to offer to the pagans in exchange for the countless gods of the old religion whom she was endeavouring to displace and to degrade. Indeed the real difficulty of the Christian Church was the tolerant spirit of the Greek people. They would not acknowledge that any feud existed. They were ready to worship the Christian God: but they must have felt that it was unreasonable of the Christian missionaries to ask them to give up all their old gods merely because a new god had been introduced. Even if their gods were all that the Christians represented them to be—cruel, licentious, unjust—that was no reason for neglecting them; rather it furnished a stronger motive for propitiating them and averting their wrath by prayer and sacrifice. Tolerant themselves, they must have resented a little the intolerance of the new religion.
Such being the attitude of the two parties, it may be doubted whether the Church would have made much headway in Greece, had it not been for a fresh development in her own conditions. And this development was the second disturbing factor in what should have been the simple struggle between monotheism and polytheism. Christianity, as understood by the masses, became polytheistic on its own account.
It is true that the authorities of the Greek Church have always taught that the angels and saints are not to be worshipped in the same sense as God. Ecclesiastical doctrine concedes to them no power to grant the petitions of men at their own will: they can act as intermediaries only between man and the Almighty; yet while they cannot in their own might fulfil the requests which they hear, their intervention as messengers to the throne of God is deemed to enhance the value of man's prayers and wellnigh to ensure their acceptance. But such a doctrine is naturally too subtle for the uninstructed common-folk: and just as Christ had been admitted to the ranks of the Greek gods, so were the saints, it would seem, accepted as lesser deities or perhaps heroes. Whatever their precise status may have been, they at any rate became objects of worship; and a religion which admits many objects of worship becomes necessarily a form of polytheism.
Now while the Church did not sanction this state of things by her doctrine, there can be no doubt that she condoned it by the use to which she put it. The attempt to crush paganism
