th. It is
to be observed that Beagas, the French Bague, is the Anglo-Saxon
denomination for rings, and Dr. William Bell suggests that holy St.
Bega was but a personification of one of the holy rings which, having
gained great hold upon the minds of the heathen Cumbrians, it was not
politic in their first Christian missionaries wholly to subvert.[445]
These rings are, of course, the doom rings of the Scandinavian temples
which are so often referred to in the Sagas.[446]

Baptism, an essentially Christian ceremony, might off-hand be supposed
to contain nothing but evidence for Christianity. It might at most be
expected that the details of the ceremony would contain relics of
adapted pagan rites, and this we know is the case. But we can go
beyond even this, and discover in the popular conception of the rite
very clear indications of the early antagonism between Christianity
and paganism--an antagonism which is certainly some eighteen hundred
years old in this country, and though so old is still contained in the
evidence of folklore.

An analysis of baptismal folklore shows us that its most important
section is contained under the group which deals with the effect of
non-baptism. In England we have it prevailing in the border counties,
in Cornwall, Devonshire, Durham, Lancashire, Middlesex,
Northumberland, and Yorkshire, and in North-East Scotland, that
children joined the ranks of the fairies if they died unchristened, or
that their souls wandered about in the air, restless and unhappy,
until Judgment Day. Various penalties attended the condition of
non-baptism, but perhaps the most significant is the Northumberland
custom of burying an unbaptised babe at the feet of an adult Christian
corpse--surely a relic of the old sacrifice at a burial which is
indicated so frequently in the graves of prehistoric times,
particularly of the long-barrow period. In Ireland we have the effect
of non-baptism in a still more grim form. In the sixteenth century the
rude Irish used to leave the right arms of their male children
unchristened, to the intent that they might give a more ungracious and
deadly blow.[447]

[Illustration: RITE OF BAPTISM, ON FONT AT DARENTH, KENT]

These, and their allied and variant customs, are relics, not so much
of the absorption by Christian baptism of rites belonging to early
paganism as of the struggle between Christianity and paganism for the
mastery, of the anathemas of Christians against pagans, and of