Pagans

“ The pagans have contaminated the sanctuaries of God, and have poured out the blood of saints round about the altar; have laid waste the house of our hope, have trampled upon the bodies of saints in the temple of God like dung in the street. ”

“ The sacraments of baptism and confirmation are far older than the Church of Rome. The Eucharist is pagan. Long before popes began to murder each other, pagans ate cakes—the flesh of Ceres, and drank wine—the blood of Bacchus. Holy water flowed in the Ganges and Nile, priests interceded for the people, and anointed the dying. ”

“ I see around me a land given over to idolatry and sensual crime, as if the old Pagans were returned again to earth; and here around me I see the symbols of the Pagan worship and of the Pagan sin, and I hear no other talk than that which would have befitted the Pagan revels and the Pagan darkness which overhung the world to come. ”

“ Like the spirit of the Universal Deity of the Pagans, their love was all around them in everything they saw, or heard, or felt, in every word they uttered, unseen, but powerful, throughout the whole creation. ”

“ The modern pagans tear with scorn the Holy Scriptures into shreds before our eyes, and subject to a lawless criticism the ablest records of ecclesiastical history, while they try to overturn every monument that might shelter the weary pilgrims of earth on their road to heaven. ”

“ The Pagans were amazed to see a lady of her rank, age, and fortune, possessed of all the advantages necessary to please the world, and yet in a condition to enjoy all that is in it most flattering, to contemn all this, and life itself with such an heroic constancy. ”

“ 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 practiced, without rebuke, without remark, with the indulgence even of genuine believers, the rites and usages of the Paganism they pretended to have abjured. ”

“ The seven sleepers of the legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians, and woke when the Christians were persecuting each other, did not find themselves in a world more completely new to them. ”

“ These Pagans are more fervent in their religion than we Christians, who have the true knowledge of the Lord God Almighty, and ought, therefore, day and night to give thanks to his Holy Majesty that we have come to that true knowledge, and be more fervent in our prayers than we are. ”

“ The pagans, even such grand old pagans as the Romans, before undertaking any important action would solemnly consult the auspices. Men with reason given them of God would stand anxiously around the steaming entrails of a bird, to find out whether the fates were propitious to their undertaking. ”

“ They imagined the Pagans would receive Christianity with more facility when they saw the rites and ceremonies to which they were accustomed adopted in the church. So the religion of the Christians was made to conform very [Pg 57] nearly to that of the Pagans in external appearance. ”

“ Seeing that the pagans are all dead and cannot answer any point made against them, I wonder these complacent bestowers of unqualified approval on themselves are not ashamed to bluster so, where they have it all their own way. ”

“ Can any one have the presumption to say that these savage pagans have yielded anything more than an inconsiderable recompense to their benefactors, in surrendering to them a little pitiful tract of this dirty sublunary planet, in exchange for a glorious inheritance in the kingdom of heaven. ”

“ Besides, some of the ancient Christians reproached the pagans with being the dupes of their priests. Observe how Clement of Alexandria speaks of them: "Boast as long as you please of your childish and impertinent oracles, whether of Claros or the Pythian Apollo, of Dindymus or Amphilocus; and add to these your augurs and interpreters of dreams and prodigies. ”

“ For it was contrary to the rule of the gospel that Christians should hold fellowship, or have any intercourse, with pagans. Besides which, the number of those that were come over was now so great, that they were a terror to his subjects; and nobody could now know who was a pagan, or who a Christian, since pagans married the daughters and kinswomen of Christians. ”

“ The Pagans, by an official process called deification, frequently exalted men who had lived among them to a position worthy of special honor and worship. Papists, by a similar process called canonisation, raise their former men of prominence to the dignity of saints and then offer up prayers to them.
The foregoing practises are derived from Paganism; also from Judaism or Paganism came their practise of burning incense in public worship, the use of holy water, burning wax candles in the daytime, and votive gifts and offerings. ”

“ The pagan nations, among whom Catholic missionaries go forth, reproduce the admiration of Greek and Latin pagans; they reverence that which they have not strength to follow, and are often drawn by its exhibition into the fold. ”

“ Soon after the so-called conversion of Constantine, when he became sole emperor, the Church entered on its apostasy from the primitive simplicity and purity which marked its earlier history. Pagans in vast multitudes pressed into the Christian fold, bringing with them old [209] practices and customs, and filling the places of Christian worship with the pageantry and the ornaments which characterized the worship of the gods in heathen temples. ”

“ Every Catholic, even the child, is taught the difference between the idol of the pagan and a Catholic image. Pagans looked upon their idols as gods. They thought these senseless objects had power, intelligence, and other attributes of the Deity. ”

“ Their gloomy and austere aspect, their abhorrence of the common business and pleasures of life, and their frequent predictions of impending calamities, inspired the pagans with the apprehension of some danger which would arise from the new sect, the more alarming as it was the more obscure. ”

“ If that is the case, [26] there is no doubt that a lot of Pagans have slipped in among us—perhaps they have also been proselytising. Don’t let us proselytise too far, don’t let us forget the faith of our forefathers. It must have taken a tremendous faith mixed with a double dose of courage to have crossed the Atlantic in a shell of a boat—yet they did. They were not Pagans. ”

“ She said, "Son, we know that nearly one hundred years have gone by since it was discovered in certain secret books of a pagan sect that the Christian people would rise up against us in battle and subjugate us entirely, setting up their kingdom where we now exercise dominion, so that pagans would be subject to those of the true faith. ”

