634 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
by processes of transference, usually unconscious, but often half-conscious, and 
undoubtedly in some cases wholly conscious. Where the process has been un- 
conscious or half-conscious these beliefs, observances, and practices have survived 
in the new system because the religious sense of the masses felt instinctively that 
they were necessary to its expression. They cannot therefore be regarded as 
survivals with any implication of decay or death. They were necessities under 
the former system; they remained necessities under the later, and may be living 
forces and vital expressions of the human desire for relation with the divine under 
the new as much as under the old. Where the process has been conscious a 
popular demand for their survival as necessities has been appreciated by leaders 
of the system, and observances and forms of ritual have been consciously taken 
from the old system to express a principle still active under the new. Often we 
are in a position to know that the old beliefs, observances, and forms did not 
accord with the highest ideals of the most advanced professors of the new system, 
and that they came to be consciously adopted by compromise in the interests of 
the more rapid and permanent establishment of the latter among inferior intel- 
ligences.. They were better than the worse, if not as good as the best. Of these Dr. 
Bigg is speaking in the preface to his book ‘The Church’s Task under the Roman 
Empire’ when he says, ‘The most significant changes in history were not imposed 
upon the Church by the bishops from above, but forced upon the bishops by the 
pressure of popular opinion from below.’ A well-known example is supplied by 
the early history of Islam, when the Prophet, having learned in exile at Medina, 
what many of his apostles have since had to learn, that the Semitic masses 
could not be weaned to a perfectly spiritual system, came to terms with the 
primeval worship of the Arabian Goddess in Mecca and displaced her personality 
by retaining many expressions of the popular cult of her; and, as so often has 
happened in similar cases of religious transference, those expressions remaining 
to this day the most strictly observed by Moslems, testify still to the vitality of 
the religious necessity which lay and lies behind them. And not only the early 
history of Islam, but the early history of Christianity offers instances of such 
conscious transference, some of which may be read of in Sir William Ramsay’s 
works, e.g., in ‘The Church in the Roman Empire,’ where he deals with that strange 
story of Glycerius the Cappadocian deacon, who broke out at a certain great 
gathering of Christians at Venasa, one of the holiest of the pagan high places of 
the land, and revived the former orgiastic form of cult by leading a band of 
enthusiastic maidens dancing and singing through the hills to the glory of Christ 
crucified. Condemned in haste by the stern Basil of Czesarea, the recalcitrant 
deacon found an apologist and a protector in no less saintly a priest than Gregory 
of Nazianzos, who knew better than his Metropolitan how real and deep a local 
religious instinct lay beneath this scandalous manifestation, and how much better 
it were to bend to the service of the Church, than to break, the religious zealots 
who had expressed it. Another curious collection of such transferences may be 
found in a recent work of Mr. Rendel Harris, which he entitled ‘The Heavenly 
Twins.’ Here are set out an immense number of facts and suggestions tending to 
show how the early Church adapted to its ends the cult of the Dioscuri or of 
similar twin gods known by other names both in the West and East, a cult which 
expressed a certain conception of the relation between human and divine, salu- 
tary and indeed necessary to many pagan minds. The book needs to be read in 
a critical spirit, for the author has been led on by the fascination of myth-inter- 
pretation to find his twin nature-gods wherever he turns to look for them; and 
often his reading of the legends is less convincing than would be (if it is allowed 
to use a frivolous instance in such a connection) a similar explanation applied to 
the story of Box and Cox—those obvious twins of Dark and Light who occu- 
pied, turn and turn about, their chamber, the World, under the benign influence 
of the landlady of the tale, a manifest Harth-Mother of mythology. 
Many of the undoubted transferences which took place under the Christian 
system cannot at this time of day be certainly distinguished into the conacious 
and the unconscious. We know that saints of the Church have entered often into 
the honour and the local habitations of pagan deities. Mr. Frazer has told us 
