uspiciously accepting her.2
The incredibleness of a doctrine is no obstacle to a popular
belief in it. Whosoever thinks of the earnest reception of the
dogma of transubstantiation the conversion of a wheaten wafer into
the infinite God by nearly three quarters of Christendom at this
moment, must permit the paradox to pass unchallenged. Doubtless
the closing eye of many an expiring Greek reflected the pitiless
old oarsman plying his frost cold boat across the Stygian ferry,
and his failing ear caught the rush of the Phlegethonian surge. It
is equally certain that, at the same time, many another laughed at
these things as childish fictions, fitted only to scare "the baby
of a girl."

Stricken memory, yearning emotion, kindled fancy, a sensitive and
timorous observation of natural phenomena, rustling leaves,
wavering shadows, apparent effects of unknown causes, each is a
superstitious mother of beliefs. The Sonora Indians say that
departed souls dwell among the caves and rocks of the cliffs, and
that the echoes often heard there are their voices. Ruskin
suggests that the cause of the Greeks surrounding the lower world
residence of Persephone with poplar groves was that "the
frailness, fragility, and inconstancy of the leafage of the
poplar tree resembled the fancied ghost people." We can very
easily imagine how, in the breeze at the entrance to some
subterranean descent,

"A ghostly rank Of poplars, like a halted train of shades,
Trembled."

The operations of fierce passions, hate, fright, and rage, in a
brain boiling with blood and fire, make pictures which the savage
afterwards holds in remembrance as facts. He does not by
reflection consciously distinguish the internal acts and sights of
the mind from objective verities. Barbarians as travellers and
psychologists have repeatedly observed usually pay great attention
to the vagaries of madmen, the doings and utterances of the
insane. These persons are regarded as possessed by higher beings.
Their words are oracles: the horrible shapes, the grotesque
scenes, which their disordered and inflamed faculties conjure up,
are eagerly caught at, and such accounts of them as they are able
to make out are treasured up as revelations. This fact is of no
slight importance as an element in the hinting basis of the
beliefs of uncultivated tribes. Many a vision of delirium, many a
raving medley of insanity, has been accepted as truth.3 Another
phenomenon, closely allied to the for