therefore this same ‘high civilization,’ as it is called, in the
midst of which Christianity was preached, was a real danger to the
inward life of the new disciple of Christ.

“How could it be otherwise, when it is a fact, now known to all,
that, even at the beginning of the fifth century, Rome was almost
entirely pagan, at least outwardly and among her highest classes; so
that the poet Claudian, in addressing Honorius at the beginning of
his sixth consulship, pointed out to him the site of the Capitol,
still crowned with the temple of Jove, surrounded by numerous pagan
edifices, supporting in air an army of gods; and all around, temples,
chapels, statues without number; in fact, the whole Roman and Greek
mythology, standing in the city of the catacombs and of the pope.

“The public calendars, preserved to this day, continued to note the
pagan festivals, side by side with the feasts of the Saviour and his
apostles. Within the city and beyond, throughout Italy and the most
remote provinces, idols and their altars were still surrounded by the
thronging populace, prostrate at their feet.”[14]

HARDWICK describes the tendency to reproduce pagan theories and customs in the early Church as follows:

“Or take again the swarm of heresies that soon invaded almost
every province of the early Church. Abandoning, as they did, the
more essential of the supernatural truths of revelation, they were
virtually and in effect revivals of paganism, and family likenesses
may accordingly be traced among the older speculations current in the
schools of heathen philosophy. In discussing, for example, the nature
of the divine Son-ship, Sabellius and his party taught a doctrine
very similar to that already noticed in the Trimurrti of India;
while Docetism, starting from a notion that the spiritual and the
material cannot permanently co-exist, had merely reproduced the Hindu
doctrine of Avataras. The inward correspondence in the texture of
ideas had issued in a similar deprivation of revealed truth. Or if,
penetrating below the surface, we investigate the elementary thoughts
and feelings that hereafter found utterance in monastic institutions
of the Church, we find that on one side those ideas are alien from
the spirit of primitive Christianity, and on the other that they had
long been familiar in the East, before they were appropriated or
unconsciously reproduced among one class of Christians in Syria and
Egypt. India was the real birthplace of monasticism, its cradle being
in the haunts of earnest _yogins_, and self-torturing devotees, who
were convinced that evil is inherent not in man only, but in all the
various forms of matter, and accordingly withdrew as far as possible
from contact with the outer world. At first, indeed, the Christian
hermit, like the earliest of his Hindu prototypes, had dwelt alone on
the outskirts of his native town, supporting himself by manual labor,
and devoting all the surplus of his earnings to religious purposes.

“But during the fourth century of the present era many such
hermits began to flock together in the forest, or the wilderness,
where regular confraternities were organized upon a model more or
less derived from the Egyptian Therapeutæ, and the old Essenes
of Palestine; the members in their dress and habits most of all
resembling those of the religious orders who still swarm in Thibet
and Ceylon.”[15]

MAITLAND bears important testimony touching many points in which Christianity was paganized. He sums up the general results in the following concerning the worship of martyrs:

“The degrees of worship and adoration, since defined with fatal
precision by the Romish Church, were not then fixed; and the heathen,
even less willing than the Christian laity to enter into refinements
on the subject, saw no distinction between one form and another. The
consequences were disastrous in the extreme; the charge of idolatry,
mutually urged by the contending parties, lost the force, or rather
was effectively employed by the pagans, after it had become powerless
in Christian hands. Thus it was that, although the pure doctrines of
our faith speedily displaced the profligate polytheism of the empire,
the after conflict was long doubtful, being maintained by a religion
enfeebled by admixture with foreign elements, against one that had
profited by adversity, and had not scrupled to borrow largely from
its rival. We read in fable of the struggle between the man and the
serpent, in which at length the combatants become transformed into
the shapes of each other. In the last contest between paganism and
Christianity we find the sophist contending for the unity of God, and
accusing the Christian of undisguised polytheism; and on the other
side the Christian insisting on the tutelary powers of glorified
mortals, and the omniscience of departed spirits.”[16]

Similar testimony is borne by SEYMORE, who says:

“The apostasy of the Church of Rome will be more apparent when we
reflect that the character of the mediation which Romanism ascribes
to its saints is precisely the same as that which heathenism ascribes
to its demi-gods. It was believed among the heathen that when a man
became illustrious for his deeds, his conquests, his inventions,
or aught else that distinguished him as a benefactor of mankind,
he could be canonized and enrolled among inferior deities. He thus
became a mediator whose sympathies with his fellow-men on the one
hand, and whose merits with the gods on the other fitted him for
the mediatorial office of bearing the prayers and wants of mortals
to the presence of the gods. The heathen philosophers, Hesiod,
Plato, and Apuleius, all thus speak of those persons. The last named
philosopher says: ‘They are intermediate intelligences, by whom our
prayers and wants pass unto the gods. They are mediators between the
inhabitants of the earth and the inhabitants of heaven, carrying
thither our prayers, and drawing down their blessings. They bear
back and forwards prayers for us, and supplies for them; or they
are those that explain between both parties, and who carry our
adorations.’ This was the creed of heathenism, and in nothing but
the name does it differ from the corresponding creed of Romanism.
When the Church of Rome finds members of her communion whom she
regards as signally pious, or illustrious for supposed miraculous
powers, she holds that they be canonized and enrolled among her
saints; that they can mediate between God and man; that they have
sufficient favor or influence with God to obtain compliance with
our prayers, and therefore they are fitting objects to whom our
confessions, invocations, and prayers may be offered; or, as she
expresses it in her creed, ‘that the saints reigning with Christ
are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God
for us.’ The principle of heathen Romanism, and the principle of
Christian Romanism are one and the same, the only difference is
in the details of the names. And the origin of the practice is
demonstrative of this; for when it was found, after the establishment
of Christianity in the times of Constantine, when the great object
of the court was to promote uniformity of religion, that many of the
heathen would outwardly conform to Christianity if allowed to retain
in private their worship of their guardian or tutelar divinities,
they were so allowed, merely on changing the names of Jupiter to
Peter, or Juno to Mary, still worshipping their old divinities under
new names, and even retaining old images that were baptized with
Christian names. This is apparent in the writings of those times,
and was thought a measure of wisdom, a stroke of profound policy, as
tending to produce a uniformity of religion among the unthinking
masses. The invocations of Juno have been transferred to Mary; the
prayers to Mercury have been transferred to Paul. We see not how the
substitution of the names of Damian or Cosmo, for those of Mercury
or Apollo, or how the substitution of the names of Lucy or Cecelia,
for those of Minerva or Diana, can alter the idolatrous character of
the practice. In some instances they have not even changed the names,
and Romulus and Remus are still worshipped in Italy, under the more
modern names of St. Romulo and St. Remugio. The simple people believe
them to have been two holy bishops. I have myself witnessed this
near Florence, and even Bacchus is not without his votaries, under
the ecclesiastical name of St. Bacco. The principle and practice of
papal Rome are identical with the principle and practice of pagan
Rome. Every argument to justify one may be equally urged to justify
or extenuate the other. And if the principle and practice of pagan
Rome are to be pronounced as idolatrous, I see not why the very same
principle and practice in papal Rome should not be pronounced as
idolatrous likewise.”[17]

In the light of all the facts Mr. Seymore cannot fasten the pagan residuum upon Romanism alone. The controlling trend into paganism was established before the papacy was developed; and if new forms of expression appeared afterward, they were but the fruitage of earlier tendencies.

RENAN, speaking of the relation between the religious _cultus_ of the Orient and early Christianity, says:

“This is the explanation of the singular attraction which about the
beginning of the Christian era drew the population of the ancient
world to the religions of the East. These religions had something
deeper in them than those of Greece and Rome; they addressed
themselves more fully to the religious sentiment. Almost all of them
stood in some relation to the condition of the soul in another life,
and it was believed that they held the warrant of immortality. Hence
the favor in which the Thracian and Sabasian mysteries, the _thiasi_,
and confraternities of all kinds, were held. It was not so chilly in
these little circles, where men pressed closely together, as in the
great icy world of that day. Little religions like the worship of
Psyche, whose sole object was consolation for human mortality, had
a momentary prevalence. The beautiful Egyptian worship, which hid a
real emptiness beneath a great splendor of ritual, counted devotees
in every part of the empire. Isis and Serapis had altars even in
the ends of the world. A visitor to the ruins of Pompeii might be
tempted to believe that the principal worship which obtained there
was that of Isis. These little Egyptian temples had their assiduous
worshippers, among whom were many of the same class as the friends of
Catullus and Tibullus. There was a morning service; a kind of mass,
celebrated by a priest, shorn and beardless. There were sprinklings
of holy water; possibly benediction in the evening. All this
occupied, amused, soothed. What could any one want more?

