THE INFLUENCE OF PAGANISM ON CHRISTIANITY.

Some years ago, eight or ten I daresay, I happened, when passing down Tottenham Court Road, to be the witness of a Httle ceremony which I daresay a great many of you have seen somewhere or other in London, which is, at any rate, I have no doubt, to be seen every year.

I was passing one of the great furniture shops in that street, when the door opened, and there issued from it, instead of the one or two shoppers whom one might have expected to see, a beadle in all the glory of his official costume, followed by a crowd of boys, some of whom carried white sticks, peeled osier or willow I suppose.

The beadle stopped at a mark on the pavement, and the boys set to work to beat it with their sticks. This was, in fact, what we are all familiar enough with by name, the custom which is called " beating the bounds."

If you have ever seen this performance, you could hardly help being struck, as I was, by its extreme ridiculousness in itself But if you happened to be at all interested in studying the history of customs and ceremonies, the very ridiculousness of this one would have been rather attractive to you, because you would have said to yourself, "This cannot be the original form of the ceremony I am looking at. There must have been some more reasonable and sensible form, which has got decayed, so to say, to this unmeaning ceremony. What was it?" Now, suppose a man who had given a good deal of time to studying the history of institutions and customs, but who had never before heard of this custom of beating the bounds, to see what I saw in Tottenham Court Road, he would, I think, at once fix upon the most absurd part of the present custom as probably the most ancient (because, you see, it is natural that the oldest part should be the part the meaning of which has been most completely lost sight of), and, of course, this most ridiculous part of the ceremony is the custom of beating the pavement. But he might go on farther, and say to himself, Beating implies some one to beat ; the sticks could not have been meant originally to fall on the back of the flag stones in Tottenham Court Road." And he might make a good guess at the real origin of the custom by saying, " How if, originally, the boys in this ceremony, instead of beating something else, had to be beaten themselves ?"

That is a guess which he might make merely from his natural acuteness, and the guess would be the right one. That is the real fact of the case. I don't know that anybody would find it out by merely guess-work in the way I have supposed. But we know well enough, as a fact, that a different and, for the principal actors, a much less agreeable form of beating the bounds is still practised in some countries, and was still practised not more than a hundred years ago in some parts of our own.

I read only the other day in a sort of magazine, published about sixty years ago, a letter from a man who said that he remembered how the beating of the bounds was carried out in Cumberland in his childhood. There the boys or some boys in the village were actually taken to certain boundary marks, and received a good thrashing at each. And in connection with the same ceremony, he mentioned another custom which, as I hope presently to show you, had probably its roots in a very remote past.

The same day on which the bounds were marked out, the clergyman of the parish used to go to three or four set trees, which stood at different parts of the parish boundaries, and read a portion of the gospel of the day from each ; or sometimes he would preach a short sermon, taking his text from the gospel for the day. These trees, which were of course landmarks in fixing the limits of the various parishes, were called gospel trees or gospel oaks. And you know that there is a station in the north of London which still preserves this name Gospel Oak. I have no doubt that the publichouse from which the station took its name stood on or near the site of one of these gospel trees.

The older form of the ceremony of beating the bounds was not of course a pleasant practice so far as the boys were concerned ; but I daresay you will see the use of it if you consider a moment. Suppose a state of society in which maps and charts do not exist, when title-deeds and the lawyers' offices that contain them are unknown. You will see that in such a state of things there really are no means of preserving the memory of the boundaries of a parish, or, let me rather say, of a village, except the recollection which the inhabitants have of it. Taken for example, that two neighbouruig villages have agreed together that such and such a tree, such and such a rock, such a portion of a stream, should mark the boundary between them ; suppose that years and years have passed without there being any dispute over the matter, but that at last a dispute arises, what can the villagers have to refer to in such case but that which still has to be called into evidence sometimes, and which still has a place in our law books, what is called the memory of the oldest inhabitant ? But the oldest inhabitant at the time the dispute arose was likely enough a very young inhabitant at the time the boundary was fixed. If he had been then a mere boy, he would have had no natural interest in the mere determining of the boundaries itself. How to give him an interest—of a certain sort ? That is the question. People foresaw that his memory might be called upon.

