t attach any importance to them when
they appear in this connexion, not even in apologists in whose works the
demon theory is lacking. No Christian theologian in antiquity advanced,
much less sustained, the view that the pagan gods were mere phantoms of
human imagination without any corresponding reality.

Remarkable as this state of things may appear to us moderns, it is really
quite simple, nay even a matter of course, when regarded historically.
Christianity had from its very beginning a decidedly dualistic character.
The contrast between this world and the world to come was identical with
the contrast between the kingdom of the Devil and the kingdom of God. As
soon as the new religion came into contact with paganism, the latter was
necessarily regarded as belonging to the kingdom of the Devil; thus the
conception of the gods as demons was a foregone conclusion. In the minds
of the later apologists, who became acquainted with Greek philosophy, this
conception received additional confirmation; did it not indeed agree in
the main with Platonic and Stoic theory? Details were added: the
Christians could not deny the pagan miracles without throwing a doubt on
their own, for miracles cannot be done away with at all except by a denial
on principle; neither could they explain paganism--that gigantic,
millennial aberration of humanity--by merely human causes, much less lay
the blame on God alone. But ultimately all this rests on one and the same
thing--the supernatural and dualistic hypothesis. Consequently demonology
is the kernel of the Christian conception of paganism: it is not merely a
natural result of the hypotheses, it is the one and only correct
expression of the way in which the new religion understood the old.

CHAPTER VIII

In the preceding inquiry we took as our starting-point not the ancient
conception of atheism but the modern view of the nature of the pagan gods.
It proved that this view was, upon the whole, feebly represented during
antiquity, and that it was another view (demonology) which was transmitted
to later ages from the closing years of antiquity. The inquiry will
therefore find its natural conclusion in a demonstration of the time and
manner in which the conception handed down from antiquity of the nature of
paganism was superseded and displaced by the modern view.

This question is, however, more difficult to answer than one would perhaps
think. After ancient paganism had ceased to exis