We shall notice in later chapters the remnants of other pagan institutions which the Greek Church has harboured--an oracle established in a Christian chapel and served by a priest--a church-festival at which sacrifice is done and omens are read--the survival of ancient ‘mysteries’ in the dramatic celebration of Good Friday and Easter. For the present enough has been said to show that, even within the domain of what is nominally Christian worship, the peasant of to-day in his conception of the higher powers and in his whole attitude towards them remains a polytheist and a pagan. And as in this aspect of religion, so in that other which concerns men’s care for the dead and their conception of the future life, the persistence of pagan beliefs and customs is constantly manifest. The ancient funeral usages are undisturbed; and in the dirges which form part of them the heaven and the hell of Christianity seem almost unknown: ‘the lower world’ (ὁ κάτω κόσμος), over which rules neither God nor the Devil but Charon, is the land to which all men alike are sped. But there is no need to dilate upon these matters yet. It is clear enough already, I hope, that the fact of Greece being nominally a Christian country should not preclude the hope of finding there instructive survivals of paganism. The Church did not oust her predecessor. By a policy of conciliation and compromise she succeeded indeed in imposing upon Hellenic religion the name of Christianity and the Christian code of morality and all the external appanages of Christian worship: but in the essentials of religion proper she deferred largely to the traditional sentiments of the race. She utilised the sanctuaries which other associations had rendered holy; she permitted or adopted as her own the methods by which men had approached and entreated other gods than hers; she condoned polytheism by appropriating the shrines of gods whom men had been wont to worship to the service of saints whom they inevitably would worship as gods instead; and even so she failed to suppress altogether the ejected deities. The result is that for the peasant Christianity is only a part of a larger scheme of religion. To the outside observer it may appear that there are two distinct departments of popular religion, the one nominally Christian, devoted to the service of God and the Saints, provided with sanctuaries and all the apparatus of worship, served by a regular priesthood, limited by dogma and system; the other concerned with those surviving deities of pre-Christian Greece to whom we must next turn, free in respect of its worship alike from the intervention of persons and the limitations of place, obedient only to a traditional lore which each may interpret by his own feelings and augment by his own experience. But the peasant seems hardly sensible of any such contrast. His Christian and his pagan deities consort amicably together; prayer and vow and offering are made to both, now to avert