The charge taken up here is one of the oldest, and at the moment one of the most effective. It holds that Christianity never truly cleansed the sacred world of the nations: that she came late to ground already holy, condemned its gods with one hand, and quietly kept their worship with the other, so that beneath the Christian names the old cults go on, renamed and absorbed but never converted. Against this I mean to show what the charge cannot see, that the Church, where she is allowed to be herself, has the power to heal and to purify fallen worship. She does this neither by pretending the old cults were harmless nor by flattening the world into the dead matter that the secular age prefers to manage. She does it by judging the idols, by casting the demons out of the places they had seized, by blessing the creation they had only counterfeited, by praying for the dead instead of feeding them, and by handing a man’s whole world back to the God who made it.
