An inference is misleading when it carries with it consequences which are irrelevant to the main facts upon which it is founded.
You cannot say that because the Christians used fire in their worship at Easter and the pagans also used fire in their worship, therefore the Christians adopted the practice from the pagans; still less can you say that Easter originated in a pagan festival. All you can say is that fire, as an accessory of worship, was used by both, just as prayer was also so used by both. The paraphernalia (using the term in a neutral sense) of two religions may be precisely alike, while the religions themselves may be as wide as the poles asunder. And the complaint one has to make against much that is brought forward as evidence of a common origin for customs, both religious and secular, is that it is not evidence at all, and that though it be repeated or multiplied a thousandfold, it follows the familiar rule of mathematics and amounts to nothing. Even when legitimate inferences have been drawn from groups of observed facts, it is by no means uncommon to find them so manipulated by writers as to convey wrong and erroneous impressions. Having regard to the laws of the physical growth and development of organic matter and to other considerations of a more technical character it may be considered a legitimate inference that men and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but it is a misrepresentation of the inference to say that it implies that men are descended from apes. For although it may be a source of comfort to all English-speaking people to believe that their ancestors “either came in with William the Conqueror or went out in the Mayflower,” it is clearly impossible for them to believe that they can all trace their descent either from George the Third on the one hand, or from George Washington on the other. A genealogical enthusiast may perhaps be pardoned for seeking to embrace as many of the elect as possible in his family tree, because even in his moments of deepest depression he can point to Adam as the common ancestor. The student of religions in like manner may be pardoned for desiring to express in tabular form the successive stages through which doctrines and rites have passed; have been developed, arrested, modified, governed and conditioned. But neither the genealogist nor the religious philosopher can be pardoned for mistaking a collateral for a direct ancestor.
The Christian Church has, with generous and ready welcome, received into her bosom all that could produce credentials of kinship, holding nothing as common or unclean, however unworthy its associations and however perverted its use in the past. Painting, music, poetry, drama, philosophy, architecture, ritual, organisation, each has found a place and received a fresh consecration as the result of its admission to the embrace of the true mother of them all. Only one barrier has she interposed—the barrier of heresy. She has always insisted that the postulant’s real intentions should be clearly known. By sacrament, creed, and confession she has exercised every precaution to secure peace within her sacred walls. She has sacrificed popularity, endured persecution, incurred hatred in order that all her children should share the same affections, should speak the same things and think the same thoughts. This has ever been and is still her great offence, her unpardonable sin, in the eyes of those outside her communion, viz. that she has been so uncompromisingly true to herself. For this reason it might have been thought superfluous, or at any rate a more or less academic matter, to discuss the origin of her symbolism and its affinities. The human mind, however, almost inevitably, refuses to admit the appropriateness of a newly imported symbol unless its past associations are free from suspicion. Not only so, the student of religions obsessed with the superlative value of resemblance and coincidence, is apt to suppose that if he can show that the paraphernalia of Christian worship approximately resembles that of some pagan religion he has proved identity of intention and belief.
By way of reply it would be possible to argue, with greater force and to better purpose, that historically it can be shown that Christian worship would be, at this time, fuller, richer, more ornate, more attractive and possibly not less true to its supreme purpose if larger use had been made of the common sources of religious ceremonial. The history of heresy is, however, a sufficient refutation of the main contention. An examination of some particular forms which the pagan theory has assumed in relation to Cornwall will be given later on.
II
THE CELTS
It is almost, if not quite, impossible to acquire a right perspective of the position which the Celts occupy in British history without examining the incidence of that position and some of its relationships by the light of the results of modern archæological research.
In Cornwall, as elsewhere, the prehistoric races which inhabited the county before the Celts appeared have left abundant evidence of their presence. That evidence, however, will be hard to discover in the warp and bent of character and in the physical development which doubtless all Englishmen have in some measure inherited from them, and towards which these extremely remote ancestors have to some slight extent contributed. We shall probably never know enough about any of them so as to be in a position to say of any one living in the county as we might say, for example, of an Irishman “that splendid act of daring or that hairbrained escapade must be set down to his Irish breeding.” Yet, inasmuch as no one supposes that an incoming race commonly extirpates the race it supplants there is always the suspicion that the new race may have yielded to the moral influence or to the religious atmosphere of the old. History supplies us with instances of this triumph of spiritual over physical force, Christianity itself being the most striking instance of all.
For this reason it is necessary to go back to those ages which have been distinguished as palæolithic, neolithic, and bronze, in other words to those periods during which unpolished stone, polished stone, and bronze implements were in use,[[11]] in order to discover, if possible, whether as the tide of industrial progress flowed in, there are indubitable signs of an unbroken tradition of religious thought and practice which became articulate in the historic narrative of Julius Cæsar.
Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., has thought that he detected traces of the palæolithic age in the raised beach at Prah Sands,[[12]] and there is, a priori, no reason to suppose that his discovery will not be confirmed by further investigation. Quite the contrary; it is not unlikely that some of the implements which have been found in the county and which are now commonly regarded as belonging to the later stone age will be found to belong to the earlier. This consideration, however, has only a very indirect bearing upon the present enquiry, for it has not yet been shown that the men of the earlier period had any religious belief at all.