the rights of the senate, as well as the privileges,
honours, and riches of the aristocracy? Being destined, as they were under
any religion whatever, for a life of labour and privation, they might
choose between Christianity and Paganism, without having their choice
actuated by any personal interest. It is therefore necessary to seek for
another cause of that obstinate attachment which the lower classes of the
town and country population showed for the practices of a worship whose
existence was for a century reduced to such a miserable state.

"I shall not dwell on what has been said about the tyranny of habit, which
is always more severe wherever minds are less enlightened. I shall
indicate another cause of the obstinacy of the Pagans, which was founded
at least upon an operation of the mind--upon a judgment--and was,
consequently, more deserving of fixing the attention of the church than
that respect of custom against which the weapons of reason are powerless.

"The Christian dogmas, penetrating into a soul corrupted and weakened by
idolatry, must have, in the first moment, filled it with a kind of terror.
And, indeed, how was it possible that the Pagans, accustomed as they were
to their profligate gods and goddesses, should not have trembled when they
heard for the first time the voice of God, the just but inexorable
rewarder of good and evil? Should not a solemn and grave worship, whose
ceremonies were a constant and direct excitation to the practice of every
virtue, appear an intolerable yoke to men who were accustomed to find in
their sacred rites a legitimate occasion to indulge in every kind of
debauchery? The fear of submitting their lives to the rule of a too rigid
morality, and to bow their heads before a God whose greatness terrified
them, kept for many years a multitude of Pagans from the church.

"If it has entered the designs of Providence to temper the severe dogmas
of Christianity by the consecration of some mild, tender, and consoling
ideas, and by the same adapted to the fragile human nature, it is evident
that, whatever may have been their aim, they must have assisted in
detaching the last Pagans from their errors. The worship of Mary, the
mother of God, seems to have been the means which Providence has employed
for completing Christianity.(24)

"After the council of Ephesus the churches of the East and of the West
offered the worship of the faithful to the Virgin Mary, who had
victoriously issued