The experience of the Jewish people is reproduced elsewhere. When Christianity, beginning the conquest of Europe with Greece and Italy, closed its victorious career by reducing to the cross the Scandinavians and the German tribes of Prussia, later even than the conversion of the Tartaric Russians, there was left in all lands a pagan element, on which the arch-enemy based his new schemes of revolt and war upon the truth. We of the Gentiles, whether from the sunny south or the colder north, bear to this day, in our terms for the divisions of the week and year, the names of the deities whom our heathen ancestors worshipped—the demons who blinded them to the truth. The Italian, Frenchman, and Spaniard thus keep alive the memory of Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Saturn; the German and Scandinavian tribes of Tuisco, Woden, Thor, Freya, and Sator. Janus opens the year, followed by Februata, Juno, and Mars; Maia claims a month we dedicate to Mary, and which the Irish in his own language still calls the Fire of Baal—Baal-tinne.
Earth and time even seem not enough; we go, so to speak, to the very footstool of God, and name the glorious orbs that move in celestial harmony through the realms of space, from the very demons who for ages received from men the honors due to God—from Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and Mars, Juno and Ceres, Castor and Pollux, and the whole array of gods and demi-gods.
And it is a strange fact that the only attempt made to do away with these pagan relics was that of the infidel and bloodthirsty Revolutionists of France, pagan in all but this.
We bear, as it were, badges of our heathen origin—tokens, perhaps, of the general apostasy which, as some interpreters hold, will one day behold the Gentile nations renounce Christianity, when the number of the elect is to be completed from the remnant of the Jews.
In the heresies, schisms, and revolts against the church the pagan element appears as an uprising, an attempt to retrieve a defeat by causing an overthrow of the victorious church even where a restoration of the old demonic gods seems in itself hopeless. The German tribes and those of Scandinavia, receiving the faith later than the Latin and Celtic races, revolted from the church while the remembrance of pagan rites and license was still fresh. The so-called Reformation was essentially gross and sensual, and none the less so because the Christian influence made the absolute rejection of God for a time impossible, and compelled it to borrow tone, and expression, and the outer garb of Christianity. Vice, in its open and undisguised form, would have shocked communities that had tasted of Christian truth. The arch-enemy was subtle enough to meet the wants of the case, and to present what would appear to the sixteenth century as true, as shrewdly as he presented the grosser forms to earlier minds gross enough to accept them. But, it may be said, it is going too far to make all heresies diabolical; yet the church so speaks. If, in the prayer for the Jews on Good Friday, it asks that God would remove the veil from their hearts, that light might shine in upon the darkness, we cannot but observe that when the petitions arise for those misled by heresy, the church speaks of them as souls deceived by the fraud of the devil. The New Testament is full of allusions to this war of the arch-enemy: he is held up as one who will come to some as a roaring lion, terrifying and alarming; while to others he comes as an angel of light, plausible and Heaven-sent, as it were, raising up false teachers whose reasonings would, were that possible, deceive even the elect. And St. Paul tells us that our struggle is not with flesh and blood—not with the men who are but instruments—but with the spirits of darkness who are the prime movers.