This symbolic adoption in connection with their God was far from original. A fish, at first the symbol of Vishnu, was adopted by the Buddhists, and from them by the Christians of Turkestan.[697] This adoption and adaptation of a Pagan symbol was but one of the many instances where Christian policy or Christian practice took over and continued heathen customs, institutions, and vestments.[698] Such seems to have been the trend, possibly from pursuing a policy of compromise, more probably from following the line of least resistance, of most religious changes or revivals. But while the attributes of many of the Greek gods were, at least in certain of their attributes, assimilated to Syrian and Eastern divinities, and while the Roman pantheon made room for various Egyptian new-comers, the Jew’s conception of his Deity remained practically unaffected and uninfected. A fish frequently figures on the tombs of the early Christians in the catacombs at Rome: sometimes it bears on its back a bowl with wine and wafers of bread. Many tombs contain small fish of wood or ivory. Such fish served, we are told, as emblems and acrostics, pointing out to his co-religionists the burial place of a Christian without betraying the fact to the persecutors. This explanation lacks confirmation, and carries little conviction, for two (among other) reasons. First: critical statistics show that fish as symbols in Christian art figured frequently both before and after Constantine. Second: fish as indicative of a burial place would by their very presence quickly defeat the object aimed at. They would indicate, as surely as pointers game, the secret grave, for the persecutors of the Christians, as history shows, were not all exactly fools. Some authors trace back not a few of the signs[699] and usages adopted and perpetuated by the Christians to the worship of Venus, of which, when in conjunction with a fish, the underlying idea was the adoration—nearly universal—of fecundity. Two instances, which I give for what they are worth, must suffice. As regards Lent, A. de Gubernatis contends that Aphrodite or Venus, the goddess of Love[700], frequently represented the Spring. Hence it is that in Lent, appointed by the Church to be observed in Spring, and again on Friday (or the day of Freya) we are enjoined to eat fish, of which, it must be remembered, Aphrodite was a patron goddess. As regards Maunday Thursday, Robinson writes: “One of the annual Church disbursements up to the end of the sixteenth century was for herrings, ‘_red and white_.’ Let us hope that those who in pious observation of Christian ordinances thus charged themselves with phosphorus were not aware that they were simply perpetuating the worship of Venus.[701] Friday, again, is _dies Veneris_, and fish, her own symbol, is therefore appropriate for the day.”