PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 635 
how St. Felicita has replaced Mephitis, the heathen personification of the poisonous 
gas of the pool of Frigento, and how Adonis in Sicily and Sardinia lives on as 
St.John. These instances might be multiplied to many hundreds. We know, too, 
that almost all our stated ecclesiastical festivals are continuations of heathen 
feasts, so far as their dates and the general nature of their commemorative 
significance are concerned. What had to be changed has been changed, but not 
more, Christmas has succeeded to the festival of the winter solstice which 
celebrated the new birth of the Sun; Easter to the spring festival at which in 
many parts of the Mediterranean world the Nature-Goddess, and especially the 
death and resurrection of her Son, were commemorated. The Assumption of the 
Virgin replaces the August feast of Artemis and Diana in Greece and Italy. The 
anniversary of St. George, so great a day in modern Greece, seems to be the old 
Parilia; St. John the Baptist has taken on the heathen rites of midsummer, and 
you may see the folk of Smyrna, Christian and Moslem alike, jumping through 
fire to his honour on any St, John’s Eve. Very rarely, as in the case of the Feast 
of All Souls, the late Christian adoption of which in the tenth century happens to 
be known, can we ascribe these transferences to any definite action of a leader of 
the Church. Usually we know no more than that where and when there was 
once a pagan saint or a pagan feast there are now saints and feasts of Christianity. 
But no reasonable person feels that the latter are discredited or lose anything of 
their actual significance by the fact of their having a pre-Christian pedigree. 
St. John may have succeeded to Adonis, but he is not Adonis. Christmas may be 
the heir of the Saturnalia, but it is the Saturnalia no longer. To feel that the 
sanctity of either is impaired by these facts is as if one were to refuse reverence to 
the art-types of early Christianity, because most unqestionably these were not 
invented fresh and new for the new religion. Why should they have been? If 
there were ready to hand images in pagan art, fit to express the early Christian 
ideas, it would have needed a miracle for the nascent Church to have invented 
new ones. The human creative faculty in matters of art is strictly limited 
as to types. Presentations of Apollo or Orpheus were used naturally for the 
new Christ, and those of the Nature-Goddess of Asia with her Son for the new 
Mother and Child. How else should gracious maternity have been represented ? 
Last year I showed in this Section certain terra-cotta images of the Ephesian 
Goddess with her child, dated to the fourth century before Christ, which might 
easily have been mistaken for Madonna figures of the Italian Renaissance ; and 
last winter 1 saw in a newly excavated Coptic chapel of the sixth century at 
Memphis a fresco painting of the Virgin suckling her Son which was indistinguish- 
able from late representations of Isis. 
As a matter of fact there is little fear that anthropologists in demonstrating 
the fact of transference in such categories of religious expression as these with 
which I have just been dealing will impair their religious efficiency. For, after 
all, how much is there not in the everyday expression of the religious sense among 
ourselves which has suffered a transference in time and space so obvious that no 
reflective mind can be unconscious of it? Consider only the religious phraseology 
current among the simplest Christians—all that mass of images and ideas proper to 
an alien race and to the latitude and climate of the Mediterranean in which, for 
example, the Presbyterian of Scotland expresses the most pious of his aspirations. 
He sighs for the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, for the plash of running 
waters, for the shade of the fig and the vine; and, the most restless of men to whom 
all inaction is hateful, he aspires to a heaven floored with the crystal of Oriental 
imagery, where he shall for ever sit still. These ideas one meets at every turn, 
not only in the religious, but in the secular, thoughts of every Oriental or South 
European. Among us they appear in religion only, known for manifest exotics, 
but not the less full of religious significance, even to the least congruous Christian. 
Ere I leave this second class of Survivals let me revert again for a moment to 
the cult of the Virgin in the Nearer East. It is possible, even probable, that 
Mary, the mother of Jesus, also owes her divine, or at least semi-divine position 
in the Christian system to such a conscious effort by leaders of the Church as 
those to which we have just alluded. It is a well-known fact that neither the 
