It is far easier, however, to overthrow the more public manifestations of a creed than to destroy its inner vital force. Cromm Cruaich’s idol might fall, but his spirit would survive—a very Proteus. The sacred places of the ancient Celtic religion might be invaded, the idols and altars of the gods thrown down, the priests slain, scattered, or banished, and the cult officially declared to be extinct; but, driven from the important centres, it would yet survive outside and around them. The more civilized Gaels and Britons would no doubt accept the purer gospel, and abandon the gods they had once adored, but the peasantry—the bulk of the population—would still cling to the familiar rites and names. A nobler belief and a higher civilization come, after all, only as surface waves upon the great ocean of human life; beneath their agitations lies a vast slumbering abyss of half-conscious faith and thought to which culture penetrates with difficulty and in which changes come very slowly. We have already shown how long and how faithfully the Gaelic and Welsh peasants clung to their old gods, in spite of all the efforts of the clerics to explain them as ancient kings, to transform them into wonder-working saints, or to ban them as demons of hell. This conservative religious instinct of the agricultural populations is not confined to the inhabitants of the British Islands. The modern Greeks still believe in nereids, in lamias, in sirens, and in Charon, the dark ferryman of Hades.[563] The descendants of the Romans and Etruscans hold that the old Etruscan gods and the Roman deities of the woods and fields still live in the world as spirits.[564] The high altars of the “Lord of the Mound” and his terrible kin were levelled, and their golden images and great temples left to moulder in abandonment; but the rude rustic shrine to the rude rustic god still received its offerings. It is this shifting of the care of the pagan cult from chief to peasant, from court to hovel, and, perhaps, to some extent from higher to lower race, that serves to explain how the more primitive and uncouth gods have tended so largely to supplant those of higher, more graceful mien. Aboriginal deities, thrust into obscurity by the invasion of higher foreign types, came back to their own again. For it seems plain that we must divide the spiritual population of the British Islands into two classes. There is little in common between the “fairy”, strictly so-called, and the unsightly elf who appears under various names and guises, as pooka, leprechaun, brownie, knocker, or bogle. The one belongs to such divine tribes as the Tuatha Dé Danann of Gaelic myth or their kin, the British gods of the Mabinogion. The other owes his origin to a quite different, and much lower, kind of imagination. One might fancy that neolithic man made him in his own image.