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Updated: June 15, 2025
But in all the qualities that assure both maturity and heroism, he was a full-grown man. As not infrequently occurs, his greatest obstacles were found, not in the hopeless paganism of the degraded tribes of the Dark Continent, but in the apathy, if not antipathy, of the representatives of Christian governments.
It is the devil who instigates the Roman authorities to persecute; the gods and goddesses of paganism are devils, and idolatry itself is an invention of Satan; if a saint falls away from grace, it is by the seduction of the demon; if heresy arises, the devil has suggested it; and some of the Fathers go so far as to challenge the pagans to a sort of exorcising match, by way of testing the truth of Christianity.
Charities were not one of the fruits of paganism. Men may have sold their goods and given to the poor, but we have no record of such deeds. Hospitals and eleemosynary institutions were nearly unknown. When a man was unfortunate, there was nothing left to him but to suffer and die. There was no help from others. All were engrossed in their schemes of pleasure or ambition, and compassion was rare.
It is an undoubted historical fact, recorded by St. Jerome himself, that the election of Pope Damasus, his friend and benefactor, was accompanied by bloody and fatal riots. Damasus and subsequent Popes then obtained or sanctioned the use of the Roman soldiers for the suppression of heresy and schism and Paganism, and Christianity was installed by violence throughout the Empire.
Come poetry, nature, youth, and love, knead my life again with your fairy hands; weave round me once more your immortal spells; sing your siren melodies, make me drink of the cup of immortality, lead me back to the Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no paganism! God of joy and of grief, do with me what Thou wilt; grief is good, and joy is good also. Thou art leading me now through joy.
Later, after learning the salutary lesson, they accomplished much through the organization and direction of the work of Liberian missionaries. In this way the gospel is safely and successfully propagated among the natives. A foe more stubborn than paganism is to be met in the ranks of Islam. There seems to be something in its teachings which renders the native a ready convert.
Tatian, the author of this work, was converted from paganism about 152 A.D., and prepared his unified gospel, probably for the use of the Syrian churches, sometime after 172. His work is one of the treasures of the early Christian literature recovered for us within the last quarter-century.
With him the entire Papacy is there steeped in paganism. What a spectacle when the slender, weak old man, all soul, so purely white, passes along the galleries of the Museum of Antiquities on his way to the gardens. Right and left the statues behold him pass with all their bare flesh.
These silly fables, and this incapacity of understanding how a pagan name or emblem can be used without falling back into paganism, betray one of the peculiar features of the Raskol namely, the realistic nature, of its symbolism, and its matter-of-fact determination to fill images, allegories and words with occult meaning.
He always ended his prayers by asking the Great Spirit to do all these things for the sake of his Son Jesus. All this was very strange and even startling to Oowikapun. He had lived all his life in a land dark with superstition and paganism. The Gospel had as yet never been proclaimed there.
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