“But it was above all the Mithraic[18] worship which, in the second
and third centuries, attained an extraordinary prevalence. I
sometimes permit myself to say that, if Christianity had not carried
the day, Mithraicism would have become the religion of the world.
It had its mysterious meetings, its chapels, which bore a strong
resemblance to little churches. It forged a very lasting bond of
brotherhood between its initiates; it had a Eucharist, a supper so
like the Christian mysteries that good Justin Martyr the Apologist
can find only one explanation of the apparent identity, namely, that
Satan, in order to deceive the human race, determined to imitate the
Christian ceremonies, and so stole them. A Mithraic sepulchre in the
Roman catacombs is as edifying, and presents as elevated a mysticism,
as the Christian tombs.”[19]

Describing the earliest Christianity, KILLEN bears valuable testimony to the fact that the features of paganism which became prominent at a later period were wholly wanting in the earliest Christianity. He shows that the Church was Judaistic in forms and practice.

These are his words:

“A Roman citizen, when present for the first time at the worship
of the Church, might have remarked how profoundly it differed
from the ritual of paganism. The services in the great heathen
temples were but an imposing scenic exhibition. The holy water for
lustration, the statues of the gods with wax tapers burning before
them, the officials robed in white surplices, and the incense
floating in clouds and diffusing perfume all around, could only
regale the sense or light up the imagination. No stated time was
devoted to instruct the assembly; and the liturgy--often in a dead
language--as it was mumbled over by the priest, merely added to
the superstition and the mysticism. But the worship of the Church
was, in the highest sense, a ‘reasonable service.’ It had no parade,
no images, no fragrant odors; for the first hundred years it was
commonly celebrated in private houses or the open fields; and yet it
addressed itself so impressively to the understanding and the heart
that the congregations of the faithful frequently presented scenes
incomparably more spirit-stirring and sublime than anything ever
witnessed in the high places of Greek or Roman idolatry....

“No individual or church court is warranted to tamper with symbolic
ordinances of divine appointment; for as they are the typical
embodiment of great truths, any change essentially vitiates their
testimony. But their early administrators overlooking this grave
objection, soon ceased to respect the integrity of baptism and
the Lord’s Supper. In the third century a number of frivolous and
superstitious ceremonies--such as exorcism, unction, the making of
the sign of the cross on the forehead, and the kiss of peace--were
already tacked to baptism; so that the beautiful significance of
the primitive observance could not be well seen under these strange
trappings. Before the middle of the second century the wine of
the Eucharist was mixed with water; fifty years afterwards the
communicants participated standing; and at length the elements
themselves were treated with awful reverence. The more deeply to
impress the imagination, baptism and the Eucharist began to be
surrounded with the secrecy of the heathen mysteries, and none save
those who had received the ordinances were suffered to be present at
their dispensation. The ministers of the Church sadly compromised
their religion when they thus imitated the meretricious decorations
of the pagan worship. As might have been expected, the symbols so
disfigured were misunderstood and misrepresented. Baptism was called
regeneration, and the Eucharist was designated a sacrifice. Thus
a door was opened for the admission of a whole crowd of dangerous
errors.”[20]

The tendency to religious syncretism, during the early centuries, was a prolific source of corruption to New Testament Christianity. Speaking of the results of this tendency, and of the composite character of the religious _cultus_ at Alexandria, in the time of Hadrian (117-138 A.D.), Canon FARRAR says:

“There was no city in the empire in which a graver task was assigned
to the great scholars and teachers of Christianity than the city of
Alexandria. It was the centre of the most energetic intellectual
vitality; and there, like the seething of the grapes in the vine
cluster, the speculations of men of every religion and every
nationality exercised a reciprocal influence on each other.

“A single letter of Hadrian presented by Vopiscus will show the
confusion of thought and intermixture of religions which prevailed
in that cosmopolitan city, and the aspect presented by its religious
syncretism to a cool and cynical observer. ‘Those who worship
Serapis,’ he says in a letter to a friend, ‘are Christians, and those
who call themselves Bishops of Christ are votaries of Serapis. There
is no ruler of a synagogue there, no Samaritan, no presbyter of the
Christians, who is not an astrologer, who is not a soothsayer, who
is not a gymnast. The patriarch of the Jews himself when he comes to
Egypt is forced by one party to worship Serapis, by the other Christ.
They have but one God who is no God; him Christians, him Jews, him
all races worship alike.’ To the disdainful and sceptical mind of
the emperor, who deified his own unhappy minion, Christianity,
gnosticism, Judaism, paganism were all forms of one universal
charlatanry and sham.”[21]

In writing of Leo the Great (440-461) founder of the papacy, Dean MERIVALE gives a graphic picture of the state of Christianity at that time. Space is here taken for a copious extract that the weight of Merivale’s name and words may add force to the facts. He says:

“It will be admitted, I trust, without entering upon disquisitions
which would be inappropriate to this occasion, that the corruptions
of Christian faith against which our own national Church and many
others rose indignantly at the Reformation had for the most part
struck their foundations deep in the course of the fifth century;
that though they had sprung up even from an earlier period, and
though they developed more in some directions, and assumed more
fixity in the darker times that followed, yet the working of the
true Christian leaven among the masses was never more faint, the
approximation of Christian usage to the manners and customs of
paganism never really closer, than in the age of which we are now
speaking. We have before us many significant examples of the
facility with which the most intelligent of the pagans accepted the
outward rite of Christian baptism, and made a nominal profession of
the faith, while they retained and openly practised, without rebuke,
without remark, with the indulgence even of genuine believers, the
rites and usages of the paganism they pretended to have abjured. We
find abundant records of the fact that personages high in office,
such as consuls and other magistrates, while administering the laws
by which the old idolatries were proscribed, actually performed
pagan rites, and even erected public statues to pagan divinities.
Still more did men, high in the respect of their fellow-Christians,
allow themselves to cherish sentiments utterly at variance with the
definitions of the Church. Take the instance of the illustrious
Bishop Synesius. Was he a Christian, was he a pagan; who shall say?
He was famous in the schools of Alexandria as a man of letters, a
teacher of the ancient philosophies, an admirer of the pagan Hypatia.
The Christian people of Ptolemais, enchanted with his talents,
demanded him for their bishop. He protests not indeed that he is an
unbeliever--but that his life and habits are not suitable to so high
an office. He has a wife whom he cannot abandon, as the manners of
the age might require of him; whom he will not consort with secretly,
as the manners of the age would, it seems, allow. ‘But further I
cannot believe,’ he adds, ‘that the human soul has been breathed
into flesh and blood; I will not teach that this everlasting world
of matter is destined to annihilation; the resurrection, as taught
by the Church, seems to me a doubtful and questionable doctrine. I
am a philosopher, and cannot preach to the people popularly.’ In
short, he maintains to all appearance that if he is a believer in
Jesus Christ, he is a follower of Plato; and such doubtless were
many others. The people leave him his wife and his opinions, and
insist that he shall be their bishop. He retains his family ties,
his philosophy, his Platonism, his rationalism, and accepts the
government of the Church notwithstanding. Again we ask, was Synesius
a Christian or a pagan? The instance of such a bishop, one probably
among many, is especially significant; but the same question arises
with regard to other men of eminence of the period. Was Boëthius,
a century later, the imitator of Cicero, Christian or pagan? Was
Simplicius, the commentator on Plato? Was Ausonius, the playful
poet and amiable friend of the Bishop Paulinus, who celebrates
Christ in one poem, and scatters his allusions to pagan mythology
indiscriminately in many others? We know that Libanius, the intimate
friend and correspondent of Basil, was a pagan of the pagans; but he
did not on that account forfeit the confidence of a sainted father of
the Christian Church. So indifferent as Christians seem to have been
at this period to their own creed, so indifferent to the creed of
their friends and associates, we cannot wonder if it has left us few
or but slight traces of a vital belief in the principles of divine
redemption.

“We must make, indeed, large allowance for the intellectual trials
of an age of transition when it was not given to every one to see
his way between the demands urged upon an intelligent faith by the
traditions of a brilliant past on the one hand, and the intimations
of an obscure and not a cheerful future on the other. We hardly
realize, perhaps, the pride with which the schools of Athens
and Alexandria still regarded their thousand years of academic
renown, while the Christian Church was slowly building up the
recent theological systems on which its own foundations were to be
secured for the ages to follow. We need not complain of Leo, and
other Christian doctors, if they shrank, as I think they did, from
rushing again into polemics with the remnant of the philosophers,
whose day, they might think, was sure to close at no distant date.
But the real corruption of the age was shown in the unstinted
adoption of pagan usages in the ceremonial of the Christian Church,
with all the baneful effects they could not fail to produce on the
spiritual training of the people. There are not wanting, indeed,
passages in the popular teachings of St. Leo, in which he beats the
air with angry denunciations of auguries, and sortilege, and magic,
stigmatizes idolatry as the worship of demons, and the devil as the
father of pagan lies. But neither Leo, nor, I think, the contemporary
doctors of the Church, seem to have had an adequate sense of the
process by which the whole essence of paganism was throughout their
age constantly percolating the ritual of the Church and the hearts
of the Christian multitude. It is not to these that we can look for
a warning that the fasts prescribed by the Church had their parallel
in the abstinence imposed by certain pagan creeds, and required
to be guarded and explained to the people in their true Christian
significance; that the monachism they extolled so warmly, and which
spread so rapidly, was in its origin a purely pagan institution,
common to the religions of India, Thibet, and Syria, with much,
no doubt, to excuse its extravagance in the hapless condition of
human life at the period, but with little or nothing to justify it
in the charters of our Christian belief; that the canonizing of
saints and martyrs, the honors paid them, and the trust reposed in
them, were simply a revival of the old pagan mythologies; that the
multiplication of formal ceremonies, with processions and lights and
incense and vestments, with images and pictures and votive offerings,
was a mere pagan appeal to the senses, such as can never fail to
enervate man’s moral fibre; that, in short, the general aspect of
Christian devotion, as it met the eye of the observer, was a faint
and rather frivolous imitation of the old pagan ritual, the object
of which, from first to last, was not to instruct, or elevate man’s
nature, but simply to charm away the ills of life by adorning and
beautifying his present existence.”[22]

Witness also the following from WESTROPP and WAKE:

“In popular customs, and even in religious institutions, these things
are as plainly perceived to-day as when Adonis and Astarte were the
Gods of the former world. The sanctities, the powers, the symbols,
and even the utensils of the ancient faith have been assumed, if not
usurped or legitimately inherited, by its successors. The two holies
of the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists, Sophia and Eirene--Wisdom and
Peace--were adopted as saints in the calendar of Constantinople.
Dionysius, the god of the mysteries, reappears as St. Denys in
France, St. Liberius, St. Eleutherius, and St. Bacchus; there is
also a St. Mithra; and even Satan, prince of shadows, is revered as
St. Satur and St. Swithin. Their relics are in keeping. The holy
virgin Astræa or Astarte, whose return was announced by Virgil in the
days of Augustus, as introducing a new golden age, now under her old
designation of Blessed Virgin and Queen of Heaven, receives homage as
‘the one whose sole divinity the whole orb of the earth venerates.’
The Mother and Child, the latter adorned with the nimbus or aureole
of the ancient sun-gods, are now the objects of veneration as much
as were Ceres and Bacchus, or Isis and Horus, in the mysteries.
Nuns abounded alike in Christian and Buddhist countries, as they
did formerly in Isis-worshipping Egypt; and if their maidenhood is
not sacrificed at the shrine of Baal-Peor, or any of his cognate
divinities, yet it is done in a figure; they are all ‘brides of
the Saviour.’ _Galli_ sing in the churches, and consecrated women
are as numerous as of old. The priestly vestments are like those
formerly used in the worship of Saturn and Cybele; the Phrygian
cap, the pallium, the stole, and the alb. The whole Pantheon has
been exhausted, from the Indus, Euphrates, and the Nile, to supply
symbolic adornment for the apostles’ successors. Hercules holds the
distaff of Omphale. The Lily has superseded the Lotus, and celibacy
is exalted above the first recorded mandate of God to mankind....

