The history of the Roman witch is thus prophetic of that of her Christian successor. So long as she was subject to the civil power alone she suffered little interference from the State, but as soon as she aroused the jealous attention of the more orthodox interpreters of the supernatural, her doom was sealed. We are apt to boast great things of the increase of knowledge in our time, and to instance the decay of superstition in evidence, but, were a sudden religious revival to take place at all comparable to the birth-throes of early Christianity or the Reformation, it is doubtful whether we should not find a belief in the wicked prowess of the witch revive along with it, and possibly our spiritual pastors and masters among the first to attack it with temporal weapons. It is difficult to see how they could logically refrain. CHAPTER IX FROM PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY Seeing that it affects ourselves so considerably, we are in the habit of proclaiming the introduction of Christianity as the greatest revolution in history--a claim which will be more capable of demonstration when a few more thousand years have passed, and a few more religions have waxed and waned. At least, the mind of the cultured "Christian" of to-day varies little in its outlook--save in so far as it is affected by modern material discoveries--from that of the cultured "Pagan" of Imperial Rome, much less, indeed, than do either of them from the earnest Early Christian. The ovine tendency of human nature makes it inevitable that a few sincere believers--whatever their belief--will always attain a comet-like tail of followers, hypnotised by their earnestness, and themselves understanding very little about it. However it may have been with the small band of early Christians--whose belief was given reality by their sufferings in its cause--one may be sure that the ideas of the sixth century Christian in the village street upon Heaven, Hell, and their denizens, differed only in the change of a few names, and the addition of some intolerance from those of his pagan ancestor six centuries before. His spiritual advisers bade him worship the names of Christ, St. John, and St. Peter, in place of Apollo, Mercury, or Mars, and he, troubling his head about very little but his means of daily livelihood, accepted the change without demur. Meanwhile his mind--such as it was--worked along its old lines. As in all great religious movements, we find no sudden or violent change--except, of course, in individual cases--the older ideas were abandoned, in name, though only very slowly, and the change from Diana to Christ, so far as it affected the great bulk of worshippers, was mentally imperceptible.