at our door and straightway out at another is, while within,
safe from the storm; but soon it vanishes into the darkness whence it
came."

Such faiths as these, indeed, show us primitive ideas at their very
roots. This seventeenth-century pagan depended upon himself for his
faith. He worked out his own ideas as to the origin of soul and heaven
and God and Christ. They were terms that had filtered down to him
through the hard surroundings of his life, and he set to work to
define them in the fashion of the primitive savage. We meet with other
examples. Thus among the superstitions of Lancashire is one which
tells us of the lingering belief in a long journey after death, when
food is necessary to support the soul. A man having died of apoplexy,
near Manchester, at a public dinner, one of the company was heard to
remark: "Well, poor Joe, God rest his soul! He has at least gone to
his long rest wi' a belly full o' good meat, and that's some
consolation," and perhaps a still more remarkable instance is that of
the woman buried in Cuxton Church, near Rochester, who directed by
her will that the coffin was to have a lock and key, the key being
placed in her dead hand, so that she might be able to release herself
at pleasure.[253]

These people simply did not understand civilised thought or civilised
religion. To escape from the pressure of trying to understand they
turned to think for themselves, and thinking for themselves merely
brought them back to the standpoint of primitive thought. It could
hardly be otherwise. The working of the human mind is on the same
plane wherever and whenever it operates or has operated. The
difference in results arises from the enlarged field of observation.
When the Suffolk peasant set to work to account for the existence of
stones on his field by asserting that the fields produced the stones,
and for the origin of the so-called "pudding-stone" conglomerate, that
it was a mother stone and the parent of the pebbles,[254] he was
beginning a first treatise on geology; and when the Hampshire peasant
attributes the origin of the tutsan berries to having germinated in
the blood of slaughtered Danes,[255] other counties following the same
thought, I am not at all sure that he is not beginning all over again
the primitive conception of the origin of plants.

[Illustration: LONG MEG AND HER DAUGHTERS]

[Illustration: STONE CIRCLES ON STANTON MOOR]

This beginning shows the mark of the primitive mi