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Gallegico Directory 03
Page 04
Among the other events which occurred during the reign of King Charles the Second, and which tended to connect unfavorable associations with the recollection of it in the minds of men, was a very extraordinary affair, which is known in history by the name of Titus Oates's Popish Plot. It was the story of a plot, said to have been formed by the Catholics, to put King Charles to death, and place his brother James, who, it will be recollected, was a Catholic, upon the throne in his stead. The story of this plot was told by a man named Titus Oates, and as it was at first generally believed, it occasioned infinite trouble and difficulty. In after times, however, the whole story came to be regarded as the fabrication of Oates, without there being any foundation for it whatever; hence the name of Titus Oates's Popish Plot, by which the affair has always since been designated in history. The circumstances were these:
Another of these emblems of joyous festivity which is frequently seen, is a vine, with its branches and purple clusters spreading in every direction, reminding us that in Eastern countries the vintage is the great holiday of the year. In the Jewish Church there was no festival so joyous as the Feast of Tabernacles, when they gathered the fruit of the vineyard, and in some of the earlier celebrations of the Nativity these festivities were closely copied. And as all down the ages pagan elements have mingled in the festivities of Christmas, so in the Catacombs they are not absent. There is Orpheus playing on his harp to the beasts; Bacchus as the god of the vintage; Psyche, the butterfly of the soul; the Jordan as the god of the rivers. The classical and the Christian, the Hebrew and the Hellenic elements had not yet parted; and the unearthing of these pictures after the lapse of centuries affords another interesting clue to the origin of some of the customs of Christmastide.
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