"The maxim holds good in the social as well as the mechanical world, that, when two bodies strike, the form of both is changed. Paganism was modified by Christianity; Christianity by Paganism" (Conflict, pp. 34-52). While affirming the divine origin of Christianity, the church historian Mosheim admits its early paganization. He says: "The rites and institutions, by which the Greeks, Romans, and other nations had formerly testified their religious veneration for fictitious deities, were now adopted, with some slight alterations, by Christian bishops, and employed in the service of the true God.... Hence it happened that in these times the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed very little in its external appearance from that of the Christians. They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual. Gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, crosiers, processions, lustrations, images, gold and silver vases, and many such circumstances of pageantry, were equally to be seen in the heathen temples and the Christian churches" (Ecclesiastical History, p. 105). The Rev. Dr. R. Heber Newton, in an article which appeared in the North American Review, says: "There is, in fact, as we now see, nothing in the externals of the Christian church which is not a survival from the churches of paganism.... The sacramental use of water and bread and wine, the very sign of the cross--all are ancient human institutions, rites and symbols. Scratch a Christian and you come upon a Pagan. Christianity is a rebaptized paganism." "Christendom," says Dr. Lyman Abbott, "is only an imperfectly Christianized paganism."