religions in like manner may be pardoned for desiring to express in tabular form the successive stages through which doctrines and rites have passed; have been developed, arrested, modified, governed and conditioned. But neither the genealogist nor the religious philosopher can be pardoned for mistaking a collateral for a direct ancestor. The Christian Church has, with generous and ready welcome, received into her bosom all that could produce credentials of kinship, holding nothing as common or unclean, however unworthy its associations and however perverted its use in the past. Painting, music, poetry, drama, philosophy, architecture, ritual, organisation, each has found a place and received a fresh consecration as the result of its admission to the embrace of the true mother of them all. Only one barrier has she interposed—the barrier of heresy. She has always insisted that the postulant’s real intentions should be clearly known. By sacrament, creed, and confession she has exercised every precaution to secure peace within her sacred walls. She has sacrificed popularity, endured persecution, incurred hatred in order that all her children should share the same affections, should speak the same things and think the same thoughts. This has ever been and is still her great offence, her unpardonable sin, in the eyes of those outside her communion, viz. that she has been so uncompromisingly true to herself. For this reason it might have been thought superfluous, or at any rate a more or less academic matter, to discuss the origin of her symbolism and its affinities. The human mind, however, almost inevitably, refuses to admit the appropriateness of a newly imported symbol unless its past associations are free from suspicion. Not only so, the student of religions obsessed with the superlative value of resemblance and coincidence, is apt to suppose that if he can show that the paraphernalia of Christian worship approximately resembles that of some pagan religion he has proved identity of intention and belief. By way of reply it would be possible to argue, with greater force and to better purpose, that historically it can be shown that Christian worship would be, at this time, fuller, richer, more ornate, more attractive and possibly not less true to its supreme purpose if larger use had been made of the common sources of religious ceremonial. The history of heresy is, however, a sufficient refutation of the main contention. An examination of some particular forms which the pagan theory has assumed in relation to Cornwall will be given later on. ----- Footnote 3: R. A. Courtney, _The Hill and the Circle_, p. 15. Footnote 4: Between the years 1854 and 1930, inclusive, Little Easter occurs once—on the 2nd of May, 1886. Footnote 5: Quoted in the _Parochial History of Cornwall_, iii., 175. Footnote 6: