“The neophytes felt for the pagan temples an involuntary respect. They could not pass at once from veneration to a contempt for the monuments of their ancestors’ piety; and in ascending the steps of the church, they were casting a longing look on those temples which a short time before had been resplendent with magnificence, but were now deserted. Christianity understood the power of this feeling, and desired to appropriate it to its own service; it consented, therefore, to establish the solemnities of its worship in the edifices which it had disdained for a long time.(21) Its care not to offend pagan habits was such, that it often respected even the pagan names of those edifices.(22) In short, its policy, which, since the times of Constantine, was always to facilitate the conversion of the Pagans, assumed, after the fall of Rome, a more decided character, and the system of useful concessions became general in all the churches of Europe; and it cannot be doubted that its results have been favourable to the propagation of Christian ideas.(23) “There is, moreover, a peculiar cause to which the rapid decline of the pagan doctrines in the west must be ascribed, and I shall endeavour to place this powerful cause in its true light, carefully avoiding mixing up with a subject of this importance all considerations foreign to the object of my researches. “Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, after having defended a long time the true faith, strayed from it on a subject which proved a stumbling-stone to so many theologians—I mean, the nature of Jesus Christ. Nestorius distinguished in the Son of God two natures, a divine and a human one; and he maintained that the Virgin Mary was not the mother of God (Θεοτοκος), but the mother of the man (ἀνθρωποτοκος). This doctrine, which was a new and bolder form given to Arianism, spread in the two empires, and gained a great number of partisans amongst the monasteries of Egypt. Many monks could not almost suffer that Jesus Christ should be acknowledged as God, and considered him only as an instrument of the Divinity, or a vessel which bore it (Θεοφορος).