remove the uneasiness of heathen converts on account of the
loss of their Lupercalia, or feasts of Pan.

"The apotheosis of the old Roman times was replaced by
canonization; tutelary _saints_ succeeded to local
mythological divinities. Then came the mystery of
_transubstantiation_, or the conversion of bread and wine by
the priest into the flesh and blood of Christ. As centuries
passed, the _paganization_ became more and more
complete."[408:1]

The early Christian saints, bishops, and fathers, _confessedly_ adopted
the liturgies, rites, ceremonies, and terms of heathenism; making it
their boast, that the pagan religion, properly explained, really was
nothing else than Christianity; that the best and wisest of its
professors, in all ages, had been Christians all along; that
Christianity was but a name more recently acquired to a religion which
had previously existed, and had been known to the Greek philosophers, to
Plato, Socrates, and Heraclitus; and that "if the writings of Cicero had
been read as they ought to have been, there would have been no occasion
for the Christian Scriptures."

And our Protestant, and most orthodox Christian divines, the best
learned on ecclesiastical antiquity, and most entirely persuaded of the
truth of the Christian religion, unable to resist or to conflict with
the constraining demonstration of the data that prove the absolute
sameness and identity of Paganism and Christianity, and unable to point
out so much as one single idea or notion, of which they could show that
it was peculiar to Christianity, or that Christianity had it, and
Paganism had it not, have invented the apology of an hypothesis, that
the Pagan religion was _typical_, and that Crishna, Buddha, Bacchus,
Hercules, Adonis, Osiris, Horus, &c., were all of them _types_ and
forerunners of the _true_ and _real_ Saviour, Christ Jesus. Those who
are satisfied with this kind of reasoning are certainly welcome to it.

That Christianity is nothing more than Paganism under a new name, has,
as we said above, been admitted over and over again by the Fathers of
the Church, and others. Aringhus (in his account of subterraneous Rome)
acknowledges the conformity between the Pagan and Christian form of
worship, and defends the admission of the ceremonies of heathenism into
the service of the Church, by the authority of the wisest prelates and
governors, whom, he says, found it necessary, in the con