erved the gratitude of their fellow-creatures, by
some signal services rendered to the community, or their admiration, by
having performed some deeds which required a more than usual degree of
mental and physical powers. The same cause obtained for the Christian
martyrs the gratitude and admiration of their fellow-Christians, and
finally converted them into a kind of demigods. This was more particularly
the case when the church began to be corrupted by her compromise with
Paganism, which having been baptized without being converted, rapidly
introduced into the Christian church, not only many of its rites and
ceremonies, but even its polytheism, with this difference, that the
divinities of Greece and Rome were replaced by Christian saints, many of
whom received the offices of their Pagan predecessors.(4) The church in
the beginning tolerated these abuses, as a temporary evil, but was
afterwards unable to remove them; and they became so strong, particularly
during the prevailing ignorance of the middle ages, that the church ended
by legalising, through her decrees, that at which she did nothing but wink
at first. I shall endeavour to give my readers a rapid sketch of the rise,
progress, and final establishment of the Pagan practices which not only
continue to prevail in the Western as well as in the Eastern church, but
have been of late, notwithstanding the boasted progress of intellect in
our days, manifested in as bold as successful a manner.

Nothing, indeed, can be more deserving of our admiration than the conduct
of the Christian martyrs, who cheerfully submitted to an ignominious
death, inflicted by the most atrocious torments, rather than deny their
faith even by the mere performance of an apparently insignificant rite of
Paganism. Their persecutors were often affected by seeing examples of an
heroic fortitude, such as they admired in a Scaevola or a Regulus,
displayed not only by men, but by women, and even children, and became
converted to a faith which could inspire its confessors with such a
devotion to its tenets. It has been justly said that the blood of the
martyrs was the glory and the seed of the church, because the constancy of
her confessors has, perhaps, given her more converts than the eloquence
and learning of her doctors. It was, therefore, very natural that the
memory of those noble champions of Christianity should be held in great
veneration by their brethren in the faith. The bodies of the martyrs,