Note 40 — Chapter VIII · SUPPLEMENTARY MYTH

Thus did paganism, chased out of the window of early Judaic Christianity, re-enter by all the doors, supplying the growing Church with the forms of psychic and literary attraction which ultimately served to give it a general hold over the ignorant and uncivilized masses of decadent and barbaric Europe.40 Even with that machinery, the Church was dissolving in universal schism when Constantine saved it—or at least its body—by establishing it. As the Church broadened its basis, especially after its establishment, its assimilation of pagan ideas, names and practices, became so general that the process has long been made a standing ground of Protestant impeachment of the Church of Rome.41 Middleton’s Letter from Rome (1729) may be said to begin the scientific investigation, which is still going on.42