All which relates to the overspreading of the Greek Empire with Monks and Nuns, who placed holiness in abstinence from marriage; and to the invocation of saints and veneration of their relics, and such like superstitions, which these men introduced in the fourth and fifth centuries. Isaac Newton
This was the first step made in the Christian religion towards the veneration of the Martyrs: and tho it did not yet amount to an unlawful worship; yet it disposed the Christians towards such a further veneration of the dead, as in a short time ended in the invocation of Saints. Isaac Newton