630 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
and that attention has often been arrested by striking instances of cwltus 
continuity under successive religious systems or dispensations. I enjoyed the 
advantage of beginning travel in the Nearer Kast in the company of the acute 
observer who is now Sir William Martin Ramsay, and to his comments on what 
we saw together in the Phrygian highlands as long ago as 1887 I owe muchof 
my earliest interest in the question of religious survival and my direction towards 
the lines on which I have since tried to study it. Some day let us hope that, 
prompted by such a lectureship as the Gifford Foundation, or encouraged by some 
discerning publisher, Sit William Ramsay may collect from his many books the 
scattered observations upon the religious elements which survived from Anatolian 
heathendom into both Christian and Moslem observance, and adding to them 
others from the storehouse of his memory and his note-books, produce a volume 
arallel to that ‘Religion of the Semites’ which is the abiding memorial of his 
dead friend and ally. 
I have called ‘Religious Survivals’ a controversial topic. That is to put it 
mildly. Indeed, few anthropological topics generate so much heat. In addition 
to a common distaste with which one may sympathise, even if one does not share 
it, manifested by many reverent minds for all objective discussion of things 
religious, this topic challenges a certain very widespread prejudice, as irrational 
as it is strong—namely, the prejudice against the inclusion of orthodox religious 
beliefs and observances under the general maxim, ‘ There is nothing new under 
the sun.’ The more sacred a man holds anything the less will he believe that 
evolution has had anything to do with it—eyolution with its inevitable impli- 
cation of embryonic aid imperfect stages. The Athenian loved to think that the 
great patron goddess of his city sprang fully grown and fully armed from the 
head of the King of heaven. The devotees of all creeds have wished to he- 
heve that when the first founders of systems proclaimed their missions the old 
things passed away like a burning scroll and a wholly new earth and heaven 
began. Nothing is more repugnant to the ordinary orthodox Moslem than the 
suggestion that the Prophet borrowed theology and doctrine from earlier Semitic 
systems, notably the Hebraic, and that much of the ceremonial and observance 
now followed by the faithful in their most religious moments, those of the Meccan 
pilgrimage, survive from the times of ignorance. Yet what contentions are less 
controvertible in fact than these? The devotee can believe that every detail of a 
new dispensation was known from all time in heaven, but will refuse to allow that 
anything can have been known on earth. With that direct revelation which 
he thinks to have been vouchsafed at a given moment from on high, the slate 
of time must have been wiped clean of all previous religious thought and practice. 
I do not, of course, speak for one moment of the enlightened and scholarly doctors 
of our own creed or any other. These have always seen and often stated that the 
réligious systems by which they hold have assimilated much from systems of earlier 
date ; norin admitting that have they found their faith take any harm. 
How natural and compelling, however, is the prejudice in question may be 
estimated by the fact that it is extended to dispensations in otber fields than the 
religious. For example, that message to civilisation which it was given to the 
pagan Hellene to deliver does not admit in the view of certain devout Hellenists 
of the view that the Greek artistic sense had any pedigree in pre-classical times. 
They resent as an insolent innuendo the contention that what is essential in the 
Greek spirit can be detected in the work of peoples living in the Hellenic area 
long before the rise of classic Hellenic art, and that from these peoples and from 
others who possessed older civilisations the fabric of Hellenism was built up in 
strata, which can still be observed, and referred to their pre-Hellenic authors. 
So close akin is odiwm archeologicum to odium theologicum! Yet, perhaps, in 
this case they are really one and the same, for perfervid Hellenism is the last 
half-conscious protest of the Western peoples of Europe against the dominance of 
an Asiatic religion. 
Irrational is this prejudice in the first degree of course, because not only have 
we the clearest historical evidence that in our own religious practice, as in that of 
other races, details of earlier ritual and observance have survived, often by con- 
