THE INFLUENCE OF PAGANISM ON

CHRISTIANITY.

By C. F. KEARY.

SOME years ago, eight or ten I daresay, I happened, when passing down Tottenham Court Road, to be the witness of a little 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 ticks. This was, in fact, what we are all familiar enough with by nan e, 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 gospe 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 public house 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 neighbouring 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 upor

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 the 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, that 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 triendly 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 ant

quity, 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.1 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 is 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

1 The origin of our na..aes for the days of the week is rather this. Our remoter ancestors had a week of nine days. But when they became acquainted with the Roman week of seven days they adopted that. They found the days of the week called after certain Roman divinities. Some of these names they kept; for others they substituted the name of their own god in place of the Roman god-Tiw for Mars, Wodin for Mercury, Thor for Jove.