|I {093}mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but which is of very high importance in early religion--the sacred tree, with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their general significance in the history of religion, and also from their special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel, who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism. I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because, as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of the God of Israel. All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), {094}long described by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local peasants as _sepolture dei giganti_--the tombs of the giants. In Syria, Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas. Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners; and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and “poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish predecessors. Now, what is the share of such sacred stones in the rise and growth of the religious habit?