She marched through the open door into the Roman state, and settled down there to Christianize the state by imparting to it the word of the Gospel, but at the same time leaving it everything except its gods.
It was natural that olive and willow should have been chosen for the Palm Sunday ceremony, for they are the earliest trees to bud in the spring; their consecration, however, may be explained by the intention to Christianize a pagan belief, and it is easy to see how their mystic virtues came in this way to be ascribed to the palm also.
Sporadic efforts to Christianize the Aleuts were made in the latter half of the 18th century, but little impression was made before the arrival in 1824 of Father Ivan Venyaminov, who in 1840 became the first Greek bishop of Alaska.
The attempt to Christianize the old Platonic list of virtues, which we have noticed in Augustine's system, was probably due to the influence of his master Ambrose, in whose treatise De officiis ministrorum we find for the first time an exposition of Christian duty systematized on a plan borrowed from a pre-Christian moralist.
