ess, the tunbellied
Cabiri; but yet she bore with them, adopted them as workmen, even to
shaping out of them her own Vulcan. Rome in her majesty welcomed not
only Etruria, but even the rural gods of the old Italian labourer. She
persecuted the Druids, but only as the centre of a dangerous national
resistance.

Christianity conquering sought and thought to slay the foe. It
demolished the schools, by proscribing logic and uprooting the
philosophers, whom Valens slaughtered. It razed or emptied the
temples, shivered to pieces the symbols. The new legend would have
been propitious to the family, had the father not been cancelled in
Saint Joseph; had the mother been set up as an educatress, as having
morally brought forth Jesus. A fruitful road there was, but abandoned
at the very outset through the effort to attain a high but barren
purity.

So Christianity turned into that lonely path where the world was going
of itself; the path of a celibacy in vain opposed by the laws of the
emperors. Down this slope it was hurled headlong by the establishment
of monkery.

But in the desert was man alone? The Devil kept him company with all
manner of temptations. He could not help himself, he was driven to
create anew societies, nay whole cities of anchorites. We all know
those dismal towns of monks which grew up in the Thebaid; how wild,
unruly a spirit dwelt among them; how deadly were their descents on
Alexandria. They talked of being troubled, beset by the Devil; and
they told no lie.

A huge gap was made in the world; and who was to fill it? The
Christians said, The Devil, everywhere the Devil: _ubique daemon_.[6]

[6] See the Lives of the Desert Fathers, and the authors
quoted by A. Maurie, _Magie_, 317. In the fourth century, the
Messalians, thinking themselves full of devils, spat and blew
their noses without ceasing; made incredible efforts to spit
them forth.

Greece, like all other nations, had her _energumens_, who were sore
tried, possessed by spirits. The relation there is quite external; the
seeming likeness is really none at all. Here we have no spirits of any
kind: they are but black children of the Abyss, the ideal of
waywardness. Thenceforth we see them everywhere, those poor
melancholics, loathing, shuddering at their own selves. Think what it
must be to fancy yourself double, to believe in that _other_, that
cruel host who goes and comes and wanders within you, making you roam
at his pl