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Updated: May 15, 2025
The less noble for the guests. In front of the chiefs high-seat were the high-seat-poles which in the early ages of Paganism in the North were objects of much veneration, and must always accompany the chief if he moved his abode, and point out his new homestead, if he fared for it over sea, by the spot where they drifted ashore, as, when land was sighted, they were thrown overboard.
It could not be otherwise! No other consideration could have induced the barbarian general to abandon such an achievement as the destruction of Rome. With the chance of an assault the prospects of Paganism had brightened with the certainty of a blockade, they sunk immediately into disheartening gloom!
He may not have been either an atheist or a pessimist. But he may have been; that is exactly the rub. He may have been an ordinary decently good man slightly deficient in spiritual expansiveness. On the other hand, he may have been the incarnation of paganism in the sense that Christ was the incarnation of Christianity.
"What a wretch!" said one man to himself, who made a large part of his living by the sale of under-garments whose every stitch was an untacking of the body from the soul of a seamstress. "Bah!" said some. "A hypocrite, by his own confession!" said others. "Exceedingly improper!" said Mrs. Ramshorn. "Unheard-of and most unclerical behaviour! And actually to confess such paganism!"
Every festival day and every extraordinary event has its accompanying song. Though these songs have been modernized in language and form, that they date from the age of paganism is evident from their frequent invocations of heathen deities and allusions to heathen customs.
Fortunately he has written himself down; so has Ramage; and it is instructive to compare the wayside reflections of these two contemporaries as they rove about the ruins of Italy; the first, ardent Catholic, his horizon close-bounded by what the good fathers of Stonyhurst had seen fit to teach him; the other, less complacent, all alive indeed with Calvinistic disputatiousness and ready to embark upon bold speculations anent the origin of heathen gods and their modern representatives in the Church of Rome; amiable scholars and gentlemen, both of them; yet neither venturing to draw those plain conclusions which the "classic remains of paganism" would have forced upon anybody else upon anybody, that is, who lacked their initial warp, whose mind had not been twisted in youth or divided, rather, into watertight compartments.
But whereas they exist here as survivals discernible only to the eye of research and even at the beginning of the Christian era had ceased to be the obvious characteristics of European paganism, in Asia they are still obvious. Age and logic have not impaired their vigour, and official theology, far from persecuting them, has accommodated its shape to theirs.
Riches are good, power is desirable; eating and drinking are very pleasant; praise, flattery, admiration, all these things delight us, and under Paganism were sought and prized. But Christianity said, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Christianity, then, set about in earnest to rescue this soul which Paganism had disregarded.
Not only this, which whispered to him and who shall say that the whisper was of the earth, or of the lower world? 'She is too beautiful to be utterly evil'; but the very defect in her creed which he had just discovered, drew him towards her again. She had no Gospel for the Magdalene, because she was a Pagan.... That, then, was the fault of her Paganism, not of herself.
She had certainly been led into no toleration of moral laxity, and indeed the effect of her husband's cynical Paganism had been to make her dread more acutely any infringement upon moral laws. She had been constantly learning, however, the enjoyment and appreciation of beauty, not merely in a conventional and Philistine sense, but as a pure Pagan aestheticism.
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