Speaking of that extremely remote epoch when the twilight and mists of morning shed dim-looming shapes and flickering half lights about the path of our scarcely awakened race, _The Athenæum_ a year or two ago remarked: "No wonder that to such purblind eyes men appear as trees, and trees as men--Balder the Beautiful as the mystic oak, and the oak as Balder". This passage forms part of a congratulation that the work of Sir James Frazer is now complete, and that _The Golden Bough_ "has at length carried us forward into broad daylight". I have studied the works of Sir James Frazer in the hope of finding therein some insight as to the origin and why of custom, but I have failed to perceive the broad daylight of _The Athenæum's_ satisfaction. One might lay down _The Golden Bough_ without a suspicion that our purblind ancestors ever had a poetic thought or a high and beautiful ideal, and it is probable that scholarship will eventually arraign Sir James Frazer for this _suggestio falsi_. In the meanwhile it should hardly be necessary to enter a _caveat_ against the popular idea that we are now "in broad daylight". The value of _The Golden Bough_ lies largely in the evidence therein adduced of what may be termed universal ritual. But all ritual must have originated from ideas, and these original ideas do not seem to have entered the horizon of Sir James Frazer's speculations. What reason does he suppose lurked necessarily behind, say, the sacred fire being kindled from _three_ nests in _three_ trees, or by _nine_ men from _nine_ different kinds of wood? And why do the unpleasant Ainos scrupulously kill their sacred bear by _nine_ men pressing its head against a pole? It is now the vogue to resolve every ancient ceremony into a magic charm for producing fire, or food, or rain, or what not, and there is very little doubt that magic, or sacred ceremonies, verily sank, in many instances, to this melancholy level. But, knowing what history has to tell us of priestcraft, and judging the past from the present, is it not highly likely that the primitive divine who found his tithes and emoluments diminishing from a laxity of faith would spur the public conscience by the threat that _unless_ sacred ceremonies were faithfully and punctually performed the corn would not flourish and the rain would either overflow or would not fall?[79]