far from being miracles and intercessions
attributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devout
to Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at
Saragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception
for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Each
religious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it will
cultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are also
particular places and days on which graces are granted, as not on
others, and the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonic
standards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of a
certain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts and
remissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders.
One man's spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to
another, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but which
is really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like the
atonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead and
living.

[Sidenote: Natural pieties.]

Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequent
festivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships, fields, labours, and
seasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by the
living for the lesser dead--a perfect survival of heroes and penates on
the one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the
other. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints' and all
souls', Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes's and
Saint Valentine's days with their profane associations, a saint for
finding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since all
great and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the
Virgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, with
what more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism within
Christian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found in
the gospel, the mass, the breviary, or the theologians.

Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, for
they rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacy
of your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is
perched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle
of it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivals
associated with them, have entered y