The way they hit upon was to give him and his comrades a thrashing at the important boundary mark, and to hope that that would impress it upon their minds. Such is the origin of that unmeaning ceremony which we still keep up as "beating the bounds." I chose this illustration in order to show how some common custom of to-day may, if we are at all given to historical studies, take our thoughts back to a very remote past, a time so remote that there were no written records, and no means of preserving the recollection of such things as boundaries, except the memory of tlie people themselves. Such a time would take us back in our own history before the conversion of our forefathers to Christianity, before probably our English forefathers ever came into this country. For, as I suppose you know, the English race was originally German ; we came into this country as conquerors from Germany, and our remotest history takes us back to a time when our forefathers lived side by side with the ancestors of the Germans of to-day. Having got thus far, I will ask you to lend me your imaginations, while I try and draw to you some picture of the primitive, the very early life of our far-away ancestors, as far back as we have any clear traces of them in the abyss of time. Then towns were not ; people were only grouped together in villages. The picture must not stand in England, for, as I have just said, it belongs to a time so remote that it lies before the coming of our forefathers into this country. We should take, for instance, the country which was afterwards called Old Saxony, I mean after our Saxon forefathers had settled in England, which thus became New Saxony. This country of Old Saxony was described years after the remote period of which I am thinking as so thickly wooded that a squirrel might travel for seven leagues without needing to touch the ground. Wild nature was everywhere ; the clearings and villages which were the signs of man's habitation, appeared only like islands in the midst of the waste.

In this world of forest or, where not a forest, of heath or moor, each village was, in a certain sense, a tribe—a nation to itself Of course the people altogether, tliat is to say, groups of many villages, constituted a larger nation ; but there might still remain a good deal of internal strife or half hostility between village and village. And the stronger the village was, the more it made it a point of honour to keep round itself a wide belt of waste country or forest land, which it claimed as, to a certain extent, its own. The real boundary of the village lay outside this claimed territory; but over the greater part of this wild country most of the inhabitants never passed. Their own houses did not stand close together ; and you must not think of a modern English village when I use this word. You must think of houses, or rather small, one-roomed wooden huts scattered here and there among the forest trees, very likely only one or two being visible at the same time. But still there were paths, no doubt, from house to house, and there were places, no doubt, where the villagers met from time to time for merry-makings, or to hold a village council, or for some religious ceremony. All round, however, this familiar territory there lay the vast unknown, uncultivated forest or heath. The more warlike part of the villagers, the young men, probably, who thought themselves superior to agricultural pursuits, spent their time in hunting over this wild country.

To a certain extent this forest land was committed to their charge, for the village still claimed it as its own property, and the invasion, without leave, of this country by any stranger would be, as you like to put it, either an act of trespass or a declaration of war. Thus, from the earliest time, we can trace a certain division in the life of our forefathers, that is to say, between the life of the more peaceful villagers and that of the warlike portion of the inhabitants.

It was in the midst of this forest land that our heathen forefathers had their holy places, what served them in the place of temples and the homes of their gods. For our heathen forefathers did not build temples. '' The Germans," says the Roman writer who has told us most about our German forefathers, " build no fanes and make no images for worship ; but in the midst of their forest recesses they call upon the unseen Presence, which they honour under the names of various gods." And it is a curious thing that when, in later years, these people learnt the notion of a temple or a house for the gods, they gave it a name which literally means " grove," showing that the original dwelling-places of their gods had been in the midst of groves.

The author whom I have just quoted gives us an account of one particular grove which was renowned far and wide among one of the great divisions of the German people, and whither people used to come long distances as on a sort of pilgrimage. Human sacrifices were offered there to the chief god among the ancient Germans. Those who entered the sacred enclosure did so with chains round their necks to show their subjection to the god ; if a man fell down while inside the grove, he might not raise himself upright again, but must crawl out on hands and knees. And there are other descriptions of sacred groves, and of the victims (animals of all kinds, not excluding men) being brought to them and hung upon the trees. "Single trees," says a certain author, "are accounted so sacred, that they themselves receive a sacrifice." Can we doubt that two friendly villages, or friendly tribes, worshipping, as they would do, the same gods, would often have a common sacred grove (for that sacred grove of which I spoke just now was common to a whole nation of separate tribes), and that this sacred grove would stand as near as might be midway between the two villages which united in worship there, that is, in the very middle of their boundary forest. In such a grove there would be one tree which was more holy than the others, a single tree like those spoken of in the passage quoted above, " which was counted so sacred, that the victims were hung on it, and sacrifices (for that is what our author intends) offered to it as to a god. When ages passed by, and the boundary waste between village and village was cultivated, these most sacred trees would be left standing, or new trees which grew upon the sites would be held as sacred. And I make bold to guess that just in the same way that beating the bounds takes us back to primeval days almost, or, at any rate, to days of extreme antiquity, so do those " gospel oaks " on the boundaries of a parish, and the custom of preaching from them, take us back to the days of the sacred groves of our forefathers, and to the time when what became in Christian days the gospel oak was the sacred tree of that heathen grove.

