66 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilized 

 ideas are compounded. They arise in the comparison 

 which exists in the savage mind between the living 

 and the non-living, and in the attribution of like 

 qualities to things superficially resembling one an- 

 other-; hence belief in their efficacy, which takes 

 active form in what may be generally termed magic. 

 For example, the rite of baptism is explained when 

 we connect it with barbaric lustrations and water- 

 worship generally; as also that of the Eucharist by 

 reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods; 

 feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters 

 and the eaten. Middleton, himself a clergyman, 

 shows perplexity when watching the elevation of the 

 host at mass. He lacked that knowledge of the 

 origin of sacramental rites which study of barbaric 

 customs has since supplied. In Mr. Frazer' s Golden 

 Bough, the " central idea " of which is " the concep- 

 tion of the slain god," he shows at what an early 

 stage in his speculations man formulated the concep- 

 tion of deity incarnated in himself, or in plant or ani- 

 mal, and as afterward slain, both the incarnation and 

 the death being for the benefit of mankind. The 

 god is his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most 

 striking form, as insisted upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, 

 as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his representa- 

 tive; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the 

 custom of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. 

 The fundamental idea of this sacramental act, as 

 the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer fur- 



