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The city of Naples, which lies amid the vents, though not immediately in contact with any of them, has steadfastly grown and prospered from the pre-Christian times. It is doubtful if any lives have ever been lost in the city in consequence of an eruption, and no great inconvenience has been experienced from them.
As to the undisguised truth, the original history of every interesting spot, we should have had to search for these by ourselves, assisted only by our own conjectures. Modern India does not present a pale shadow of what it was in the pre-Christian era, nor even of the Hindostan of the days of Akbar, Shah-Jehan and Aurungzeb.
They belonged to septs and clans, and each sept would have its Maor, and each clan or province its Maormor or big chief, succession being derived through females, a custom which no doubt originated in remote pre-Christian ages when the paternity of children was uncertain. Being Celts, the Picts would shun the open sea.
Such a system is attested for pre-Christian times already; it was re-activated in the eleventh century and again from time to time, down to the present. Yet the system of land equalization soon broke down and was abolished officially around A.D. 780. But the classification of citizens into different classes, first legalized under the Toba, was retained and even more refined.
Even the plainly evident fact that, while in pre-Christian days the symbol of the cross represented the two sexual powers in conjunction, it has in Christian times come to be considered the symbol of Life as being the symbol of the SON of God, should, moreover, lead us to note that our religion scarcely does justice to the part played in the economy of Nature by the fair sex.
The conviction of the pre-Christian Mystic was that to him was given knowledge of the divine, while the people were obliged to have faith in its expression in images. Christianity came to the conviction that God has given his wisdom to mankind through revelation, and man attains through his knowledge an image of this divine revelation.
And what is thus said of Homer will apply to Dante with perhaps even greater force. With nearly all of Homer's grandeur and rapidity, though not with nearly all his simplicity, the poem of Dante manifests a peculiar intensity of subjective feeling which was foreign to the age of Homer, as indeed to all pre-Christian antiquity.
Nash says it does; all his efforts are directed to show how much of the so called sixth-century pieces may be resolved into mediaeval, twelfth- century work; his grand thesis is that there is nothing primitive and pre-Christian in the extant Welsh literature, no traces of the Druidism and Paganism every one associates with Celtic antiquity; all this, he says, was extinguished by Paulinus in AD. 59, and never resuscitated.
He was a middle-aged man, become prematurely old because he had lived too fast in his pre-Christian days, or so report said. Now he had a somewhat imbecile appearance, for his fingers twitched and when he spoke his mouth jerked up at the corners; also he kept looking over his shoulder as though he were afraid of something behind him. Altogether he inspired Thomas with no confidence.
To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-Christian religions would be 'a large order' larger than I could attempt to fill; but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know, of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to sexual worships.
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