However, we would be tempted to believe that there had been no change in the Roman faith, were we to read certain authors that fought idolatry in those days. Saint Augustine, for instance, in his _City of God_, pleasantly pokes fun at the multitude of Italian gods that presided over the paltriest acts of life.[3] But the useless, ridiculous deities of the old pontifical litanies no longer existed outside of the books of antiquaries. As a matter of fact, the Christian polemicist's authority in this instance was Varro. The defenders of the {203} church sought weapons against idolatry even in Xenophanes, the first philosopher to oppose Greek polytheism. It has frequently been shown that apologists find it difficult to follow the progress of the doctrines which they oppose, and often their blows fall upon dead men. Moreover, it is a fault common to all scholars, to all imbued with book learning, that they are better acquainted with the opinions of ancient authors than with the sentiments of their contemporaries, and that they prefer to live in the past rather than in the world surrounding them. It was easier to reproduce the objections of the Epicureans and the skeptics against abolished beliefs, than to study the defects of an active organism with a view to criticizing it. In those times the merely formal culture of the schools caused many of the best minds to lose their sense of reality. The Christian polemics therefore frequently give us an inadequate idea of paganism in its decline. When they complacently insisted upon the immorality of the sacred legends they ignored the fact that the gods and heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence.[4] The writers of that period, like those of the Renaissance, regarded the fictions of mythology as details necessary to poetical composition. They were ornaments of style, rhetorical devices, but not the expression of a sincere faith. Those old myths had fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed in the compact with Mephistopheles.