In response to these claims Augustine asserted that Rome’s problems were of its own making, not a result of Christian teaching. Saint Augustine affirmed that Christianity actually saved the city from complete destruction and that Rome’s fall was the result of it’s own internal moral decay. In The City of God he revealed that Rome’s own gods did not come to the city’s protection, and Roman Pagans sought and found protection from the invaders only by fleeing to Christian churches. He further entails that the mythic gods of the Pagans actually degraded the civic and moral virtues that once characterized the Roman republic. Augustine did acknowledge that some Pagans understood that the gods should be worshiped for the sake of happiness in
