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led vast multitudes to adopt silently this time-cycle, which—let me once more reiterate this point—was new to them, whether it actually originated in recent or in prehistoric times. We cannot, I think, do more than say that it grew because the plain man believed vaguely but profoundly in the power of the planets. He rose on Friday and Saturday with the belief that these days were somehow under the influence, the one of the beneficent, the other of the maleficent star. He did not know what either could do for him, or what the astrologers said about them, but as other people remembered them, it was well for him to remember them also. And he was confirmed in this view by the belief that that remarkable, if objectionable, people, the Jews, appeared to attach immense importance to abstinence from activity on Saturn's day. This is the only answer I can give. I am not sure that it is a satisfactory one: at any rate it leaves me with a sense of some mystery surrounding the whole institution. One thing, however, is clear. The institution of the week remains to shew us, as nothing else in the history of the astrological movement does, how widely diffused and deeply rooted in the early Empire was the belief in the all-mastering power of the planets.
