celebrated in that month; but still the superstition is not extinct, for marriages in May are thought by many to be unlucky now. How vivid and penetrating a ray of light does the fact throw on the persistence, for good or ill, of past, be it never so remote, in present human thought and feeling!

The priests of ancient Rome, making good profit to themselves out of this omen-seeking habit of mind, as the medicine-men of savage tribes do still, discovered, in the entrails of the animals offered up as sacrifices to the gods, the signs propitious or unpropitious to the enterprise about to be undertaken; and the derivation of omens from the flights of birds was developed into an elaborate science, feeble survivals of which are found in the superstitions still lingering in remote country villages with respect to the good or ill luck portended by flights of magpies. How little real observation was at the bottom of omens of the kind, widespread and hallowed as they were amongst all sorts of people in all quarters of the earth, is shown clearly by the fact that the same event which was an omen of ill luck in one nation might be an omen of good fortune in another nation, and that the sight of the same kind of bird was a good or bad omen according as it happened to the right or to the left of the person who chanced to see it. In like manner, when prayers were made daily to

saints in Christendom, with deeper sense of reality

and a more vital belief in their efficacy than exist generally now, or than it is perhaps possible for any one to feel in the modern atmosphere of thought, one saint was invoked as specially propitious to one person or one class of persons, and another saint to another person or another class of persons; whence it did not fail sometimes to happen that the saint who was the patron of one was hostile to another when the interests of the two conflicted.*

Of course, he who had prayed once to a particular saint, and had got what he prayed for, was persuaded that he had got it in consequence of his prayer, and ever afterwards invoked that saint with heart of good hope, notwithstanding that on a hundred other occasions he failed to obtain that which he prayed for. In some Roman Catholic churches at the present day the walls inside are nearly covered with the votive tablets of those who, having prayed to the Virgin or to a favourite saint for the recovery of a mother, child, sister, brother, father, or lover, from sickness, have thus recorded their gratitude for the favourable answer which the event has been.† And so in English

*The Lacedæmonians, according to Xenophon, put up their prayers very early in the morning, in order to be beforehand with their enemies and to pre-engage the gods in their favour.

† And not in Christian churches only. Of a Buddhist temple in the province of Shansi, in China, to which the neighbouring Mongols

churches still, when the country is suffering damage from the long continuance of wet weather, and the harvest cannot be gathered in, and the farmer looks round him in despair at the rain which continues to fall, special prayer is made solemnly to Almighty God, that He may turn from the people those evils which they for their sins have most righteously deserved, by sending fine weather. If fine weather comes at length after the long continuance of wet weather, it is a manifest and merciful answer to prayer; if not, the credit of prayer nowise suffers by its seeming ill success on the occasion.

§ Fallacies of Coincidence in Reasoning.

It might naturally be thought that people of all countries in all ages would not have offered sacrifices and supplications to their gods had not the events often answered the expectations of those who were at the cost and pains of offering them. Propitiatory hecatombs of slain creatures, human and animal,

make pilgrimages in numbers, Mr. Gilmour says, "It seemed to be quite a famous temple, and was hung almost full of its own praises, written on red cloth and silk, the grateful offerings of votaries, who in this way returned thanks for having their prayers answered.” (Among the Mongols, p. 144, by the Rev. James Gilmour, M.A.) All which naturally seemed very absurd and barbarous to a missionary of the one true religion.

offered up in countless numbers on countless altars in all parts of the world, are surely plenteous proof of the existence of gods who have inclined their ears to hear the urgent prayers of mankind. Not so; since the many gods that were thus invoked and propitiated with costly rites and ceremonies and amid the reverential awe of their unnumbered worshippers are now universally acknowledged to have had no existence outside human imagination, and not ever, therefore, to have answered the prayers they were devoutly believed to answer at the time. Their real interest now is as extinct beliefs, not as extinct beings.

Why, then, were they thought to answer prayers? In the main, perhaps, for a reason which operates as strongly now as then as a cause of fallacy in reasoning-namely, the well-known tendency of the mind, so much insisted on by Bacon, to be impressed vividly by agreeing instances and to remember them, while overlooking and forgetting the opposing instances. Those who see proof of the power and goodwill of the gods when they look round on the numerous votive tablets that are so many records of their benevolent interpositions in human affairs, do not remember to ask themselves where the votive tablets are of the vastly greater number of persons who received no answers to their prayers. When the

wicked man, not turning away from his wickedness, is struck down in the height of his evil prosperity, and survives a sad spectacle of social and moral ruin, many good people see the special judgment of Providence in the event; but they do not take notice of a special judgment in the event when the wicked man flourishes and rejoices in the fruits of his iniquity, or when the good man's life, in the height of its beneficent activity, prematurely ends in the protracted agonies of a torturing disease.

So it was with the astrologers of old, who, noting the fortunes of persons born when a particular constellation was in the ascendant, believed they could predict the fortunes of those who were born under the same celestial auspices, although one of two persons born at the same instant might become a prince and the other a beggar, and were never a whit shaken in their pretensions and authority by the multitude of their failures. So it is with the fortune-teller of today, who imposes upon the credulity of the ignorant by the authority of some remarkable instance or instances in which his prediction was verified by the event. So in a signal manner has it been with the observation and use of dreams, for it has not only been an accepted saying that dreams come true, but the opposite saying that dreams go by contraries has also had some vogue; in both cases the remembrance