Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/306

280 spite of his ardent adherence to the new creed, it is plain that the Christian doctrine of the one sufficient sacrifice had little hold on him. Though the blood of the Highest Himself had been shed, to Hjalti's mind other life-offerings were, if not absolutely necessary, at least seemly and acceptable. No less than his theological adversaries, he placed his confidence in the efficacy of sanguinary rites, and in the special security attaching to blood-bought successes and benefits. The cause hallowed by the willing death of the true and the stalwart, who yielded himself utterly to the deity invoked, must be triumphant; and to this present century it is evident that a freshly executed corpse, or the blood from it, possesses inherent virtue. The invisible and impalpable principle of life may, when ousted from its native abiding-place, still serve to vitalize and restore to health some languishing bodily frame. It even appears that purely moral attributes are likewise capable of being transmitted thus in modern England. A writer in the Church Times, February 13, 1891, publishes the following archaic, but still-existing folk-belief as he received it from the minister of a colliery village in the far north. "I had not been in the parish long before I was struck with the circumstance that when a funeral took place there was almost sure to be a baptism party at the church at the same time, sometimes the baptism party arriving with the funeral party without the accustomed notice beforehand. On inquiry I found it to be a superstition in that part (I have not met with it elsewhere) that should a child be brought to the font at the same time that a body be committed to the ground, that whatever was 'good' in the deceased person was transferred to the little child; that God did not allow any 'goodness' to be buried and lost to the world, and that such goodness was most likely to enter a little child coming to the sacrament of Baptism." Alphonse Karr's celebrated epigram: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" is