IMAGES AND NAMES. 121

aries have remarked this difference in the views of more and
less intelligent members of the same tribe ; and it is emphati-
cally true of a large part of Christendom, that the images and
pictures, which, to the more instructed, serve merely as a help
to realise religious ideas and to suggest devotional thoughts,
are looked upon by the uneducated and superstitious crowd as
beings endowed not only with a sort of life, but with miraculous
influences. 1

The line between the cases in which the connexion between
object and figure is supposed to be real, and those in which it is
known to be imaginary, is often very difficult to draw. Thus
idols and figures of saints are beaten and abused for not granting
the prayers of their worshippers, which may be a mere expression
of spite towards their originals, but then two rival gods may be
knocked together when their oracles disagree, that the one which
breaks first may be discarded, and here a material connexion
must certainly be supposed to exist. To the most difficult class
belong the symbolic sacrifices of models of men and animals in
Italy and Greece, and the economical paper-offerings of Eastern
Asia. The Chinese perform the rite of burning money and
clothes for the use of the dead ; but the real things are too
valuable to be wasted by a thrifty people, so paper figures do
duty for them. Thus they set burning junks adrift as sacrifices
to get a favourable wind, but they are only paper ones. Perhaps
the neatest illustration of this kind of offerings, and of the state
of mind in which the offerer makes them, is to be found in Hue
and Gabet's story of the Tibetan lamas, who sent horses flying
from the mountain-top in a gale of wind, for the relief of worn-
out pilgrims who could get no further on their way. The horses
were bits of paper, with a horse printed on each, saddled, bridled,
and galloping at full speed. 3

Hanging and burning in effigy is a proceeding which, in
civilized countries at any rate, at last comes fairly out into pure
symbolism. 