“More than sixteen hundred years have passed since Christianity was made the state religion in the decadent Roman Empire. Throughout all those years [notwithstanding its cracking and its crumbling] it has been extending its borders.... It is estimated that at the present time about one third of the entire population of the world is Christian--approximately five hundred and sixty-five million souls. And of course, it is to the spirit of Paul regnant in Christendom that one must credit that enormous expansion.... It is because countless monks and healers and warriors and saints have felt Paul’s call [sic!] to go out and win the heathen to Christ, that today more souls are turned to Christ than to any other deity on earth.” I do not know if Browne attributes the Pauline triumph to the Apostle’s loose handling of theological terms, but he says, “these wholesale increases in numbers were not made save at a high price.... Just as Buddha had to be idolized before he could conquer the East, so Jesus had to be idolized, too, for pagan Europe.”[201] Yet--“despite all these compromises, the new religion remained always heavens above the old [paganism]. By assimilating pagan rites and myths ... Christianity became at last almost completely pagan in semblance; but it never became quite pagan in character. The Old Testament puritanism which had so marked the life of Jesus was never routed.... If the spirit of Paul insisted that Cybele be taken over as the Mother of Christ, the spirit of Jesus insisted that her wild Corybantes with their lustful rites, and her holy eunuchs with their revolting perversions, be left severely behind. If the spirit of Paul demanded that the wild Celtic goddess named Bridget be accepted into Christianity, the Spirit of Jesus demanded that first she be made lily-white and a saint.... It [the Spirit of Christ] set its face hard against sacred prostitution and against all those other loosenesses and obscenities which arose out of the pagan’s free attitude towards sex.”[202] So it was the spirit of a man who was “in his own class” one of the “stupendously great men of the earth,” who favored prostitution, insisted upon taking Cybele into his loosely-worded theology, and--having failed to secure the lustful Corybantes and the holy eunuchs who still had a capacity for perversions--demanded and obtained the acceptance of a wild Celtic goddess named Bridget. Browne describes this Spirit-of-Paul’s Bridget. She was, it appears, one of three deities who “had already [2000 years ago] been sufficiently detached from their physical bodies to be thought of as remote gods and goddesses.” The other two were Ogmius and Maponus.