But though the Platonists invented and introduced this new sense of the word, its widespread acceptance was probably not their work, but a curious accident resulting from misinterpretation of early Christian writings. In St Paul’s Epistles[664] there occurs several times a phrase, τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ‘worldly principles,’ which was apparently a little too cultured for many of those who heard or read it. It conveyed to their minds probably no more than ‘being enslaved to weak and beggarly elements[665]’ conveys to the British peasant of to-day. What more natural then than that the commentator should accept the word in the sense given to it by the Platonists, and that the common-folk who heard his exposition should readily identify the στοιχεῖα whom they were bidden no longer to serve with the lesser deities and local _genii_ to whose service they had long been bound--to whose service moreover in spite of the supposed injunction they have always continued faithful? The Church, they would have felt, acknowledged the existence of these beings; ecclesiastical authority endorsed ancestral tradition; and since such beings existed, it were folly to ignore them; nay, since the Church declared that they were powers of evil, it was but prudent to propitiate them, to appease their malevolence. Thus στοιχεῖα came to be reckoned by every right-minded peasant among his regular demoniacal _entourage_. And so they remain--some of them hostile to man, some benevolent, but all alike wild, uncontrollable spirits--so that St Paul’s phrase στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου even appears in one folk-song metaphorically as a description of wild and wilful young men[666].