apologies and promises of a new coat of gilding. There is what appears a genuine story of a Chinaman who had paid an idol priest to cure his daughter, but she died; whereupon the swindled worshipper brought an action at law against the god, who for his fraud was banished from the province. The classic instances, again, are perfect — the dressing and anointing of statues, feeding them with delicacies and diverting them with raree-shows, summoning them as witnesses; the story of the Arkadian youths coming back from a bad day's hunting and revenging themselves by scourging and pricking Pan's statue, and the companion tale of the image which fell upon the man who ill-treated it; the Tyrians chaining the statue of the Sun-god that he might not abandon their city; Augustus chastising in effigy the ill-behaved Neptune; Apollo's statue that moved when it would give an oracle; and the rest of the images which brandished weapons, or wept, or sweated, to prove their supernatural powers. Such ideas continued to hold their place in Christendom, as was natural, considering how directly the holy image or picture took the place of the household god or the mightier idol of the temple. The Russian boor covering up the saint's picture that it may not see him do wrong; the Mingrelian borrowing a successful neighbour's saint when his own crop fails, or when about to perjure himself choosing for the witness of his deceitful oath a saint of mild countenance and merciful repute; the peasant of Southern Europe, alternately coaxing and trampling on his special saint-fetish, and ducking the Virgin or St. Peter for rain; the winking and weeping images that are worked, even at this day, to the greater glory of God, or rather to the greater shame of Man — these are but the extreme instances of the worshipper's endowment of the sacred image with a life and personality modelled on his own.[1]
- ↑ For general collections of evidence, see especially Meiners, 'Geschichte der Religionen,' vol. i. books i. and v.; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii.; Waitz, 'Anthropologie;' De Brosses, 'Dieux Fétiches,' &c. Particular details in
