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In the platonic Jews, Christianity found soil so exactly suited to its reception that it is only by he dates that the Thérapeute of Alexandria and their historian Philo are proved not to be Christian; and, again, it was in the close union between the platonic Jews and the platonists that Christianity found its easiest path to the ears and hearts of the pagans.
"They dispute," says Caesar, "on the stars and their motions, on the size of the universe and of this earth, on the nature of physical things, as well as on the strength and power of the eternal God." To bring our question home, what were the religious belief and worship of the Irish Celts while still pagans?
There was, it is true, a particular reason in this case why the forms of divine service should be faithfully observed, and that is, that the war was considered in a great measure a religious war. The Danes were pagans. The Saxons were Christians.
This fact is related in some books, and if it be true, it was done by magic, for the gods of the pagans are in reality demons. A dragon prevented barbarous and ignorant men from drinking at the fountain of Castalia. We must also remember the dragon of Andromeda, which was slain by Perseus. But let us turn from these pagan fables, in which error is always mixed with truth.
The pagans themselves well understood the advantage of this most important science, even for the securing of the happiness of this life; since they had the following words inscribed, as a summary of all human science, upon the frontispiece of the most celebrated temple of Greece, know thou thyself.
"Prefixed to this book, are Prolegomena, in which the author shews that the works of the ancient Pagans are filled with maxims agreeable to the truths taught in holy writ. He intended to dedicate this book to the Chancellor Silleri: he had even writ the dedication, but his friends, to whom he shewed it, thought he expressed himself with too much warmth, against the censurers of his Apology.
United and powerful under the terrible Batu, who died in 1255, it fell to pieces under his successors; but in the fourteenth century the khan Uzbeck reunited it anew, and gave the Horde a second period of prosperity. The Tartars, who were pagans when they entered Russia, embraced, about 1272, the faith of Islam, and became its most formidable apostles.
The Egyptians, like the Greeks, had always been loud in declaring that they were beloved by their gods; but they received their favours with little gratitude, and hardly professed that they felt any love towards the gods in return. But after the time of the Christian era, we meet with more kindly feelings even among the pagans.
After this attack upon the pagans, their religion was no longer openly taught in Alexandria.
But the great truths which those youthful pedants, Maurice and Lewis William, had extracted twenty years before from the works of the Emperor Leo and earlier pagans, amid the jeers of veterans, were not easy to transplant to the Malayan peninsula.
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