The chief gods worshipped in this wise by our forefathers were those from whom we have inherited the three central days of the week—Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Tuesday is the day of Tew or Tiw ; Wednesday, the day of Wodin or Wedan, or Odin, as he was called in the north ; Thursday is Thor's day. I cannot say that these days of the week have been so called precisely because they were days left holy to Tew, Wodin, and Thor.i But, at any rate, these names of the days of the week preserve the memory of the gods of our forefathers. Friday preserves the memory of a goddess—Freyja is a goddess of Spring and of Love.

Of these gods, the two whose character stands out most vividly before us are Wodin and Thor. Both were gods of the storm. Wodin rode through the air on the swiftest of horses (the wind), Thor drove rumbling over the hills in his chariot (the thunder), and wielded a miraculous hammer (the crusher), which had this faculty, that when hurled from the hand it struck the victim, and then, like a boomerang, returned to the hand which sent it forth. Of Tiw (called in the Scandinavian lands Tyr) we know less. What seems highly probable is that each of these three divinities, the chief made divinities among the ancient Germans, among our ancestors, among the ancestors of Norsemen, Danes, and Swedes alike, were at one time very nearly akin, and each at one time was more than anything a god of the overarching sky. But in obedience to the warlike character of those who worshipped them, these gods became gods rather of the stormy sky than of the clear heaven ; they became gods of the storm, of the wind, and of the thunder, and in so doing they became pre-eminently gods of battle. For of course men of all ages have confounded the ideas of storm and of battle, as their language shows well enough. We to-day tell of the storm of battle, and the battle of the elements. And an ancient heathen poem calls the battle ' ' The storm of spears, the wrath of Wodin. "

If, then, we want to gain one picture more characteristic than any other of the religion of our heathen forefathers, we must fancy them waiting in these dark groves until the storm draws nigh, and when they hear the wind howling through the trees, let us fancy them falling upon their faces, not daring to look up until the storm has gone by ; for in the unseen being who meets the storm they recognise the unseen presence which, as the Roman author says, they called by the names of various gods. Or let me quote a description from a contemporary writer upon the religion of our heathen forefathers :—

" If in these days," says the author, " we wish to feel the mystic presence of the great god of the Germans, let us do as our worshipping forefathers did, withdraw from the concourse of men, find out some forest solitude, and wait there. Let it be in one of the vast stretches of pine-forest in the north of Germany ; perhaps in the very spot where lay that haunted grove which Tacitus describes. There you will feel as you should the strange and awful stillness which from time to time reigns in forests such as these. Presently the quiet is broken, first by a sound like a low sigh which arises, as if from the ground itself, and breathes throughout the wood. Next from the distance another sound is heard, so like the sound of the sea, that you might swear—had you never been in such a place before—that you could hear the waves drawing back over the pebbly beach. As it approaches, the sound grows into a roar. It is the roar of the tempest—the coming of Wodin."

According to the accounts which come to us from the Scandinavian countries, there was one other characteristic of Wodin's ride through the air, which must not be forgotten. There rode with him a certain troop of maidens, a sort of northern Amazon, who were known as the helm-maidens or sheep-maidens of Wodin. These maidens, too, rode on horses or barebacked steeds, and in one beautiful passage describing these horses of Wodin's helm-maidens, it says :—

" Their horses shook themselves, and from their manes there fell Dew in the deep dales, and on the high hills hail," which shows clearly enough that in the conception of that poet, at any rate, the horses which these Amazons rode were like Wodin's horse—the clouds.

This is enough to give one side (the most important side) of the religion of our heathen forefathers ; perhaps I should rather say, enough to suggest this side of their belief- and even so it needs that you should do your utmost to bring your imaginations to bear upon the picture. You have as far as possible, to listen with their ears to the howl of the wind in deep forest recesses, or in desolate tracts around, to listen with their ears to the rumble or the crash of the thunder, distant or near, and try and realize how the storm sounded in the ears of those to whom it gave audible token of the approach of a god. To those who lived most peacefully in the centre of the village, by the clearings and the homesteads, and who did not often venture out into the dimmer groves, these were sounds of almost unmixed terror. But the more warlike portion of the villagers, those who spent half their days in hunting through these same wild tracts of country, or whose duty it was to station themselves in the forest region to guard against the danger of invasion, these would deem themselves the very companions of the war-god, his chosen champions and children.