“It is true, doubtless, that there is not a fast or festival,
procession or sacrament, social custom or religious symbol, that did
not come ‘bodily’ from the previous paganism. But the pope did not
import them on his own account; they had already been transferred
into the ecclesiastical structure, and he only accepted and perhaps
took advantage of the fact. Many of those who protest because of
these corruptions are prone to imitate them more or less, displaying
an engrafting from the same stock.”[23]

A late German writer of note and authority, LECHLER, thus states the relative influence of paganism and Judaism on early Christianity:

“Putting together all that has been said, we get the impression
that, in respect to the Gentile Christians in the second half of
the Apostolic age, heathenism was the vastly predominant power that
partly from without threatened the Church, and partly from within
prepared the most hazardous disputes. It was an anti-Christian gnosis
proceeding from heathen ideas; frequently also a moral error stained
with heathen licentiousness, that became dangerous to souls. On the
other hand, according to all the documents of that later apostolic
time that we possess, Judaism, broken as a political power, was no
longer a dangerous opponent of the Church of Christ as a spiritual
power; the time in which Judaizing errorists possessed a powerful
influence over spirits was visibly passed.”[24]

With such a preview, made up from writers of such authority and ability, the fact of the existence of an immense amount of pagan residuum in Christianity is placed beyond question. The reader may be surprised; may shrink from such facts. But shrinking from facts, or denying them, does not remove or destroy them. Facts are immortal. He who will take the trouble to follow through the successive chapters will see by what means, and in what ways, Christianity was corrupted, and whence came the pagan residuum that yet remains. Suggestions in outline will also be found, as to how the remaining residuum can be removed.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It was the next day.

[2] _History of Rome_, by Thomas H. Dyer, LL.D., p. 295, New York and London, 1877.

[3] _The Old Roman World_, by John Lord, LL.D., chap. xiii., p. 558 ff., New York, 1873.

[4] _Outlines of the History of Religions_, by Prof. C. P. Tiele, translated from the Dutch by J. E. Carpenter, pp. 242, 244. London and Boston, 1877.

[5] _Epitome Annalium Cardinalis Baronii, a Spondano._ In Dues Partes. p. 79, Lugduni, 1686.

[6] _De Inventore Rerum_, lib. v., cap. i., Venetus, 1490.

[7] _Antiquities of France_, lib. 2, cap. 1.

[8] _Faux Visage de l’Antiquité._

[9] Which are to be found in the edition printed with the king’s privilege, at Lyons, by William Rouille, anno 1556.

[10] _Conformity between Ancient and Modern Ceremonies_, Leyden, 1677, pp. 4, 5.

For the original, see _Veterum Romanorum Religio_, Guilielmo du Choul, Amstelædami, 1685, p. 216.

[11] _Middleton’s Works_, vol. iii., pp. 117, 118, London, 1752. See also Aringhus, _Rom. Subter._, tom. 1, lib. i., c. 21.

[12] _Last Results of Persian Research_, in _Outlines of the Philosophy of History_, by C. C. J. Bunsen, chap. 3, sec. 1, part 1, of First Part, London, 1854.

[13] _History of the Corruption of Christianity_, vol. ii., pp. 441, 442, Birmingham, 1782.

[14] _The Irish Race in the Past and the Present_, by Rev. Aug. Thebaud, S. J., p. 63, New York, 1876.

[15] _Christ and Other Masters_, by Charles Hardwick, M.A., part 2, p. 183, Cambridge, 1857.

[16] _The Church in the Catacombs_, etc., by Chas. Maitland, M.D., p. 306, London, 1846.

[17] _Evenings with the Romanists_, pp. 221-223, London, 1854.

[18] Eastern sun-worship.

[19] _Influence of Rome on Christianity_, Hibbert Lectures for 1880, p. 33 ff.

[20] _The Old Catholic Church_, etc., W. D. Killen, D.D., pp. 44-6, Edinburgh, 1871.

[21] _Lives of the Fathers_, vol. i., pp. 350-1, Edinburgh, 1889.

[22] _Four Lectures on Some Epochs of Early Church History_, by Charles Merivale, D.D., Dean of Ely, pp. 149-155, New York, Randolph; no date.

[23] _Ancient Symbol Worship_, Westropp and Wake, pp. 94, 96, New York, 1874.

[24] _Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times_, G. V. Lechler, D.D., pp. 262, 263.