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ALL DEVILISH IMITATIONS!
The pious Christian Fathers were themselves sorely puzzled and scandalized by these same things; their books are replete with naive attempts to explain the mystery of it,—which they attributed to the blasphemous wiles of the Devil,—that “the Devil had blasphemously imitated the Christian rites and doctrines”;—“always seeing in pagan analogies the trickery of devils.” (CE. 393.) “It having reached the Devil's ears,”says the devout Father Justin Martyr, “that the prophets had foretold the coming of Christ, the Son of God, he set the heathen Poets to bring forward a great many who should be called the sons of Jove. 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 related of the sons of Jove.” (I Apology, ch. 54; INF. i, 181-182.)
Not only the Fathers, but the Bible, Hebrew and Christian, recognized and affirmed the actuality and ever-living reality of the Pagan gods, though the late post-exilic writer of the 95th Psalm maliciously dubs them devils: “All the gods [Heb. elohim] of the nations are devils” (Heb. elilim—not much difference between them—in Hebrew; Ps. xcvi, 5);and this view the Christian forger of the Epistle under the name of Paul to the Corinthians confirms: “The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils” (I Cor. x, 20). Though these malevolent flings at the venerable divinities of Pagandom are in direct violation of the Siniatic Law of God—“Thou shalt not revile the gods” (Ex. xxii, 28);—the Hebrew Yahveh being, according to divine revelation, simply one of many gods—“a God above all gods,” even “God of gods and Lord of lords,” who “judgeth among the [other] gods.”
Father Justin, Tertullian, and many another, says the CE., could “see in all the gods, Moses”; the error and folly of which notions argues our authority,is demonstrated by reference to Middleton's letter from Rome, in which he,with Calvin, “saw an exact conformity between popery and paganism.” (CE. xii, 393.) Whether Middleton and Calvin were so far in error and folly in this opinion, our researches will reveal. Collins, too, in his Discourse,supports with good authorities the opinions of Middleton and Calvin. He cites Father Origen as “so far from disowning an agreement between [Pagan] Platonism and Christianity, that a great part of his book Contra Celsum consists in showing the conformity between them.” Likewise, he says, Amelius, a heathen Platonist, who flourished in the third century, upon reading the first verses of St. John the Evangelist, exclaimed: “Per Jovem, barbarous iste cum nostro Platone sentit—By Jove, this barbarian agrees with Plato”; and he quotes the celebrated saying of Cardinal Palavicino—“Senza Aristotele noi mancavamodi molti Articoli di Fede—Without, Aristotle we should be without many Articles of Faith” (Colins, Discourse of Free Thinking, p. 127.) 46
Not only did the Fathers and the Church admit with implicit faith the living reality of the gods of heathendom, their powers, oracles, miracles and other “analogies” to the Christian faith, they even made of such anthologies their strongest apologies, or arguments, in defense of the truth of the Christian tenets. In his Apologia addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, Father Justin reasons from analogy thus:
“By declaring the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our Master, Jesus Christ,to be born of a Virgin, without any human mixture, we [Christians] may no more in this than what you [Pagans] say of those whom you style the Sons of Jove. For you need not be told what a parcel of sons the writers most in vogue among you assign to Jove. ...
“As to the Son of God, called Jesus, should we allow him to be nothing more than man, yet the title of ‘the Son of God' is very justifiable, upon the account of his wisdom, considering that you [Pagans] have your Mercury in worship under the title of The Word, a messenger of God. ...
“As to his [Jesus] being born of a Virgin, you have your Perseus to balance that.” (Justin, Apologia, I. ch. xxii; ANF. i, 170.)The good Fathers carried their argument by analogy into proof of all sorts of holy Christian mysteries; the Pagan Oracles and miracles were undeniably valid and true, why not therefore their new Christian counterparts? “Without a single exception,” says the historian of European Mortals, “the Fathers maintained the reality of the Pagan miracles as fully as their own.The oracles had been ridiculed and rejected by numbers of the philosophers,but the Christians unanimously admitted their reality. They appealed to along series of Oracles as predictions of their faith; not until 1696 was there a denial of their supernatural character, when a Dutch Anabaptist minister,Van Dale, in a remarkable book, De Origine Progressu Idolatriae, asserted in opposition to the unanimous voice of ecclesiastical authority, that they were simple impostures.” (Lecky, History of European Morals, i, 374-375, et seq.; see pp. 378-381, et seq.) The Christian Fathers and their followers made themselves so ridiculous by their fatuous faith in the Sibyls that they were derisively called “Sibyllists” by the Pagans.
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