“ It is true that we have sufficient historical evidence to show that pagan temples were still to be found at Rome after its sack by the Goths, and that many Pagans were employed, in the Western as well as in the Eastern empires, in some of the most important offices of the state; but their number was fast disappearing, and the exercise of their religion was generally confined to the domestic hearth, to the worship of the Lares and Penates. ”

“ And even their lawgiver Moses consented to the construction of a number of imitations or substitutes for the carved images of the pagans. Their brazen serpent displayed upon a pole; their carved cherubims with the body of a man, the head of an animal, and the wings of a bird; and the ark of the covenant, which was borne about in the same manner the heathen carried their idols,—were all compromises with and concessions to idolatry, and were all venerated with the same spirit and in the same fashion the heathen adored their carved or molten images. ”

“ We would let pagans worship as they please, and to the Christians and Mahommedans, and all sects and parties in the world we would say, "Do just as you please, for your volition is free, and you must act upon it for yourselves before the heavens. ”

“ For put the case, that those ancient Christians had not avoided conformity with pagans in those rites and customs which we read to have been forbidden them, yet for all that, there had been remaining betwixt them and the pagans a great deal more difference than will remain betwixt us and the Papists, if we avoid not conformity with them in the controverted ceremonies ”

“ The pagans, according to this notion, were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all things reasonable and respectable. ”

“ They exercised charity and benevolence, and they forced the respect of the surrounding pagans to a life the motives of which they could not comprehend, unless they resulted from principles higher than those their pagan religion afforded them ”

“ It is permitted to the Church to use, for the purpose of piety, the ceremonies which the pagans used for the purpose of impiety in a superstitious religion, after having first expiated them by consecration—to the end, that the devil might receive a greater affront from employing, in honor of Jesus Christ, that which his enemy had destined for his own service. ”

“ Something will always “seal the lips of the Evangelist,” as the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of those who had seen the vision of Eleusis.2509 The pagans of the early Empire were thus, in the absence of dogma and ecclesiastical teaching, free to express, with perfect frankness, their unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality, according to the many influences that had moulded them. ”

“ For, no bigotted pilgrim appears more zealous, or strains his devotion more at the shrine, than these believing Indians do, in their idolatrous adorations. Neither do the most refined Catholics undergo their pennance with so much submission, as these poor Pagans do the severities which their priests inflict upon them. ”

“ Pagans who set us free are better than Christians who imprison us. Moreover, these brave and wily folks entered the abbey by strategem, and have slaughtered about a hundred Frankish soldiers, without counting the monks whom they despatched. ”

“ But apart from those excesses of corruption and unbelief, which, no doubt, virtuous pagans themselves abhorred, the approved, correct, and so-called pure life of the best men of pagan Rome necessitated the contamination of idolatrous worship. ”

“ The great secret for scholars is, however, that these pagans and heretics, who are the last who cling to a heathen creed out-worn in Europe—these outcast children of the Cainites, Ultra-Taborites, and similar ancient worshippers of the devil, are really the ones who possess the most valuable stores of folk-lore, that is to say, such as illustrate the first origins of the religious Idea, its development, and specially the evolution of the Opposition or Protestant principle. ”

“ The Fathers, as much as in them lies, and as far as they can, avoid and decline all occasions of speaking about the invocation of saints then practised in the Church, fearing lest to the gentiles there might appear a sort of similarity, although untrue and equivocal, between the worship paid to the saints by the Church, and by the Pagans to their false divinities ”

“ If pagans, in ignorance or malice, slandered the assemblies and love-feasts of the early Christians, it will be allowed that Christian divines of later ages have, by their fable of pagan corruption, wreaked a more than ample revenge. ”

“ A few of them who visit the king's posts, have been baptized, and taught to mutter something they call prayers, and on this account are esteemed good Christians by their tutors; while every action of their lives proves them to be as much Pagans as ever ”

“ Paganism in a modified form prevails as of yore. The more abominable rites, it is true, have been suppressed; but although the people have been taught no longer to trust in the heathen gods, they have retained their superstitions and the larger portion of their former customs. The aim of the bishops and other leaders in the Church has been to amalgamate the two systems, so as to induce the pagans to more readily afford them their support. ”

“ B Baal, the worship of, corrupted the Israelites, 156. Baptism, character of, in the N. T., 71, 72; pagans sought spiritual purity by it, 77; mithraic and gnostic, 77; gnostics called it a “purifying fire,” 79; pagans initiated candidates to their “mysteries” by it, 82; by blood, a feature of mithraicism, 82; administered at death as a means of salvation, 83; performed for the dead, 83; associated with serpent worship, 85; pagan, in Egypt, 87; of young children in Thibet and Mongolia, 93; pagan, of the dying, 93; modern Buddhistic, 94 f; various forms of, in Oriental paganism, 97 ”

“ The name of Pagan is an injurious and ignoble term derived from the Latin Paganus, which signifies a rustic, a peasant. When Christianity had entirely triumphed over Greek and Roman polytheism, and when by the order of the Emperor Theodosius, the last temple dedicated to the gods of the nations had been destroyed in the cities, it was found that the people in the country still persisted a considerable time in the ancient cult, which caused them and all their imitators to be called derisively Pagans. ”

“ Germanicus, a young man, but a true christian, being delivered to the wild beasts on account of his faith, behaved with such astonishing courage, that several pagans became converts to a faith which inspired such fortitude. ”

“ 141 A generous intercourse of charity united the most distant provinces, and the smaller congregations were cheerfully assisted by the alms of their more opulent brethren. 142 Such an institution, which paid less regard to the merit than to the distress of the object, very materially conduced to the progress of Christianity. The Pagans, who were actuated by a sense of humanity, while they derided the doctrines, acknowledged the benevolence, of the new sect. ”