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A nature-worship of this sort lent itself ill to the purposes of a priesthood; and though a priestly class existed it seems at no time to have had much weight among Englishmen. As each freeman was his own judge and his own lawmaker, so he was his own house-priest; and English worship lay commonly in the sacrifice which the house-father offered to the gods of his hearth.
It came with this precious prophet, or whatever he calls himself, who taught her to stare at the hot sun with the naked eye. It was called accepting Apollo. Oh, if these new pagans would only be old pagans, they would be a little wiser! The old pagans knew that mere naked Nature-worship must have a cruel side. They knew that the eye of Apollo can blast and blind."
With this local nature-worship the world was, in early times, thickly overspread; and manifold survivals of it are still to be found even in lands where the primitive religion has been longest superseded.
Taking them in the order we have already followed, we come first to the great nature-worship, of which heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, dawn and sunset, and then the phenomena of the weather, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, are the objects.
This final shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered a relic of Buddha, or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes were deposited, or is a form surviving from the tree-temples of the earliest primitive East when nature-worship prevailed.
Of these we shall find that there are several classes; and it will be necessary to notice the great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these classes of deities was first worshipped by man. The objects worshipped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in four classes, viz. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits. 3. A Supreme Being. Nature-worship.
To the priest of course Carnival is simply a farewell to worldly junketings and a welcome to Lent, but like every other Church festival it is flinging off its ecclesiastical disguise and donning among the people themselves its old mask as a sheer bit of nature-worship.
We do not find in him, perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky: he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength, which is Nature-worship.
These assume the kingdom of Osiris, and a judgment preceding admission to the blessed future; the completely human character of Osiris and his family are implied, and there is no trace of animal or nature-worship belonging to him. How far the myth, as recorded in Roman times by Plutarch, can be traced to earlier and later sources is very uncertain.
It dealt with primitive nature-worship; and it belonged in the class of those that are kept under lock and key by the libraries which possess them as unsafe reading for unsafe minds. Sheets of paper covered with the man's clear, deliberate handwriting lay thickly on the desk. A table in the centre of the room was strewn with volumes, some of a secret character, opened for reference.
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