Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/689

Rh antiquity or the strength of the popular attachment to them seemed dangerous to the early Christians, and in particular against the devotion it had been customary to give to certain stones. A council held at Aries in 452 notified the bishops in districts where this cult prevailed that if they neglected to destroy it they would be guilty of sacrilege. A council at Tours in 567 advised the clergy to exclude from the church all who performed before certain stones rites strange to it. A century afterward, in 668, the Council of Nantes, calling the attention of the bishops and their servitors to venerated stones in retired and woody spots where vows were made and offerings brought, enjoined them to throw the stones where their worshipers would never be able to find them. The Council of Rouen in 689 denounced those who made vows at stones as if they were altars, or who offered candles and presents before them as if some power resided within them that could dispense good and harm. Two councils at Toledo, in 681 and 693, threatened "the venerators of stones" with various penalties. The worship of stones figured in a list of superstitions still in use at that period drawn up in 743 by a council at Leptines, near Mons. These customs were also denounced in royal ordinances and episcopal instructions. A decree of Chilperic in the second half of the sixth century ordered the stone monuments standing in the fields to be destroyed. In the middle of the next century, St. Eloi, Bishop of Noyon, prohibited Christians from performing vows or diabolical ceremonies around stones. We read in the Capitulary of Charlemagne, which was drawn up at Aix-la-Chapelle in 789, "On the subject of stones to which some foolish people come and give themselves up to superstitious practices, we order that this abuse so detestable and so execrable to God be abolished and destroyed." Similar measures were adopted in England. A decree of Edgar in 967 threatened with terrible punishments those who should perform before certain stones practices savoring of their ancient consecration, or who should omit to destroy them. The decree does not seem, however, to have been of much effect. Canute was obliged to renew it in an edict which characterized such worship of stones as barbarous.

The effect of these ordinances and threats was far from complete. The people kept on in their old ways. The church, not succeeding in destroying the reverence in which the megalithic monuments were held, and fearing the wrath of the people if they overthrew them, decided to sanctify them, to put them under the care of the Virgin, and to derive some profit from the worship paid them. It was necessary, as Fréminville says, to resort to pious frauds and senseless modifications.

A considerable number of menhirs have preserved evident traces