in towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their
rustic brethren. In every age cities have been the centres and as it
were the lighthouses from which ideas radiate into the surrounding
darkness, kindled by the friction of mind with mind in the crowded
haunts of men; and it is natural that at these beacons of intellectual
light all should partake in some measure of the general illumination. No
doubt the mental ferment and unrest of great cities have their dark as
well as their bright side; but among the evils to be apprehended from
them the chances of a pagan revival need hardly be reckoned.

Another point on which I have changed my mind is the nature of the great
Aryan god whom the Romans called Jupiter and the Greeks Zeus. Whereas I
formerly argued that he was primarily a personification of the sacred
oak and only in the second place a personification of the thundering
sky, I now invert the order of his divine functions and believe that he
was a sky-god before he came to be associated with the oak. In fact, I
revert to the traditional view of Jupiter, recant my heresy, and am
gathered like a lost sheep into the fold of mythological orthodoxy. The
good shepherd who has brought me back is my friend Mr. W. Warde Fowler.
He has removed the stone over which I stumbled in the wilderness by
explaining in a simple and natural way how a god of the thundering sky
might easily come to be afterwards associated with the oak. The
explanation turns on the great frequency with which, as statistics
prove, the oak is struck by lightning beyond any other tree of the wood
in Europe. To our rude forefathers, who dwelt in the gloomy depths of
the primaeval forest, it might well seem that the riven and blackened
oaks must indeed be favourites of the sky-god, who so often descended on
them from the murky cloud in a flash of lightning and a crash of
thunder.