These were the majority, or, at any rate, the ruHng spirits, and it was through them that the ancient heathenism took its fierce and warUke character. Still, there was a more peaceful side. There were some gods—and still more goddesses—who belonged to this side of their belief—goddesses of the hearth and of simple domestic duties. Some of the names of these are still preserved in German popular sayings and German popular superstitions. And it is natural, when we come to think of it, that these peaceful divinities should be better remembered in Germany than elsewhere ; for the more warlike of the heathen Germans of old time (like our own ancestors) migrated out of Germany, and so the more peaceful must have been left behind.

One name of an ancient goddess which is much used to-day is Bertha, originally Perchsa, the "Bright one," who exists in popular superstition, as Frau Bertha, Mrs. Bertha. Another is Frau Holda. If women spinning flax leave some upon the distaves at night, Frau Holda is supposed to come and tangle it all before the next morning, as a punishment for their idleness. This is especially likely to happen at the time of year which has only lately passed, what are called the Twelve Days, from Christmas to the sixth of January, the Epiphany. Those twelve days are, it is certain, connected quite as much with the ancient German religion as with the Christian. Yule-tide, or New Year's Day, which falls in the very centre of these twelve days, was the greatest feast among our heathen ancestors. When the snow falls, the Germans say to-day that Frau Bertha is making her bed, and it is the feathers from the bed which are falling to the ground.

A goddess formerly known in this country was Ostara, or Eastre, whose festival, celebrated in the spring, came to be confounded with the Church festival of the resurrection, to which it has given (strangely enough) its name, the name of the goddess of our heathen ancestors.

But the worship of the goddesses who were, for the most part, divinities of the spring, or of the harvest, or of the hearth and home, formed a small part of the creed of our ancestors, beside the worship of the war-gods ; and it is on this side of their creed that we must chiefly fix our attention. For now let the centuries pass on. The German races grow more and more into nations, and become the great conquering people of the world. Some invade Italy, some Spain and Africa, some France ; our own ancestors, as you know, take possession of this country. The nations or tribes who perform these several feats bear different names, but they all belong to the same stock ; they all originally came out of Germany, and we know that the religion of all was the same. So far as their religion goes, the German races in these different lands all underwent the same fate, each was sooner or later converted to Christianity. The missionary comes among them—we have accounts of these conversions—and preaches to the people. If he is a very bold man, he sets to work to cut down the sacred trees of the villagers, or their most sacred grove. Sometimes he pays the penalty for his rashness, sometimes, according to the accounts, his preaching is quote a description from a contemporary writer upon the religion of our heathen forefathers :—

" If in these days," says the author, " we wish to feel the mystic presence of the great god of the Germans, let us do as our worshipping forefathers did, withdraw from the concourse of men, find out some forest solitude, and wait there. Let it be in one of the vast stretches of pine-forest in the north of Germany ; perhaps in the very spot where lay that haunted grove which Tacitus describes. There you will feel as you should the strange and awful stillness which from time to time reigns in forests such as these. Presently the quiet is broken, first by a sound like a low sigh which arises, as if from the ground itself, and breathes throughout the wood. Next from the distance another sound is heard, so like the sound of the sea, that you might swear—had you never been in such a place before—that you could hear the waves drawing back over the pebbly beach. As it approaches, the sound grows into a roar. It is the roar of the tempest—the coming of Wodin."

According to the accounts which come to us from the Scandinavian countries, there was one other characteristic of Wodin's ride through the air, which must not be forgotten. There rode with him a certain troop of maidens, a sort of northern Amazon, who were known as the helm-maidens or sheep-maidens of Wodin. These maidens, too, rode on horses or barebacked steeds, and in one beautiful passage describing these horses of Wodin's helm-maidens, it says :—

" Their horses shook themselves, and from their manes there fell Dew in the deep dales, and on the high hills hail,"

which shows clearly enough that in the conception of that poet, at any rate, the horses which these Amazons rode were like Wodin's horse—the clouds.

This is enough to give one side (the most important side) of the religion of our heathen forefathers ; perhaps I should rather say, enough to suggest this side of their belief- and even so it needs that you should do your utmost to bring your imaginations to bear upon the picture. You have as far as possible, to listen with their ears to the howl of the wind in deep forest recesses, or in desolate tracts around, to listen with their ears to the rumble or the crash of the thunder, distant or near, and try and realize how the storm sounded in the ears of those to whom it gave audible token of the approach of a god. To those who lived most peacefully in the centre of the village, by the clearings and the homesteads, and who did not often venture out into the dimmer groves, these were sounds of almost unmixed terror. But the more warlike portion of the villagers, those who spent half their days in hunting through these same wild tracts of country, or whose duty it was to station themselves in the forest region to guard against the danger of invasion, these would deem themselves the very companions of the war-god, his chosen champions and children.

