To this objection there are two answers: first, that the capacity of superstitions to spread widely and rapidly is by no means denied; secondly, that many Christian traditions are really heathen, though their origin and meaning may now be lost. For the policy of the Church towards paganism, though at times one of radical opposition, was generally one better calculated for success. It learned to prefer gradual triumphs to speedy conquests, aware that the former were more likely to last, and was pleased to satisfy its conscience and hide its impotence under connivance and compromise. It assimilated beliefs which it could not destroy, and glossed over what it could not erase, substituting simply its saints and angels for the gods and spirits of older cults. On Monte Casino, near Rome, there existed down to the sixth century a temple sacred to Apollo, till St. Benedict came and, like another Josiah, broke the idols and overthrew the altar and burned the grove, but set up a temple to St. Martin in its stead. And this case is typical of the way in which obstinate heathen rites were diverted and customs consecrated. Some illustrations may be added to those already incidentally alluded to, since they serve to explain how so many relics of heathenism have resisted centuries of Christian teaching. The Scandinavian water-spirit, Nikur, inhabitant of lakes and rivers and raiser of storms, whose favour could only be won by sacrifices, became in the middle ages St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors and sole refuge in danger; and near St. Nicholas’ church at Liverpool there stood a statue of the Christian saint, to whom sailors used to present a peace-offering when they went to sea, and a wave-offering when they returned. So it was with sacred trees and flowers and waters. Their sanctity was transferred, not destroyed. St. Boniface, with the wood of the oak he so miraculously felled, raised an oratory to St. Peter, to whom were thenceforth paid the honours of Thor. Nobody ventured the more to touch the famous oak at Kenmare when blown down by a storm, because it had been handed over to the protection of St. Columba, nor did a fragment of St. Colman’s oak held in the mouth the less avert death by hanging because it had been sanctified by the name of a saint. The Breton princes, before they entered the church at Vretou, offered prayers under a yew outside, which was said to have sprung from St. Martin’s staff and to have been so replete with holiness that the very birds of the air left its berries untouched. The great goddess Freja could only be banished from men’s thoughts by transferring what had been sacred to her to the Virgin Mary; and the names of such common plants as Lady’s Grass, Lady’s Smock, Lady’s Slipper, Lady’s Mantle, and others, attest to this day the wrong that was done to the Northern goddess. Bits of seaweed called Lady’s Trees still decorate many a Cornish chimney-piece, and protect the house from fire and other evils. The Ladybird was once Freja’s bird; and Orion’s belt, which in Sweden is still called Freja’s spindle, in Zealand now belongs to her successor Mary. In the same way Christmas has supplanted the old Yule festival, and the Yule log still testifies to the rites of fire-worship once connected with the season. So we now keep Easter at the time when our pagan forefathers used to sacrifice to the goddess Eostre, and hot cross-buns are perhaps the descendants of cakes once eaten in her honour, on which the mark of Christianity has taken the place of some heathen sign.
Such then is the evidence which Comparative Folk-Lore affords in confirmation of the teaching of history, that the people from whom we inherit our popular traditions were once as miserable and savage as those we now place in the lowest scale of the human family. The evidence that the nations now highest in culture were once in the position of those now the lowest is ever increasing, and the study of Folk-Lore corroborates the conclusions long since arrived at by archæological science. For, just as stone monuments, flint knives, lake-piles, or shell-mounds point to a time when Europeans resembled races where such things are still part of actual life, so do the traces in our social organism of fetishism, totemism, and other low forms of thought, connect our past with people where such forms of thought are still predominant. The analogies with barbarism which still flourish in civilised communities seem only explicable on the theory of a slow and more or less uniform metamorphosis to higher types and modes of life, whilst they enforce the belief that before long it will appear a law of development, as firmly established on the inconceivability of the contrary, that civilisation should emerge from barbarism, as that butterflies should first be caterpillars, or that ignorance should precede knowledge. In this way superstition itself turns to the service of science, confirming its teaching, that the history of humanity has been a rise, not a fall, not a degradation from completeness to imperfection, but a constantly accelerating progress from savagery to culture; that, in short, the iron age of the world belongs to the past, its golden one to the future.
FOOTNOTES
[1] The justification of the use of the word force is not far to seek. One of the demands in the ultimatum addressed to Cetewayo, which helped to bring about the present unhappy Zulu war, was for the reinstatement of missionaries in Zululand. A Natal correspondent of the Times, January 28, 1879, justly observes about this: ‘If the Zulus object to missionaries—who certainly in many cases have acted as spies—why force missionaries upon them?’ The italics are not the correspondent’s.
[2] See on this subject Mr. Wallace’s Tropical Nature, pp. 290-300.
[3] Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii. 312, 313, 333.
[4] Sproat, Savage Life, 178, 179, 209, 210.
[5] Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, v. 173; and Bancroft, iii. 105.