_On the pagan side_, the course of development is not so easily traced. To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now impossible; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews: and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire fitted in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the Euphrates, to the Empire's westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep-seated superstition. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of Christianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name. It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact sent thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in literary antiquities of the type of Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the search after parallels, which have received astonishing confirmation in our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the "arch-deceiver in the strange sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices," as the Romanist missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected of him, recognises the continuity of ideas: "_mutato nomine tantum_; Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as 'the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,' and the Αποθέωσις of the Heathen surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes 'by Switzers under a Canopie' is a 'Relique of the Divine Honours given to Cæsar'; the carriage of Images in _Procession_ 'a Relique of the Greeks and Romans.' ... 'The Heathen had also their _Aqua Lustralis_, that is to say, _Holy Water_. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their _Holy Dayes_. They had their _Bacchanalia_, and we have our _Wakes_ answering to them; They their _Saturnalia_, and we our Carnevalls and Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus, we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about _May-Poles_; and Dancing is one kind of worship; They had their Procession called _Ambarvalia_, and we our Procession about the Fields in the _Rogation week_.'"