§ 39.6. =Superstition.=--Just as in later times every great Christian missionary enterprise has seen religious ideas transferred from the old heathenism into the young Christianity, and, consciously or unconsciously, secretly or openly, acquiesced in or contended against, securing for themselves a footing, so also the Church of the first centuries did not succeed in keeping itself free from such intrusions. A superstition forcing its entrance in this way can either be taken over _nude crude_ in its genuinely pagan form and, in spite of its palpable inconsistency with the Christian faith, may nevertheless assert itself side by side with it, or it may divest itself of that old pagan form, and so unobserved and uncontested gain an entrance with its not altogether extinguished heathenish spirit into new Christian views and institutions and thus all the more dangerously make its way among them. It is especially the magico-theurgical element present in all heathen religions, which even at this early period stole into the Christian life and the services of the church and especially into the sacraments and things pertaining thereto (§ 58), while it assumed new forms in the veneration of martyrs and the worship of relics. One can scarcely indeed accept as a convincing proof of this the statement of the Emperor Hadrian in his correspondence regarding the religious condition of Alexandria as given by the historian Vopiscus: _Illic qui Serāpem colunt Christiani sunt, et devoti sunt Serapi qui se Christi episcopos dicunt; nemo illic archisynagogus Judæorum, nemo Samarites, nemo Christianorum presbyter non mathematicus, non haruspex, non aliptes_. This statement bears on its face too evidently the character of superficial observation, of vague hearsay and confused massing together of sundry reports. What he says of the worship of Serapis, may have had some support from the conduct of many Christians in the ascetic order, the designating of their presbyters _aliptæ_ may have been suggested by the chrism in baptism and the anointing at the consecration of the clergy, perhaps also in the anointing of the sick (Matt. vi. 13; Jas. v. 14); so too the characterizing of them as _mathematici_ may have arisen from their determining the date of Easter by means of astronomical observations (§ 37, 2; 56, 3), though it could not be specially wonderful if there actually were Christian scholars among the Alexandrian clergy skilled in astronomy, notwithstanding the frequent alliance of this science with astrology. But much more significant is the gross superstition which in many ways shows itself in so highly cultured a Christian as Julius Africanus in his _Cestæ_ (§ 31, 8). In criticising it, however, we should bear in mind that this book was written in the age of Alexander Severus, in which, on the one hand, a wonderful mixture of religion and theurgical superstition