Edward Gibbon says:
"It must be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic church imitated the profane model which they were impatient to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves, that the ignorant rusties would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of Paganism, if they found some resemblance, some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the Roman empire: but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals."[411:1]
Faustus, writing to St. Augustine, says:
"You have substituted your agapæ for the sacrifices of the Pagans; for their idols your martyrs, whom you serve with the very same honors. You appease the shades of the dead with wine and feasts; you celebrate the solemn festivities of the Gentiles, their calends, and their solstices; and, as to their manners, those you have retained without any alteration. Nothing distinguishes you from the Pagans, except that you hold your assemblies apart from them."[411:2]
Ammonius Saccus (a Greek philosopher, founder of the Neo-platonic school) taught that:
"Christianity and Paganism, when rightly understood, differ in no essential points, but had a common origin, and are really one and the same thing."[411:3]
Justin explains the thing in the following manner:
"It having reached the devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come . . . he (the devil) set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called sons of Jove, (i. e., "The Sons of God.") The devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as the prodigious fables and poetic stories."[411:4]
Cæcilius, in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, says: