638 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
with beliefs of the really religious kind. The object of cult may be a survival of 
the necessary and vital class, as, for example, the Virgin Mother; but the par- 
ticular place and manner of her worship may be conditioned by survivals of the 
pathologic sort. The persistence of local sanctity supplies the most obvious illus- 
tration of the latter kind of survival. For instance, while the consideration of 
many holy places of Christendom is due to events or traditions of Christian 
history itself, to connection with the Gospel story or with early preachers, 
teachers, or other saints, to reputed epiphanies, and so forth, a much greater 
number owe the fact that they are still frequented by the pious to reasons of 
which the pious have not the dimmest consciousness, often to features of pre- 
Christian Nature-worship—to rocks or springs, or even objects which may have 
perished long ago, like sacred trees, What Greek votary in the shrines of 
St. George or St. Elias could give a satisfactory account of either of those saints, 
demonstrate their place in the history of his Church, or say why their shrines 
stand in certain valleys or on certain peaks of the hills? We often know better 
than he; for we can say definitely that many of these saints of the Orthodox 
Church and of Islam, whose churches and tombs dot the Nearer Kast, have never 
died because they never lived, but are the unsubstantial shadows of old gods, 
clinging to the sites of shrines and groves whence their names perished long ago 
with the victory of the Galilean. 
The particularism, which communities—village, tribal, urban, and even 
national—display all the world over, has had, of course. much to do with local per- 
sistence of sanctity. A small body, blessed with a private deity of its very own 
for uncounted centuries, who has been identified with its particular interests, and 
has favoured it in its multifarious local feuds, will not readily resign it for a deity 
of more general jurisdiction. If it accepts the Christian Virgin in place of a 
pagan goddess, she will be the Virgin of that particular community, unconnected 
with any other Virgin, and in full sympathy with the insults which Latin 
peasants, for example, will heap upon the Madonna of the rival village across the 
valley. Indeed, an instinctive distrust of and disinclination to accept an impartial 
god is characteristic of all imperfect humanity, and lies beneath the sectarianism 
which has been promptly and continuously developed within the pale of all the 
great universal religions—for instance, in both Islam and Christianity. The omni- 
present, omniscient Deity is too far removed, too catholic, too vague. Man ever 
desires to focus divine attention on a smaller area, to establish for himself some 
preference in the eyes of his God; and, even when most anxious to bring the rest 
of the world into the fold, he often most jealously reserves to his own community 
the distinction of a Chosen People. 
This great and well-known class of observances and rites, which represent true 
pathologie religious survivals, supplies the bulk of the matter of all the great 
treatises written on cult by anthropologists, such as those, for example, of Mann- 
hardt and Bétticher on Tree-worship, as well as others to which | haye already 
referred, and many more. With this class the anthropologist can deal freely. In 
the others it seems reasonable that he should move with greater reserve; and 
I venture to think that he will best avoid offence if he keep clearly in his own 
mind, and as clearly before his readers, the main distinction between the classes of 
religious survivals, which, quite independently of my presentation of it, is real, 
vital, and of momentous significance. 
The following Paper was then read :— 
1. Dr. Usener’s Theories concerning Sonder-Gotter and ‘ Augenblich-Gotter 
in his ‘Gotternamen. } By L. R. Farnety, .A., Litt.D. 
The Roman ‘ Indigitamenta,’ transcribed by St. Augustine from Varro, present 
a long list of divinities or divine potencies that presided over the manifold and 
' Published in full in Anthropological Hssays presented to Hdward Burnett Tylor, 
p. 81. 
