The war waged took different forms. In the north sensualism and the grosser forms of self-indulgence were the revolt against the spirit of mortification, of self-conquest and control. It required and had no aid from the imagination, art, poetry, music. But at the south the old pagan classics, imbued with the religion of Greece and Rome, became the literature of the new Christian world and exercised a steadily-increasing pagan influence. In the French Revolution, and in the modern less bloody but as deadly Masonic war, we see the old pagan ideas and thoughts come as if spontaneously to the surface. From the reverence for all connected with the old pagan worship down to pagan cremation we see the revival, less gross, less sensual than in the north, idealized by the conception of beauty in form and color, with all the allurement of symmetry to win the eye, the ear, the imagination. That ancient art and the ancient classics have been a potent instrument in weakening the Christian spirit, and in paganizing the learned and the young whom they train, is admitted, and attempts are made to counteract the influence. Our country was settled by communities more or less imbued with all the Old-World paganisms, some of which shot out into new and strange forms, generally of the northern type, hiding sensualism under a cloak of religion, as in the Oneida community and the Mormons, the latter going directly into the ancient pagan channel in their anthropomorphic conception of God. But besides this pagan element—the more insidious because scarcely suspected by most, and which many even now would treat as absolutely null for evil—the country was, in its aboriginal inhabitants, utterly pagan; and within our limits the remnant of those nations and tribes which now represent the original occupants are to a very great extent as pagan as they were three centuries ago. Even where tribes have been converted to Christianity, and been for a long series of years under Christian teachers, a pagan element often remains, nurtured in secret, and heathen rites are practised with the utmost fidelity by many who keep up the semblance of being faithful worshippers of the true God. This crypto-paganism is termed by the Spanish writers in Mexico nagualism, and, from its secret character, formed one of the greatest afflictions of the missionaries, eating out the very heart of the apparently flourishing tree planted by the toil and watered by the blood of the earlier heralds of the Gospel.