How Christianity Was Paganized.
THE Rev. Dr. Geikie, author of the "Life and Words of Christ," gives a good illustration of the means used by some of the early Christians to induce the heathen to accept the Christian religion. We are quite sure, however, that the time of which he speaks must have been after all the apostles had ended their labors and gone to their rest. But both Paul and John foresaw this time in the near future. Dr. Geikie is speaking of the heathenism of Palestine, and says:— "Helios, the sun, was the great object of worship, and so deeply rooted was this idolatry that the early Christian missionaries knew no other way of overthrowing it than by changing it into the name of the prophet Elias, and turning the temples into churches dedicated to him."—Life of Christ, pp. 53, 54. We can well imagine the sort of Christians they would make. The ancient Egyptians, for many centuries before Christ, worshiped Isis as the queen of the heavens and the goddess mother, with her son Horus in her arms as the god of the rising sun. The image of the mother and child, Isis and Horus, was found in nearly every temple in Egypt, and in the time of the Roman emperors in many of the temples of Italy and Greece. If the Christian missionaries had told the Egyptians that this image was hereafter to be called the Virgin Mary, and her child called Jesus, and that they must hereafter worship them under these names, they would have possessed about the same amount of Christianity as those spoken of by Dr. Geikie. Yet this is just the way the missionaries induced the Egyptians to become Christians. They could continue to worship the queen of the heavens, but they must call her the blessed Virgin Mary, and they could continue to worship the all-conquering Horus, who was the rising sun, but they must hereafter call him the Sun of Righteousness. No wonder that Tertullian told the heathen in substance: "If the Christians do seem to worship the sun, they are no different from you." It was during this period that the people of the church were told by their leaders that they must now, instead of observing Sunday for the reason that the day was dedicated to the sun, or to his worship, observe it because it was the day on which God began the creation of the world, and also the day to be observed in memory of the resurrection of Christ.—Light of Home.