“Gone glimmering through the dream of things that were,”——
“A school-boy’s tale.”
Every ancient device for the perpetuation of the long established faith, disappeared in the advancing light of the gospel. Temples, statues, oracles, festivals, and all the solemn paraphernalia of superstition, were swept to oblivion, or, changing their names only, were made the instruments of recommending the new faith to the eyes of the common people. But, however the pliant spirit of the degenerate successors of the early fathers might bend to the vulgar superstitions of the day, the establishment of the Christian religion, upon the ruins of Roman heathenism, was effected with a completeness that left not a name to live behind them, nor the vestige of a form, to keep alive in the minds of the people, the memory of the ancient religion. The words applied by our great poet to the time of Christ’s birth, have something more than poetical force, as a description of the absolute extermination of these superstitions, both public and domestic, on the final triumph of Christianity:
“The oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Rolls through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell,