of the fallen angels, which was altogether
alien to paganism. By identifying them with the evil spirits of the Bible,
demon-names were even obtained which differed from those of the pagan gods
and, of course, were the correct ones; were they not given in Holy Writ?
In general, the Christians, who possessed an authentic revelation of the
matter, were of course much better informed about the nature of the pagan
gods than the Pagans themselves, who were groping in the dark. Euhemerism,
which plays a great part in the apologists, helped in the same direction:
the supposition that the idols were originally men existed among the
Pagans themselves, and it was too much in harmony with the tendency of the
apologists to be left unemployed. It was reconciled with demonology by the
supposition that the demons had assumed the masks of dead heroes; they had
beguiled mankind to worship them in order to possess themselves of the
sacrifices, which they always coveted, and by this deception to be able to
rule and corrupt men. The Christians also could not avoid recognising that
part of the pagan worship was worship of natural objects, in particular of
the heavenly bodies; and this error of worshipping the "creation instead
of the creator" was so obvious that the Christians were not inclined to
resort to demonology for an explanation of this phenomenon, the less so as
they could not identify the sun or the moon with a demon. The conflict of
these different points of view accounts for the peculiar vacillation in
the Christian conception of paganism. On one hand, we meet with crude
conceptions, according to which the pagan gods are just like so many
demons; they are specially prominent when pagan miracles and prophecies
are to be explained. On the other hand, there is a train of thought which
carried to its logical conclusion would lead to conceiving paganism as a
whole as a huge delusion of humanity, but a delusion caused indeed by
supernatural agencies. This conclusion hardly presented itself to the
early Church; later, however, it was drawn and caused a not inconsiderable
shifting in men's views and explanations of paganism.

Demonology is to such a degree the ruling point of view in Christian
apologetics that it would be absurd to make a collection from these
writings of utterances with an atheistic ring. Such utterances are to be
found in most of them; they appear spontaneously, for instance, wherever
idolatry is attacked. But one canno