The early Spaniards were prodigal with place-names testifying to their piety, but these names, in the overwhelming main, were those of saints. Add /Salvador/, /Trinidad/ and /Concepcion/, and their repertoire is almost exhausted. If they ever named a town /Jesus/ the name has been obliterated by Anglo-Saxon prudery; even their use of the name as a personal appellation violates American notions of the fitting. The names of the Jewish patriarchs and those of the holy places in Palestine do not appear among their place-names; their Christianity seems to have been exclusively of the New Testament. But the Americans who displaced them were intimately familiar with both books of the Bible, and one finds copious proofs of it on the map of the United States. There are no less than seven /Bethlehems/ in the Postal Guide, and the name is also applied to various mountains, and to one of the reaches of the Ohio river. I find thirteen /Bethanys/, seventeen /Bethels/, eleven /Beulahs/, nine /Canaans/, eleven /Jordans/ and twenty-one /Sharons/. /Adam/ is sponsor for a town in West Virginia and an island in the Chesapeake, and /Eve/ for a village in Kentucky. There are five postoffices named /Aaron/, two named /Abraham/, two named /Job/, and a town and a lake named /Moses/. Most of the /St. Pauls/ and /St. Josephs/ of the country were inherited from the French, but the two /St. Patricks/ show a later influence. Eight /Wesleys/ and /Wesleyvilles/, eight /Asburys/ and twelve names embodying /Luther/ indicate the general theological trend of the plain people. There is a village in Maryland, too small to have a postoffice, named /Gott/, and I find /Gotts Island/ in Maine and /Gottville/ in California, but no doubt these were named after German settlers of that awful name, and not after the Lord God directly. There are four /Trinities/, to say nothing of the inherited Spanish /Trinidads/. [Pg294]