Note 960 — ROMAN PEOPLE (continued 9)

It should be understood that these legacies, with the exception of the last (the vocabulary), were only taken up by the Church after the first two centuries of its existence. And even the vocabulary of the early Roman Church was mainly Greek (Gwatkin, Early Church History, ii. 213, and it was not till the rise of the African school of writers (Tertullian, Arnobius, Augustine) that the Latin vocabulary really established itself. Any real assimilation of Christian and pagan forms of worship was not possible until the latter were growing meaningless; then "the assimilation of Christianity to heathenism from the third century is matter of history" (Gwatkin, i. 269).