woods were scarce awake. As a superstition it seemed to carry us back to the great primal superstitions that have run through the earlier religions. It remains ever upon memory as a large and noble and beautiful form of belief, where Pagan and Christian of all time meet in their fear of inclement nature. Religion has ever associated itself with the rural dread of disaster. Priests say masses for sick cattle, and if the cattle do not benefit by this harmless custom, the peasants are thereby greatly comforted; they have the satisfaction of knowing, at any rate, that should the cattle so prayed for die, it was in the design of Providence, against which even the prayer of devout man was inefficacious. If religion never made more injurious concessions than these to ignorance, the wildest freethinker that ever unsheathed a sword against it must be shamed into laughter at his bellicose attitude. Indeed, it is not only the Catholics of France who expect their ministers to stand between them and rural misfortunes by prayer and holy water; in the Protestant Cévennes a pastor of the Reformed Church has been known to exorcise a field of evil spirits, or tackle by prayers the devils in a poor beast, and even in an entire herd of cattle; and the peasants dread even more than the devil a mysterious god called the Aversier.[1] An apologist for these peculiar
- ↑ The maker of rains.
