bathing; the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that
of Diana in the same month; and the festival of All Souls early
in November, that of the world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and
their ghosts at the same season.

[2] See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."

[3] "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of
the rainy season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds
could have been at night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl.
Brit. art. "Christmas Day." According to Hastings's
Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener says that the Feast of
the Nativity was held originally on the 6th January (the
Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced
it to the 25th December . . . but there is no evidence of a
Feast of the Nativity taking place at all, before the fourth
century A.D." It was not till 534 A.D. that Christmas Day and
Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as dies non.


This brings us to the second point mentioned a few
pages back--the analogy between the Christian festivals
and the yearly phenomena of Nature in the Sun and the
Vegetation.

Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have
seen, was reported to have been born on the 25th December
(which in the Julian Calendar was reckoned as the day
of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the Sun);