p. 123 | WHO ARE PAGANS?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 19, 1876

WHO ARE PAGANS?

The following interesting and instructive account of the origin of the words “Pagan” and “Heathen,” we find in “Trench on the Study of Words,” pp. 101, 102. Many of our readers will doubtless be surprised to learn that pagans and heathens were originally only the dwellers in the country, in distinction from the dwellers in the cities. It is equally an instructive fact, that Christianity made its earlier conquests, not among the weak-minded and ignorant, but among those of the strongest minds and the highest cultivation, the dwellers in the cities, the seats in those days of the civilization and learning of the world.

“Examine the words ‘pagan’ and ‘paganism,’ and you will find that there is history in them. Many of us, no doubt, are aware that ‘pagani,’ derived from ‘pagus,’ a village, signifies properly the dwellers in hamlets and villages, as distinguished from the inhabitants of towns and cities; and the word was so used, and without any religious significance, in the earlier periods of the Latin language. ‘Pagani’ did indeed then not unfrequently designate all civilians, as contradistinguished from the military caste; and this fact may not have been without a certain influence, when the idea of the faithful as soldiers of Christ was strongly realized in the minds of men.”

“But how mainly was it that it came first to be employed as equivalent to ‘heathen,’ and applied to those yet alien from the faith of Christ? It was thus: The Christian church fixed itself first in the seats and centers of intelligence, in the towns and cities of the Roman Empire, and in them its first triumphs were won; while long after these had accepted the truth, heathen superstitions and idolatries lingered on in the obscure hamlets and villages of the country; so that ‘pagans,’ or villagers, came to be applied to all the remaining votaries of the old and decaying superstitions, inasmuch as far the greater number of them were of this class. The first document in which the word appears in this, its secondary sense, is an edict of the Emperor Valentinian, of date A. D. 368. The word ‘heathen’ acquired its meaning from exactly the same fact, namely, that at the introduction of Christianity into Germany, the wild dwellers on the ‘heaths’ longest resisted the truth.”

“Here, then, are two instructive notices for us: First, the historic fact, that the church of Christ did thus plant itself in the haunts of learning and intelligence; and secondly, the more important moral fact, that it shunned not discussion, that it feared not to grapple with the wit and wisdom of this world, or to expose its claims to the searching examination of educated men; but, on the contrary, had its claims first recognized by them, and in the great cities of the world won first a complete triumph over all opposing powers.”