62 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



money ") there is the survival of a ceremony in the 

 Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles 

 before the shrines of the Madonna and Saints he is 

 reminded of a passage in Herodotus as to the use of 

 lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that 

 lamps to the Madonna took the place of those before 

 the images of the Lares, whose chapels stood at the 

 corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri (305 a. d.) 

 forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day 

 in cemeteries lest the spirits ■ of the saints should, be 

 disquieted, but the custom was too deeply rooted 

 to be abolished. As for votive oiTerings, Middleton 

 truly says that " no one custom of antiquity is so fre- 

 quently mentioned by all their writers " . . . " but 

 the most common of all offerings were pictures repre- 

 senting the history of the miraculous cure or deliv- 

 erance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor." Of 

 which offerings, the blessed Virgin is so sure always 

 to carry ofif the greatest share, that it may be truly 

 said of her what Juvenal says of the Goddess Isis, 

 whose religion was at that time in the greatest vogue in 

 Rome, that the painters got their livelihood out of her." 

 Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not 

 without covert sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his 

 Essay on Prognostications. Diagoras, surnamed 

 the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was 

 thus addressed by a friend : " You, who think the 

 gods take no care of human afifairs, do not you see 

 here by this number of pictures how many people, 

 for the sake of their vows, have been saved in 



