the catholic Christians when he said: "Ye have changed the idols into martyrs, whom ye worship with the like prayers, and ye appease the shades of the dead with wine and flesh." Augustine asserts that the church indeed celebrates the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity, to be stirred up to imitate them, united with their merits, and supported by their prayers," but it offers sacrifice and dedicates altars to God alone. Our mar- » De cura pro mortuis (a. d. 421), c. 16. lu anotlier place be decidedly rejects the first hypothesis, because otherwise he himself would be always surroimded by his pious mother, and because in Isa. Ixiii. 16 it is said : "Abraham is ignorant of ' " Et ad excitindam imitationem, ct ut nieritis eorum consocietur, atque oratio us." nibna adjuyetur." Contra Faustum, 1. 20, n. 21. § 84. THE WORSHIP OF MARTYRS AND SAINTS. 435 tyrs, says he, are not gods ; we build no temples to our mar- tyrs, as to gods ; but we consecrate to them only memorial places, as to departed men, whose spirits live with God ; we build altars not to sacrifice to the martyrs, but to sacrifice with them to the one God, who is both ours and theirs.' But in spite of all these distinctions and cautions, which must be expected from a man like Augustine, and acknowl- edged to be a wholesome restraint against excesses, we cannot but see in the martyr- worship, as it was actually practised, a new form of the hero-worship of the pagans. Nor can we wonder in the least. For the great mass of the Christian peo- ple came, in fact, fresh from polytheism, without thorough conversion, and could not divest themselves of their old notions and customs at a stroke. The despotic form of government, the servile subjection of the people, the idolatrous homage which was paid to the Byzantine emperors and their statues, the predicates divina^ sacra^ coelestio,^ which were applied to the utterances of their will, favored the worship of saints. The heathen emperor Julian sarcastically reproached the Chris- tians with reintroducing polytheism into monotheism, but, on account of the difference of the objects, revolted from the Christian worship of martyrs and relics, as from the " stench of craves and dead men's bones." The Manichsean taunt we have already mentioned. The Spanish j^resbyter Yigilantius, in the fifth century, called the worshippers of martyrs and relics, ashes-worshippers and idolaters,^ and taught that, accord- ing to the Scriptures, the living only should pray with and for each other. Even some orthodox church teachers admitted the affinity of the saint-worship with heathenism, though with the view of showing that all that is good in the heathen wor- ' De Civit. Dei, xxii. 10 : " Nobis Martyres non sunt dii : quia uiium eundemque Deum et nostrum scimus et Martyrum. Nee tamen miraculis, qute per Memorias nostrorum Martyrum fiunt, ullo modo comparanda sunt miracula, quas facta per tem- pla