A single concrete instance will help to make this general principle yet clearer. Boundaries, I believe, were originally put under the charge of local and artificial deities, by slaughtering a human victim at each turning-point in the limits, and erecting a sacred stone on the spot where he died to preserve his memory. Often, too, in accordance with the common rule, a sacred tree seems to have been planted beside the sacred stone monument. Each such victim became forthwith a boundary god, a protecting and watching spirit, and was known thenceforth as a Hermes or a Terminus. But there were many Hermæ and many Termini, not in Greece and Italy alone, but throughout the world. Only much later did a generalised god, Hermes or Terminus, arise from the union into a single abstract concept of all these separate and individual deities. Once more, the boundary god was renewed each year by a fresh victim. Our own practice of “beating the bounds” appears to be the last expiring relic of such annual sacrifices. The bounds are beaten, apparently, in order to expel all foreign gods or hostile spirits; the boys who play a large part in the ceremony are the representatives of the human victims. They are whipped at each terminus stone, partly in order to make them shed tears as a rain-charm (after the fashion with which Mr. Frazer has made us familiar), but partly also because all artificially-made gods are scourged or tortured before being put to death, for some reason which I do not think we yet fully understand. The rationalising gloss that the boys are whipped “in order to make them remember the boundaries” is one of the usual shallow explanations so glibly offered by the eighteenth century. The fact that the ceremony takes place at sacred stones or “Gospel oaks” sufficiently proclaims its original meaning. The idea underlying Christian martyrdom, where the martyr {271}voluntarily devotes himself or herself to death in order to gain the crown and palm in heaven, is essentially similar to the self-immolation of the artificial gods, and helps to explain the nature of such self-sacrifice. For Christianity is only nominally a monotheistic religion, and the saints and martyrs form in it practically a secondary or minor rank of deities.