but he seeks relief from a worship so despairful at the shrine of Frigga, or Frea, the goddess of sensuality.
Fatalism and sensuality—this is the evil heritage of the South Saxon race, and it has produced its fruit in a deep-seated melancholy, and in a continual suspicion of God and man. Of their suspicion of man it is difficult to give an adequate idea. It is seen chiefly in the way in which the typical Sussex religionist regards all who differ from him. Instead of trying to enlighten their darkness, he shuns all religious connection with them as persons in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. His suspicion of God is shown in his theology, its great object being to disprove the glad tidings of God's love to the world. From Sunday to Sunday the great work of his preachers is to assure those who have got to believe that God has a particular love for them as individuals that this is still the case. But it is hard work. On the other hand, many who do not attain to this belief have so little confidence in God that they suppose He permits them to be worried by malicious spirits, who bewitch them, frighten them with apparitions, and otherwise torment them.
In the neighbourhood of Rotherfield I went to see a good old man of seventy-three who had lived in the parish ever since he was seven years old. He was in a weak, nervous state, and suffered from sleeplessness. In broad Sussex dialect, very difficult to understand, he told us tales of witchcraft and apparition. One story was of a man who came to see a girl who lived at his house, and how this man had declared that all the cocks and hens in the yard had their feathers turned the wrong way, and how he had seen a great boar-cat with flaring eyes in the hen-roost. This unhappy man, he said, was hag-ridden, Sussex for bewitched. Our informant had not the ghost-seeing faculty himself; but he had a boy that possessed it. This lad from earliest childhood had seen cats when no one else could; still more, on one occasion he had actually seen his Uncle William's ghost walking down the road, the uncle in question dying shortly after the ominous apparition. He accounted for the preternatural power on the part of the boy by his having been born in the middle of the night!
Of the depth of superstition, ignorance, immorality, and
