The priest is poor, the temple is poor also; but the prince of the Church retains his thousands of duros yearly, and his great ecclesiastical state, and he sings his psalms tranquilly, certain that his pittance is in no danger.

The revolution up to now has only prejudiced the lower clergy; the power of the Church is ended, it is gone; what we see is only its corpse, but an enormous corpse that will cost a great deal to remove, and whose preservation will swallow up a great deal of money." "It is true the Church is defunct; what we fight are only its remains.
The vulgar believe it still lives because they can see and touch it, forgetting that a religion counts centuries in its life as minutes, and that generation after generation pass between its death and burial.

Centuries before the birth of Jesus Paganism had fallen.
The Athenian poets mocked the gods of Olympus on the stage, and the philosophers despised it.

All the same Christianity required many years of propaganda and the political support of the Caesars to bring it to an end, and even then it was not done with, for dogmas are like men who leave behind something of themselves in the family who succeed them.

Religions do not disappear suddenly through a trapdoor; they are extinguished slowly, leaving some of their beliefs and their ceremonies to the religions that follow them.