A little reflection will reveal the precarious character of this reasoning. Every step is uncertain. In the first place, it is often by no means clear that the pagan usage has not been influenced by Christianity. The Church did not long remain obscure; even early in the second century, according to the testimony of Pliny, it was causing the heathen temples to be deserted. What is more likely than that in an age of syncretism the adherents of pagan religion should borrow weapons from so successful a rival? It must be remembered that the paganism of the Hellenistic age had elevated syncretism to a system; it had absolutely no objection of principle against receiving elements from every source. In the Christian Church, on the other hand, there was a strong objection to such procedure; Christianity from the beginning was like Judaism in being exclusive. It regarded with the utmost abhorrence anything that was tainted by a pagan origin. This abhorrence, at least in the early period, more than overbalanced the fact that the Christians for the most part had formerly been pagans, so that it might be thought natural for them to retain something of pagan belief. Conversion involved a passionate renunciation of former beliefs. Such, at any rate, was clearly the kind of conversion that was required by Paul. In the second place, the similarity between the pagan and the Christian usages is often enormously exaggerated; sometimes a superficial similarity of language masks the most profound differences of underlying meaning. Illustrations will be given in the latter part of the present chapter. Thus the conclusion is, to say the least, precarious. It is by no means so easy as is sometimes supposed to prove that a pagan usage attested only long after the time of Paul is really the source of Pauline teaching. And it will not help to say that although there is no direct dependence one way or the other yet the pagan and the Pauline teaching have a common source. For to say that a usage has a pagan source several centuries earlier than the time at which the usage is first attested is really to assume the point that is to be proved. We are not here dealing with a question of literary dependence, where the unity of the books which are being compared is assumed. In such a question the independence of the two writers may be proved by the general comparison of the books; it may be shown, in other words, that if one author had used the other author's work at all he would have had to use it a great deal more than as a matter of fact the similarity would indicate. In such cases, striking verbal similarity in one place may prove that both books were dependent upon a common source. But if a pagan usage of the fourth century is similar to a Christian usage, the fact that in general the paganism of the fourth century is independent of Christianity does not disprove dependence of paganism upon Christianity at this one point.