restoration of the ancient
worship? The appearance of Julian must have upset many a mind, shaken many
a conscience, and given to the triumph of Christianity the character of a
transitory event. But, at the end of the fourth century, it was impossible
to abandon the church and return to the idols, except by a feeling which
could not but excite profound pity. I therefore understand why St
Augustinus had consented to plead with the Christians in favour of a
wretch already charged with three apostasies: he wished, above all, to
take from him the name of a Pagan, being convinced that whoever consented
no longer to sacrifice to the false gods would finally belong to the true
religion. A neophyte, restrained by the leaven of all the pagan passions,
might remain more or less time on the threshold of the church, but sooner
or later he was sure to cross it.(45) The leaders of the church considered
it always a favourable presumption when a citizen consented to call
himself no longer a Pagan. This first victory appeared to them a sure
presage of a true conversion; and they recommended to the Christians that
they should not apply the dangerous epithet of _Pagan_ to those of their
brethren who had failed, but simply to call them _sinners_. They
endeavoured, in short, to make them forget Paganism; and in order to
attain this object, they even forbade to pronounce its name.(46)

"The ancient worship was not only obstructing the development of
Christianity by covert and insidious attacks, but it was also vitiating
the discipline of the church, because its sway upon the manners of the
converts was something more like a real tyranny than the natural remnant
of its former influence. It is, indeed, surprising with what facility it
introduced into the sanctuary of the true God its superstitious spirit,
its relaxed morals, and its love of disorder. How little the church was
then,--_i.e._, seventy years after the conversion of
Constantine,--resembling what she ought to have been, or what she became
afterwards!(47) St Jerome had intended, towards the end of his life, to
write an ecclesiastical history; but it was in order to show that the
church, under the Christian emperors, went on continually declining.
_Divitiis major, virtutibus minor_ (Greater in wealth, smaller in virtue),
was the severe sentence which St Jerome must have pronounced with regret,
but the justice of which is proved by all the historical documents of that
period. This illust