IT was easier for people to drive idols out of their sacred buildings than
to drive them out of their minds and imaginations. ¹ Nobody knew better
than Augustine how much paganism was still hovering about in ghostly
fashion inside many baptized heads, and how true it was that even anointed
eyes, that had had the sign of the cross made over them, could often not be
drawn away by any power on earth from the unseemly spectacles in which they
took delight. The cults could be destroyed, but the public jollifications which
from time immemorial had been connected with them remained, as did the
traffickers in various kinds of superstition. The first of these stood under the
protection of State law, for though the State might well fail to provide security
or bread, it never failed to supply circuses. As to the second, it was kept alive
by that very powerful human instinct which causes men always to seek some
secret means of getting the better of their irrational fears.

The Christianizing of people in masses had commenced less than a hundred
years before and had certainly been over-hurried. There is, the bishop once
said, not a man among us who has not one or more pagans among his grand-
parents. ² Hundreds of thousands were crowding into the mother-house of the
saints, yet the bishop could not refrain from the thought that the fish within
the great fish-net ³ which had been nearly rent asunder, had as yet been most
imperfectly sorted; his mind kept running on the words of the psalm, "They
have increased beyond all numbering", ⁴ and that other verse from Isaiah,
"Thou hast multiplied the nation but not increased the joy." ⁵

Augustine's Christians were lively southerners and were still bogged up to
the neck in the customs of pagan society. They felt at ease in that environ-
ment, much as they felt at ease in the lukewarm water of their pagan thermae.
The Church had now become a public thing and a part of ordinary men's
lives, and precisely because she had now entered that field, her attractive
power was threatened by the pagan legacy, by the things with which the
ordinary man chiefly associated the pagan cults. There was thus more chaff
than wheat upon the threshing floor of the Church, a circumstance that
occasioned Augustine many a sigh, and though that is the way of most thresh-
ing floors, the thing was particularly true of a great port like fifth-century

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