stone was worshipped because it was a forsaken altar or an ancient place of judgment, sometimes because it marked the place of a great battle or a murder, or the burial of a king.’  Here he refers to Pausanias, book i. 28, 5, and viii. 13, 3. {223} In both of these passages, Pausanias, it is true, mentions stones—­in the first passage stones on which men stood [Greek], in the second, barrows heaped up in honour of men who fell in battle.  In neither case, however, do I find anything to show that the stones were worshipped.  These stones, then, have no more to do with the argument than the milestones which certainly exist on the Dover road, but which are not the objects of superstitious reverence.  No! the fetich-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted.  They were the stones and blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetichistic objects of worship, after the anthropomorphic gods entered Hellas.  This, at least is the natural conclusion from the fact that the Apollo and Hera of untouched wood or stone were confessedly the oldest.  Religion, possessing an old fetich did not run the risk of breaking the run of luck by discarding it, but wisely retained and renamed it.  Mr. Max Muller says that the unhewn lump may indicate a higher power of abstraction than the worship paid to the work of Phidias; but in that case all the savage adorers of rough stones may be in a stage of more abstract thought than these contemporaries of Phidias who had such very hard work to make Greek thought abstract.

Mr Muller founds a very curious argument on what he calls ’the ubiquity of fetichism.’  Like De Brosses, he compiles (from Pausanias) a list of the rude stones worshipped by the early Greeks.  He mentions various examples of fetichistic superstitions in Rome.  He detects the fetichism of popular Catholicism, and of Russian orthodoxy among the peasants.  Here, he cries, in religions the history of which is known to us, fetichism is secondary, ’and why should fetiches in Africa, where we do not know the earlier development of religion, be considered as primary?’ What a singular argument!  According to Pausanias, this fetichism (if fetichism it is) was primary, in Greece.  The oldest temples, in their holiest place, held the oldest fetich.  In Rome, it is at least probable that fetichism, as in Greece, was partly a survival, partly a new growth from the primal root of human superstitions.  As to Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions.  The documents are before the world.  As to the Russians,