One or two instances, in which popular belief glorifies the world around us with light borrowed from the days when Our Saviour walked on earth, have been given already. I add another of exceeding beauty which has come before me. In the little town of Malton, in Yorkshire, a few years ago, my friend the late Dr. Dykes, while visiting an old woman during her last illness, observed a spider near her bed, and attempted to destroy it. She at once interfered, and told him with much earnestness that spiders ought not to be killed; for we should remember how, when our Blessed Lord lay in the manger at Bethlehem, the spider came and spun a beautiful web, which protected the innocent Babe from all the dangers which surrounded Him. The old woman was about ninety years of age. I have never met with the legend elsewhere, but it may have originated the Kentish proverb—
He who would wish to thrive,
Must let spiders run alive.
The spider is curiously connected with the history of Mahomet. He is said during his flight from Mecca to have been saved by a spider and a pigeon. While he was concealed in a cave his enemies came up in pursuit of him, but, perceiving a spider’s web across the cave’s mouth and a pigeon in her nest just above, they concluded the place to have been undisturbed and did not enter it. There is a Hebrew tradition to the same effect concerning King David. While flying from Saul in the desert of Ziph, a web, it is said, was spun over a cave in which he rested, and thus the band in search of him were led to believe that no one could be concealed there. Accordingly in the Chaldaic paraphrase of Psalm lvii. instead of “I will cry unto the Most High God, even unto the God that shall perform the cause which I have in hand,” we find “I will cry unto the Most High and Mighty God, which sent the spider that she should spin her web in the mouth of the cave to preserve me.”[1]
It is well known that the Italian peasant maintains the John Dorée to have been the fish captured by St. Peter at our Lord’s
- ↑ Neale and Littledale on the Psalms, vol. ii. p. 14.
