Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/59

Rh was resorted to for the purpose of finding the body. There was the odd remark of the mother of Gamble, the half-witted youth charged with the recent boy-murder at Islington, that he was always worse when the moon is at the full. There was the excitement in the churchyard of St. John's, Hackney, last August, on the report that a sheeted ghost had been seen, when there collected as many thousands, led by curiosity or belief in the possibility of the thing, as gathered in Bohemia last January on the news that the Virgin Mary had appeared in a wood near Braunau.

These, however, by the way. And while it is well to keep on the lookout for like examples at like levels, let us not forget the monition, to "first cast out the beam" from our "own eye," that we may "see clearly to cast out the mote" from our "brother's eye." This counsel may be heeded by choosing from the newspapers a few examples of survivals among the intelligent; examples, as one may call them, of "spiritual wickedness in high places." Let it be noted that they derive their chief value, at least for the present purpose, from the ideas at the core of each which connect them with barbaric ideas. It is these that survive the changes in the pantheon of every race. Of the Greek peasant of to-day Mr. Rodd testifies that, "much as he would shudder at the accusation of any taint of paganism, the ruling of the Fates is more immediately real to him than divine omnipotence." Mr. Tozer confirms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says: "It is rather the minor deities and those associated with man's ordinary life that have escaped the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim twilight of popular belief." In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us that, "even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which represent the almighty powers of creation, preservation, and destruction,