Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/40

 4 remains of Gentilism or heathenism. The Puritans knew this very well, and if they hated the Maypole in the Strand, it was because they knew it to be at least as old as Troy, whose fate, as we know, it has shared.

The Puritans were conscious that much Pagan custom had been tolerated by the Church, and had survived, not only in ecclesiastical usage, but in popular festivals. The folk, the people, had changed the names of the objects of its worship, had saints in place of Gods, but had not given up the festival of May night, nor ceased to revere, under new titles, the nereids or the lares, the fairies or the browny. All these survivals the Puritans attacked and the old antiquarians obsei-ved, comparing early English customs with the manners of Greece and Rome. In these studies lay the origin of our modern Folk-lore, now far wider in scope, and better equipped with knowledge of many tales ancient and modern. For example, Acosta found in Peru rites which at once resembled those of the Church, those of our own harvest homes, and those of the Eleusinian mysteries and the practices of the Greek Thesmophoria. The earlier observers explained such coincidences in various ways. They thought that the devil in America deliberately parodied the ceremonial and doctrine of the Church. Or they thought that the lost tribes of Israel, in their wanderings, had carried all over the world the ritual of Judaism. At the end of the seventeenth century, Spencer, the master of C. C. C. Cambridge, reached a theory more like our own. He saw that the Jewish ritual was not an original pattern, from which heathen ritual was perverted, but was, as I have elsewhere said, a divinely licensed version of, or selection from, the religious uses of Eastern peoples in general. We have now expanded this idea, and find in the Jewish ritual a monotheistic and expurgated example of rites common, not to Semitic or Eastern peoples only, but common to all races