These were the majority, or, at any rate, the ruHng spirits, and it was through them that the ancient heathenism took its fierce and warUke character. Still, there was a more peaceful side. There were some gods—and still more goddesses—who belonged to this side of their belief—goddesses of the hearth and of simple domestic duties. Some of the names of these are still preserved in German popular sayings and German popular superstitions. And it is natural, when we come to think of it, that these peaceful divinities should be better remembered in Germany than elsewhere ; for the more warlike of the heathen Germans of old time (like our own ancestors) migrated out of Germany, and so the more peaceful must have been left behind.

One name of an ancient goddess which is much used to-day is Bertha, originally Perchsa, the " Bright one," who exists in popular superstition, as Frau Bertha, Mrs. Bertha. Another is Frau Holda. If women spinning flax leave some upon the distaves at night, Frau Holda is supposed to come and tangle it all before the next morning, as a punishment for their idleness. This is especially likely to happen at the time of year which has only lately passed, what are called the Twelve Days, from Christmas to the sixth of January, the Epiphany. Those twelve days are, it is certain, connected quite as much with the ancient German religion as with the Christian. Yule-tide, or New Year's Day, which falls in the very centre of these twelve days, was the greatest feast among our heathen ancestors. When the snow falls, the Germans say to-day that Frau Bertha is making her bed, and it is the feathers from the bed which are falling to the ground.

A goddess formerly known in this country was Ostara, or Eastre, whose festival, celebrated in the spring, came to be confounded with the Church festival of the resurrection, to which it has given (strangely enough) its name, the name of the goddess of our heathen ancestors.

But the worship of the goddesses who were, for the most part, divinities of the spring, or of the harvest, or of the hearth and home, formed a small part of the creed of our ancestors, beside the worship of the war-gods ; and it is on this side of their creed that we must chiefly fix our attention.

For now let the centuries pass on. The German races grow more and more into nations, and become the great conquering people of the world. Some invade Italy, some Spain and Africa, some France ; our own ancestors, as you know, take possession of this country. The nations or tribes who perform these several feats bear different names, but they all belong to the same stock ; they all originally came out of Germany, and we know that the religion of all was the same. So far as their religion goes, the German races in tliese different lands all underwent the same fate, each was sooner or later converted to Christianity. The missionary comes among them—we have accounts of these conversions—and preaches to the people.

If he is a very bold man, he sets to work to cut down the sacred trees of the villagers, or their most sacred grove. Sometimes he pays the penalty for his rashness, sometimes, according to the accounts, his preaching is vindicated by a miracle. Anyway he at last succeeds ; and on the very place where stood the grove sacred to Wodin there stands now a church dedicated to the new faith. This plan of building the church upon the very spot which was sacred to the old religion we know to have been generally adopted ; and it was typical of the whole procedure of Christianity when she set to work to convert our heathen forefathers. As far as possible places which were sacred before were permitted to remain still sacred, only they somewhat changed their character.

Think of how many places there are, both in this country and in Germany, or, again, in the Scandinavian countries, which still bear the name of the heathen gods. Such a place as Wednesfield is really Wodinsfield, Wednesbury is Wodensbuy, or bury. We have Thurfield or Thorsfield ; Thorsdyke, Thursford, Thurso, are a few of the English names which commemorate the great gods of heathendom, Baldersly is another, preserving the name of the northern god Balder, a god of peace and of spring-time. I could mention fifty names of the same sort if I were to go to France and Germany.

Still more striking is the way in which the sacred seasons of heathendom have been preserved in Christianity. The most important festival of our heathen forefathers fell about the time in which we now celebrate the greatest Christian festival, the birth of Christ. We cannot, however, say that in this case the accommodation of one festival to the other has been mainly other than accidental. What is the proper season for celebrating Christmas we cannot tell. The tradition which placed the birth of Christ at the particular season of the year at which we celebrate it, is only a tradition.

No information upon the subject is to be extracted from the gospels. But it suited very well with the creed of our heathen forefathers that this tradition should be observed. For their most sacred and most festive season was just that of the new year ; and as it is (as I have already pointed out) their greatest festival Yule—New Year's day—falls precisely in the middle of the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany.

So it was, as we have just shown, with Easter.

