When Christianity became powerful, the Christian writers naturally
attacked heathen religion where it was most vulnerable, on the
side of the myths, and of the mysteries which were dramatic
representations of the myths. "Pretty gods you worship," said the
Fathers, in effect, "homicides, adulterers, bulls, bears, mice,
ants, and what not." The heathen apologists for the old religion
were thus driven in the early ages of Christianity to various
methods of explaining away the myths of their discredited religion.

The early Christian writers very easily, and with considerable
argumentative power, disposed of the apologies for the myths
advanced by Porphyry and Plutarch. Thus Eusebius in the
Praeparatio Evangelica first attacks the Egyptian interpretations
of their own bestial or semi-bestial gods. He shows that the
various interpretations destroy each other, and goes on to point
out that Greek myth is in essence only a veneered and varnished
version of the faith of Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of
humour, the old theories which resolved so many mythical heroes
into the sun; he shows that while one system is contented to regard
Zeus as mere fire and air, another system recognises in him the
higher reason, while Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and Asclepius,
father and child, are all indifferently the sun.

Granting that the myth-makers were only constructing physical
allegories, why did they wrap them up, asks Eusebius, in what WE
consider abominable fictions? In what state were the people who
could not look at the pure processes of Nature without being
reminded of the most hideous and unnatural offences? Once more:
"The physical interpreters do not even agree in their physical
interpretations". All these are equally facile, equally plausible,