the churchyard that was sure to be selected as the nocturnal scene of the unhallowed ceremony. Were the clergy unable to cleanse the yearly wake of wanton dance and song? it was the church itself, by Gregory’s own decree, that became the focus of the riot. The partial survival of the village ceremonies under Christianity will appear less surprising when it is borne in mind that the heathenism which Christianity combated was itself only the final term of a long process of evolution. The worshippers of the Keltic or Teutonic deities already practised a traditional ritual, probably without any very clear conception of the _rationale_ on which some at least of the acts which they performed were based. These acts had their origin far back in the history of the religious consciousness; and it must not be supposed, because modern scholarship, with its comparative methods, is able to some extent to reconstruct the mental conditions out of which they arose, that these conditions were still wholly operative in the sixth, any more than in the thirteenth or the twentieth century. Side by side with customs which had still their definite and intelligible significance, religious conservatism had certainly preserved others of a very primitive type, some of which survived as mere fossils, while others had undergone that transformation of intention, that pouring of new wine into old bottles, which is one of the most familiar features in the history of institutions. The heathenism of western Europe must be regarded, therefore, as a group of religious practices originating in very different strata of civilization, and only fused together in the continuity of tradition. Its permanence lay in the law of association through which a piece of ritual originally devised by the folk to secure their practical well-being remained, even after the initial meaning grew obscure, irrevocably bound up with their expectations of that well-being. Its interest to the student is that of a development, rather than that of a system. Only the briefest outline of the direction taken by this development can be here indicated. But it must first be pointed out that, whether from a common derivation, or through a similar intellectual structure reacting upon similar conditions of life, it seems, at least up to the point of emergence of the fully formed village cult, to have proceeded on uniform lines, not only amongst the Teutonic and Keltic tribes who inhabited western and northern Europe and these islands, but also amongst all the Aryan-speaking peoples. In particular, although the Teutonic and the Keltic priests and bards elaborated, probably in comparatively late stages of their history, very different god-names and very different mythologies, yet these are but the superstructure of religion; and it is possible to infer, both from the results of folk-lore and from the more scanty documentary evidence, a substantial identity throughout