The method, moreover, of celebrating this festive season unquestionably dates rather from heathen than from Christian times ; for we have records sufficient of the way Yule was kept in Scandinavian countries in days when the inhabitants were still Odin-worshippers to show that the festival was as like as might be to our Christmas. Even in our day popular superstitions, stories of magic, especially of what we may call natural magic, cluster round Yuletide as they do round other seasons of the year. During the mysterious " Twelve days " the beasts in the stall are supposed to acquire the gift of human speech. They prophecy the events of the coming year, if any man is fortunate enough to hear them. Each day of these twelve days is a prophecy of the corresponding month of the twelve. If it is fine that day the corresponding month will be fine ; if the day is rainy or stormy, so will the corresponding month be. Of course all these magic properties of the twelve days culminate during the central night, New Year's eve, which is in popular superstition in Germany to-day a much more important night  than Christmas eve. On New Year's eve people make visits at midnight to their fruit-trees, and sing a rhyme round them—the relic of some heathen incantation, or they dress them with ribbons, a relic of the victims offered to trees in the old days, or sprinkle them with water, a mixture between a Christian and a heathen rite. These rites are supposed to make the trees fruitful during the coming year. People do these things, I say, still in Germany ; but it is only quite of late that these customs have decayed in England. If you read Hone's " Year Book" or " Day Book," or Brand's " Popular Superstitions," or Strutt's " Sports and Pastimes," you will find records sufificient of the same beliefs.

I have already referred to the fact that the great Christian festival has taken its name (in our country) from a goddess of our forefathers. And I do not think that it would be possible to produce any stronger proof that the passage from the older creed to the new was not a violent transition, and that there was plenty of room, therefore, for the beliefs and customs which belonged to the former creed to find a place in the latter.

Though the Christians (in England) adopted the name of the festival of Ostara or Eastre, for their own festival, I imagine that the worship of the spring goddess is best represented by the May-day celebrations which, in our country, were always the next most important after the celebrations of Yuletide, which have, of course, very nearly disappeared from among us now. I need not remind you of what these May-day celebrations were like, of how the boys and girls from the villages used to go out into the neighbouring wood to cut the May-pole, which was carried home on a wagon drawn by as many as twenty or forty yoke of oxen, " and every oxen hath a nosegay of sweete flowers tied to the top of his homes," as a disapproving writer of the sixteenth century describes it. Of course the vigour with which these ancient customs were preserved died down very much with us after the reign of the Puritans.

But this direct borrowing by Christian from heathen days, in order to fill up what I may call the interstices of life ; this continuation of harmless or comparatively harmless festivals, customs, and superstitions, from the old days to the new, forms only a very small part of the survival of heathendom in mediaeval Christianity. It would be the more peaceful side of the heathen creed which was adopted in this quiet way by Christendom. We have seen that it is the peaceful divinities Frau Holda or Frau Bertha, or our Eastre, whose names were kept most alive in the mouths of the people. Up to the time of the conversion of our forefathers, the warrior class had come more and more to the front ; for the era which preceded the conversion of these different German races, the English in England, the Franks in France, the Goths in Spain and Italy, had been an era of conquest.

Now would come the turn for the quieter members of the community to come to the front. They would be the ones to go over most easily to Christianity, and it would be out of their ranks that the Christian priesthood would be most often drawn. In theory, at any rate, the Christian priest forswore the use of arms, wherefore, upon the whole, the influence of the priestly order would be cast upon the peaceful side of life. The young priest would carry with him into the new faith rather the ideas of the simple householder of the village than of the warrior class. By him, therefore, the wind-god of the forest would be looked upon with more and more of terror ; and he would throw off the old creed with a sense of reUef at, so to say, freeing himself from the jurisdiction of Wodin, and placing himself under the protection of the God of the Christians. But lie could never feel that he had entirely withdrawn himself from the dominion of the ancient god of storm. For ancient fears are not easily shaken off. In the dark and silent forest ways there still reigned for the Christian priest or for the peasant a haunting presence, but it was no longer the presence of a protecting divinity, it was that of a god whose worship had been abandoned, who was at war with his god, who had become an anti-god or a devil. Thus arose that idea which is the prevailing idea of the Middle Ages, the omnipresence and immense power of diabolical agencies, all that enormous body of belief with regard to possession by the evil one which created a supposed witch in every village, and led, as I daresay you know, to such terrible cruelties being practised against these imagined servants of Satan.

I wish it were possible for me to convey to you in words the constant sense of diabolical presence which afflicted men's minds in the Middle Ages. The very air seemed haunted, and, as it were, beaten by dark and infernal wings. But perhaps I can—with not very much time still left us —best convey to your minds some notion of the creed of the Middle Ages by asking you to look in imagination at the one great relic which that belief has left, and which is accessible to all—I mean the mediccval cathedral. We have in London our specimen of such a cathedral in Westminster Abbey, one of the most beautiful examples possible, built just about six hundred years ago, when men were imbued with the spirit of the time which it is so difficult for us to realize. Remember, as I have said, that the cathedral architecture of those days is the greatest relic which the Middle Ages have left us, that in which the whole spirit of many centuries —ten silent centuries, as Carlyle calls them—seems to find a voice. The mediaeval cathedral represents, if you have the key to read its meaning, the world as it appeared to the men of that time, the world material in a certain sense, and the world spiritual.

