158 Hutton Webster 



century their number had reached one hundred and seventy-five.^ 

 The Greek rehgious festivals, small and great, are estimated to 

 have occupied about seventy days in the Athenian year. Thus 

 the proportion of holidays to working days was not greatly dif- 

 ferent from what it is with us ; but their occurrence at irregular 

 intervals and grouping together around the major festivals must 

 have caused much more interference with the routine of daily 

 life." In modern China, so many festivals in honor of deities 

 are observed as holidays, that, as has been expressly said, they 

 take the place in a large measure, of the Sabbath institution.'^ 

 To what extremes the practice of abstaining from labor at sacred 

 times may extend is further illustrated in Abyssinia, where the 

 numerous feasts and fasts are so strictly observed as to render 

 about six months of the year prohibited for any kind of employ- 

 ment.^ 



Human nature, it has been said, is always ready for the shift 

 from fast to feast. This transition with all its subtle and mani- 

 fold results on the organization of society may be followed under 

 our own eyes. The passage of the holy day into the holiday, 

 beginning in the lower culture, promises to reach its culmination 

 in the thorough secularizing of all the great festivals of the 

 Christian year. That evolutionary movement, whether for weal 

 or woe, at least provides a singularly instructive illustration of 

 those close relations between religion and social progress which 

 must ever impress the inquirer into the early history of mankind. 



^ L. Friedlander, Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, 

 London, 1908, ii. 11 sq. Mommsen {op. cit., 297 sqq.) gives a list of the 

 ancient feriae and of those added in the imperial epoch. No new public 

 feriae of regular recurrence were introduced during republican times. 

 Although the ancients were careful to distinguish the feriae from the hidi 

 (cf. Gellius, ii. 24, 11. Diebus ludorum et feriis quibtisdam), yet in the 

 imperial age the transformation of the feriae into joyous holidays had 

 been so far effected that many of them were celebrated much as were the 

 ludi. Cf. supra. 



'Jane E. Harrison, in Companion to Greek Studies, Cambridge, 1905, 

 p. 324. Cf. supra. 



'J. H. Gray, China, London, 1878, i. 249. The same statement is made 

 of the Korean religious holidays (Griffis, op. cit., 295). 



' W. C. Harris, Highlands of Ethiopia, New York, 1843, p. 280. 



158 



