Following the truism of Isaiah," LIKE KING LIKE PEOPLE" very great sections of the people throughout the Empire, especially the official and subservient classes, hastened to adopt the name and outward indicia of Christianity, now become official and popular. But so "joined to their idols"were the masses of pagan "converts" for convenience, and so addicted to its showy forms and ceremonies that the now officially recognized Church of Christ was not slow to popularize itself with the pagan-christian masses by taking over bodily and"baptizing" to itself the temples,idols,rituals,ceremonials, the pomp and glorious circumstances of paganism as we have just seen admitted by the paragraphs of church history quoted from the works of Sellars and the authoritative Catholic Encyclopedia. Christianity became thus scarcely more than a refined veneer of paganism. A devout pagan becoming either from convenience or conviction, a Christian no doubt felt quite comfortable and at home in a"baptized"pagan-christian temple,aglow with all trapping and ceremonials and resonant with all the old familiatuals and litanies of his just-recanted paganism,with merely the name of Zeus or Jupiter replaced by that of Jehovah, and of Adonis or Tammuz by the of Jesus, and with "Mary,Mother of God"from Isis[with the child Horus], as the new"Queen of Heaven."As the missionaries of Rome carried the new cult into yet other countries, and various Kings and rulers fell to the appeal and pomp of the priests, whole tribes and nations of heathens followed their leaders into the church,veneering their paganism with the name,forms,and ceremonials of Roman Christianity. This is the testimony of early ecclesiastical and secular history. Later instances more generally known,but the significance of which is as generally overlooked, further confirm Isaiah's maxim. For a millennium the Western Empire was more or less Roman Christians; the Eastern Empire had the Greek Church with its own Patriarch,but, with considerable vicissitudes of constancy, it recognized the supremacy of papal Rome, and the formulas of faith and creed were the same, with the exception of the age long controversy over the "filioque" clause of the Nicene Creed, and the bitter feuds over image-worship known as iconoclasm. The rancours engendered from these differences of belief, together with the bigoted pretensions of patriarch and pope, led the final rupture between Greek and Roman Churches in the year 1053. All the West followed their leader the pope; the East clung with equal tenacity to the tenets of the patriarch. So bitter were the hatreds thus perpetuated, that the Western popes and emperor refused all aid to the beleaguered emperors and church of the East in the fatal conflicts with the Turks, till in 1453 Constantinople and the whole Eastern empire fell before the Crescent, and Europe became Turkish and Mohammedan up to the very gates of Vienna. But Western and Northern Europe remained of the Roman faith until the reformation begun by Luther in 1517. Here a most signal vindication of "Like King like People" is witnessed. The Christian Kings and rulers who had political grievances against the pope quickly took up the quarrel of Luther with the Roman Church; those who were politically friendly to the pope seized arms to defend him and the Church the irrespective peoples flocked to their standards and followed them in their rival faiths, and Europe was a welter of blood and strife during the ensuring fierce wars between Catholic and Protestant Christians. The strife of hostile christian faiths yet endures, abated some-what in degree. England was wholly Romish before the reformation. The old Romish practice of burning dissenters at the stake was turned against English Catholics to suppress that sect entirely. And so,through the dark ages of faith, and so long as the priest-prostituted State would use its civil power in superstitious aid of the Holy Church, the Holy Church has zealously fulfilled its Bible commands and has murdered and tortured men, women, and tender children by fire and sword through its special agency of faith, the Holy Inquisition. This priest-ordained institution was only abolished by the infidel Napoleon of Italy in 1808; but the moment his dreaded power fell, the "Scourge of God" was eagerly re-established in the Papal States by God's Vicar Pope Pius VII in 1814. It was only finally abolished along with the usurped "temporal" of God's vicars on earth, as one of the first glorious acts of the new Kingdom of Italy, in 1870, just at the time when the Holy Ghost came to the " Vatican prisoners" to reassert that the torture and murder of dissenters from theological dogma was a God-imposed duty and divine right of his Holy Church....J.Wheless..