Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/82

 the ejected deities. The result is that for the peasant Christianity is only a part of a larger scheme of religion. To the outside observer it may appear that there are two distinct departments of popular religion, the one nominally Christian, devoted to the service of God and the Saints, provided with sanctuaries and all the apparatus of worship, served by a regular priesthood, limited by dogma and system; the other concerned with those surviving deities of pre-Christian Greece to whom we must next turn, free in respect of its worship alike from the intervention of persons and the limitations of place, obedient only to a traditional lore which each may interpret by his own feelings and augment by his own experience. But the peasant seems hardly sensible of any such contrast. His Christian and his pagan deities consort amicably together; prayer and vow and offering are made to both, now to avert their wrath, now to cajole them into kindness; the professed prophets of either sort, the priests and the witches, are endowed with kindred powers; everywhere there is overlapping and intertwining. And when the very authorities of the Greek Church have adopted or connived at so much of pagan belief and custom, how should the common-folk distinguish any longer the twin elements in their blended faith? Their Christianity has become homogeneous with their paganism, and it is the religious spirit inherited from their pagan ancestors by which both alike are animated.