Page:Apollonius of Tyana - the pagan Christ of the third century.pdf/98

Rh discourses of Pagan morality produce by the side of the orgies of Bacchus and the rites of Cybele, or in the face of the smiles of the Venus Pandemos and the indescribable forms under which Mercury was represented in the open streets? Such a mixture of severity of morals and shamelessness in religious rites would inevitably produce in the minds of the people of that time the same effect that was produced in our own time, when by some strange convulsion the restored theocracy of the Middle Ages was transformed but a few years since into the guardian of our civilisation and our social progress, and the revival of the Inquisition became the palladium of our modern liberties. A religious movement, however strong it may be apparently, must in reality be very weak when it is compelled to borrow the language and to copy the external forms of its opponents.

At the same time, it is easy to see how right modern critics are when they maintain that, as a general rule in ancient times, and more particularly in the three first centuries, the true meaning of