These opposing forces can be detected in working order. What can be more indicative of a dual system of belief than the cry of an old Scottish peasant when he came to worship at the sacred well?--"O Lord, Thou knowest that well would it be for me this day an I had stoopit my knees and my heart before Thee in spirit and in truth as often as I have stoopit them afore this well. But we maun keep the customs of our fathers." It appears over and over again in the lives of early Christian saints who were only just parting from a living pagan faith. Thus St. Bega was the patroness of St. Bees in Cumberland, where she left a holy bracelet which was long an object of profound veneration; and in a prefatory statement by the compiler of a small collection of her miracles, written in the twelfth century, we learn among other things that whosoever forswore himself upon her bracelet swiftly incurred the heaviest punishment of perjury or a speedy death. It is to be observed that Beagas, the French Bague, is the Anglo-Saxon denomination for rings, and Dr. William Bell suggests that holy St. Bega was but a personification of one of the holy rings which, having gained great hold upon the minds of the heathen Cumbrians, it was not politic in their first Christian missionaries wholly to subvert.[445] These rings are, of course, the doom rings of the Scandinavian temples which are so often referred to in the Sagas.[446] Baptism, an essentially Christian ceremony, might off-hand be supposed to contain nothing but evidence for Christianity. It might at most be expected that the details of the ceremony would contain relics of adapted pagan rites, and this we know is the case. But we can go beyond even this, and discover in the popular conception of the rite very clear indications of the early antagonism between Christianity and paganism--an antagonism which is certainly some eighteen hundred years old in this country, and though so old is still contained in the evidence of folklore.