Page:Segnius Irritant or Eight Primitive Folk-lore Stories.pdf/92

 to save its bacon, and to this day our religious world bears witness to and perpetuates, in a slightly modified form, the grotesque delusions, more pardonable in them from their want of our accumulated stores of knowledge of our savage ancestry.

Lastly, when the authority of Rome, and the respect felt even in its decay for the classic world by the rude northern tribes, had attracted the northern chiefs to the Christian superstition, and had caused them to be baptized themselves and to order the conversion en masse of their serfs and vassals, half unconsciously, perhaps, it would come to be felt, if our theory be the true one, that underlying the new faith and incorporated with it, lay large fragments of the half-forgotten primitive Arctic winter myth, with its glittering jewels of ice and snow, and this half-recognition of the old friends under new faces may help to explain the strange tenacity with which the northern people of Europe have clung to the arid, cruel and vain superstition which developed itself by degradation from the genial, poetical, and, if in part mistaken, not at all events sour or absurd beliefs, myths and generalizations of their lusty savage ancestry.