Therefore look now at this cathedral. The origin of the medijeval cathedral, as a mere house of worship is, I know. Christian. So far as regards the idea simply of a house in which to worship God, that idea traces its descent from the Jewish synagogue to the Christian church. But we have next to see in what form that idea of the house of worship clothed itself after some centuries of contact with the heathenism of Northern Europe. Observe the forest-hke darkness and height of the building, the roof scarcely visible, the building so shaped and so arranged with its countless pillars that you never seem to see the whole of it ; and I protest if you were put down in one of these cathedrals for the first time you would have no idea of its extent. Worship in such a place must be as near a counterpart as worship in any building could be, so far as the impression on the senses goes, to the worship in the sacred groves of our heathen forefathers.

So far, then, the mediaeval cathedral seems to symbolize that very thing of which we are speaking to-day, the survival of heathen belief in mediaeval Christianity. But it does not do this only. Look a little nearer. In the centre of this gloomy forest of pillars stands a lighted altar. I might devote the whole of a lecture merely to showing how much the imagination of men in the middle ages dwelt upon the ideas of lightand of candles as symbols of the light of religion ; so that when anybody who had recovered from sickness, or been saved from danger, made a dedication to a saint, it was ten to one that the dedication took the form of candles to be lighted on the altar of that saint. These candles, then, are as necessary a part of the symbolism of the cathedral as its vastness, its stupendous height, its gloom and mystery. Above the altar where these lights are always burning, the peaceful faces of saints and angels look down upon the worshipper.

But pass away from this lighted altar and the sacred presence which is believed always to abide there, or go outside of the cathedral altogether, and look at its architecture from without. Here we have no more angels' faces, but in every corner and under every arch you will detect some symbol of the powers of darkness—dragons or devil's heads—or if there are representations of human faces, they are contorted, as if in torment. Do not imagine that these architectural figures (in architecture they are commonly called gargoils) are placed where they are merely by chance. No, they symbohze the lost condition of all men outside the church, cut off from the light of faith which burns on the altar inside.

I need not say how central this belief is in the whole religion of the Middle Ages.
" No salvation outside the Church "
was, and still is, the watchword of the Catholic Church.

If I have carried you with me at all in what I have been trying to put into words—and we are dealing with thoughts and feelings very difficult to express in words—you will perhaps understand what I meant when I said just now that the mediaeval cathedral symbolized both the material and spiritual world of men in those days. For side by side with the spiritual notion, "no salvation outside the Church," went that material notion which gave over all the wild uncultured parts of the material world to the diabolical presences which had once been the ruling spirits in the world of our heathen forefathers.

In these various ways, very difficult to define in exact words, directly and indirectly, both by attraction and by repulsion, the belief of our heathen forefathers lived on in the belief of the mediaeval Christianity.

Remember that this is the most vital way in which one creed can survive in another. Dogmas and formulas matter little if the same sort of images, the same sort of ideas of the supernatural powers, continue to hold captive the popular imagination. You know how the Scotch ballad-monger said, "I care not who makes a nation's laws if I may make their ballads." And just in the relation in which ballads stand to formulated laws the appeals to popular imagination made by such things as the vast and gloomy mediaeval cathedral, its echoing chants, the wind-like voice of the organ, or again, all the fragments of popular superstition concerning the power of Satan, the assertions of those who swore that they had heard him hunting out there on the moor, in the forest, with the troops of the damned—just in this relation stand such beliefs as these to the former decrees of councils, or to the established articles of the Christian creed.

Beside the general sense of diabolical presence which pervades all the literature of the Middle Ages there are certain definite myths, certain stories touching the doings of Satan which stand out pre-eminent over the rest. Almost all these stories have survived to our day, and if they are not precisely believed in they excite a certain feeling of superstitious awe.

