The Practice of Pagan Religion In the Graeco Roman World

There is a widespread impression that the age that saw the emergence of Christianity was religiously destitute and morally decadent. The orthodox conviction of today is that all pagan religions in the first century A.D. were in a bad state of degeneration… Completely contradictory to such an estimate was the judgment of the earliest Christians. They, who knew competition with gentile cults as a matter of vivid present experience, did not question the strength or reality of gentile loyalties to heathen systems. Not because gentiles were irreligious but because they were so incurably and tenaciously religious. By far the majority of people in all strata of society held a supernaturalistic conception of the universe that presupposed the existence of a spirit world above and beyond the world known to ordinary sense perception. The ultimate forces which controlled all things were believed to be the occult spiritual powers above and not the forces of nature operative in the world below…