Polytheistic, strictly speaking, Christianity had been from the first. The formula of the Trinity was no more truly monotheistic for the new faith than it had been for ancient Egypt; and the mere belief in an Evil Power was a negation of monotheism. But when saints came to be prayed-to at separate shrines, and every trade had its saint-patron, the Christian system was both theoretically and practically as polytheistic as that of classic Greece, where Zeus was at least as truly the Supreme God as was the Father for Christians. And in the elevation of Mary to Goddesshood even the formal semblance of monotheism was lost, for her worship was in the main absolute. The worship, indeed, was long established before she received technical divinization from the Church, such Fathers as Epiphanius and Augustine having too flatly condemned her early worship to permit of a formal declaration to the contrary. But in the thirteenth century, St. Bonaventura, who expressly maintained that the same reverence must be paid to the Virgin's image as to herself--a doctrine established in the same period by Thomas Aquinas in regard to Christ--arranged a Psalter in which domina was substituted for dominus (in te domina speravi); and this became the note of average Catholicism. In the twelfth century began the dispute as to the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin--the doctrine, that is, of her supernatural birth--on which in later ages the Dominicans and Franciscans fought a bitter and obstinate battle, the latter affirming and the former denying the dogma. After seven centuries of temporizing, the Papacy has in recent times endorsed it (1854); but for a thousand years it has been implicit in the ritual of the Catholic Church.