Therefore, although the veneration of the saints has undergone some development in the course of the Church’s history—in so far as the primitive veneration of apostles, prophets and martyrs expanded about the middle of the third century to include all the saints, and then in the fourth century, not uninfluenced by that veneration of our Lady which was promoted by the Nestorian conflicts, was deepened into faith in their intercession—yet such veneration was from the beginning germinally contained in the nature of the Church as the Body of Christ, in the Christian conviction of the fellowship and solidarity of His members, and ultimately in the comprehensive validity of the Christian commandment of love. It is no pagan growth, but indigenous to Christianity.[2] It has this much in common with pagan hero-worship, that it venerates the historical achievement of the saintly figure and reverences the manifestation of the divine in human form. But that is an impulse which is not specifically pagan, but belongs to our common humanity and is therefore of universal validity. But the special characteristic of paganism was to obliterate the boundaries between the divine and human and to cultivate polytheism. In that respect the influence of paganism upon the development of the veneration of the saints was rather to impede than to promote, for it was the fear of polytheistic instincts which prevented the earlier blossoming of this veneration. It was not until the Christian conception of God and the worship of our Lord were deeply and firmly rooted in the consciousness of the masses, that the ground was ready for the specifically Christian form of hero-worship.