One of these is the story of the Wild Huntsman. We know him best as Heme the Hunter. Among other places he is supposed to haunt Windsor Forest, as any reader of Harrison Ainsworth's novel with that name will remember. I believe, however, that the old oak called Heme's oak no longer stands. He is a fiend huntsman, with two horns sticking out from his head like Satan, only in the case of Heme they are stag's horns. The story told of him in the Middle Ages was that he had been a wicked noble who cared for nothing but hunting, and hunted even on the Sunday, not only profaning the day himself, but compelling the peasantry on his estate to aid him by beating up the game. So one day there joined him two horsemen, one on a white steed and one on a black, and the latter breathed fire from its nostrils. The horseman on the white steed, who was Heme's good angel, tried to dissuade him from going to the hunt, but he would not listen, and went off with the bad angel on the black horse, saying that he wished he could go on hunting till Doomsday. And that he is now condemned to do. As the storm goes by the peasant of Germany deems that he hears this wild hunt careering through the air, that he distinguishes the shouting of men and barking of dogs, sometimes even it happens (so superstitious belief asserts) that a rain of blood falls from the clouds to the earth. In many parts of England and of France this wild hunt is known as Arthur's Chase. In Germany the huntsman goes by the name of Hackelberg.

By whatever name it may be called it is not difficult to recognise in the wild hunt a slightly transformed picture of the old supreme god of the heathens riding through the air as Wodin rides. In place of the battle in which Wodin indulges we have a hunt, an idea more famihar to the average peasant. This is almost the sole difference between the myth of Hackelberg, or Heme the Hunter, and the myth of Wodin.

Another still more striking example of a mediaeval belief stolen from the bygone religion of our ancestors, and transformed in the stealing, is the great myth, as we may call it, of the Middle Ages, the Witches' Sabbath. This myth undoubtedly grew m precision and in detail as the Middle Ages advanced, but we can trace the germ of it very early. It is this germ which is taken from the myth of Wodin. The Witches' Sabbath told how on a certain day of the year Satan was wont to meet the witches of all the world at a certain place. Usually some well-known mountain was chosen for the scene of this Witches' Sabbath, and in Germany the place most recognised in tradition was the highest mountain of the Harz range in Saxony, the Brocken or Blocksberg. But as a matter of fact there are many mountains in Germany with this same name Blocksberg, and almost all seem to have been connected with the rites of the Witches' Sabbath. It would be impossible to enumerate all the mountains in Europe upon which the same rites were said to have been enacted. Heckla, in Iceland, is one ; there were many in Norway and Sweden, others in France, Spain, Italy, the Carpathians, etc. The central figure of the myth is only Wodin, transformed into the Prince of Darkness, and the witches are only the helm-maidens or shield-maidens of Wodin, who have undergone a like transformation.

Observe that these two which I have related are connected with the two great festive seasons of heathen days, namely with Yule and with the May celebrations. Of the subject of the first myth, the Wild Huntsman, it was told that he and his following hunted throughout the year through the sky, except only during the twelve days, and then he hunted on earth. And the Witches' Sabbath, it was said to be held during the eight days following the first of May. Satan, we may suppose, was, during the rest of tlie year, banished to the molten pit, and allowed to return to earth again during the early days of May.

But what is this belief, put into different words, other than the belief that the ancient gods had been banished from earth by the new creed ; but during two short seasons —seasons of the old heathen festivals, they were allowed to return to the earth once more.

One word more, in order if possible to clench in your memory the gist of what I have been trying to put before you. All this, all the foregoing lecture, I may say, is in a manner epitomized in one word—Heathen. I did not like, at the beginning, to trouble you with verbal distinctions, or I should have explained that the title of this lecture (though the most convenient to express in a popular form its subject) does not express it quite correctly according to the niceties of language. I would rather have used mediseval Catholicism in place of Christianity, and heathenism in place of Paganism. For Paganism, which is a word of Latin origin, is naturally associated in our minds with the religion of what are called the classical peoples—the Greeks and Romans—and heathenism, which is a word of English origin, is appropriate to designate the creed of our own forefathers.

And that very word symbolizes the past life of our ancestors, and the wild nature, in the midst of which they imagined their gods to dwell. The heathen is the dweller in the "heath," the wild uncultivated country far from human habitations. Therefore, in later days, when men had got to dwell more together, and the land was more cultivated, the heathen man was a sort of outlaw, a wild man of the woods, and the gods he persisted in worshipping were thought of by Christian folk no longer as gods, but as terrible fiends, as the Wild Huntsman careering through the forest, or as Satan holding his court on a lonely mountain top.

Wherefore I think you will see what I mean by saying that that one word "heathen," if we realize its full meaning, contains in itself almost all that I have been trying to say in this lecture, and quite alone affords the sort of glance which we have been trying to take into the remote past, into the dark and backward abysses of Time.

Written by By C. F. Keary in "Religious Systems of the World", Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1892, digitized for Microsoft Corporation by the Internet Archive in 2008, excerpts pp.246-259. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.