Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
The great event of the History of the world is the revolution by which the noblest portions of humanity have passed from the ancient religions, comprised under the vague name of Paganism, to a religion founded on the Divine Unity, the Trinity, and the Incarnation of the Son of God. It has taken nearly a thousand years to accomplish this conversion.
It is clear that the king, unlike the literary devotees of Scandinavian paganism, looked upon Christianity as the root of the greatness, and even of the military force, of the nation. In order to restore the Church again, it was necessary above all things to refound the monasteries.
In every part of Italy Catholicism has inherited something of Paganism, but the Pantheon is the only ancient Temple of Rome which is preserved entire, the only one where may be remarked in its ensemble the beauty of the architecture of the ancients, and the particular character of their worship.
Accordingly, they erect no images in their cities, much less in their temples, and they refuse to grant this kind of honor to kings or emperors." The sage Pliny, who himself laughed at the crude paganism of his time, could also point the finger of scorn at the Jews as "a people notorious by their contempt of divine images."
"So you are one of those ninnies who see in the police nothing more than a horde of spies and informers? Have you never suspected the statesmen, the diplomats, the Richelieus it produces? Mercury, monsieur, Mercury, the cleverest of the gods of paganism, what was he but the police incarnate? It is true that he was also the god of thieves.
A philosophic dreamer may affect a calm indifference, a bland and benignant Liberalism; but a nation, a community, cannot be neutral or inert in regard to matters of faith: it must and will be either religious or irreligious, it must either love the truth or hate it: it is too sharp-sighted, and too much guided by homely common sense, to believe that systems so opposite as Paganism and Christianity, or Popery and Protestantism, are harmonious manifestations of the same religious principle, or equally beneficial to the State.
Civilisation is only an occasion for Christianity to prove its spirit. It is an occasion of suffering, and also of corruption. In both cases Christianity has to be tested. Christianity has to fight against a Pagan civilisation as well as a Pagan barbarism. It is sometimes harder for the Christian spirit to fight against the first than against the second form of Paganism.
M. Turrentin, of Geneva, Switzerland, a learned Protestant writer of the 17th century, in one of his orations describing the state of Christianity in the 4th century, says "that it was not so much the Empire that was brought over to the faith, as the faith that was brought over to the Empire; not the Pagans who were converted to Christianity, but the Christians who were converted to Paganism."
Not content with merely encouraging, both by precept and by example, the growth of Christianity, the Emperor further testified to his zeal for the rising religion by inflicting incessant persecutions upon the rapidly decreasing advocates of the ancient worship; serving, by these acts of his reign, as pioneer to his successor, Theodosius the Great, in the religious revolution which that illustrious opponent of Paganism was destined to effect.
M. Belloc said the reason was because there was in it more genuine faith than in any book. And we branched off into florid eloquence touching paganism, Christianity, and art. "Christianity," M. Belloc said, "has ennobled man, but not made him happier. The Christian is not so happy as the old Greek.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking