Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

but the charlatanerie of barbarian priests and the grossest Gentile superstition."

While Professor O'Curry had "no ground whatever for believing the Druids to have been the priests of any special positive worship,"--and Vallencey could say," From all I could collect from Irish documents, relative to the religion of the heathen Irish, it appears that the Druidical religion never made a part of it,"--popular opinion has always been in the other direction. Yet Vallencey would credit Druids with some religion, when he mentions the Druidical oracular stone,--in Irish Logh-oun, in Cornish Logan,--"into which the Druids pretend that the Logh, or divine affluence, descended when they consulted it."

Dr. Richey depreciates the Druid, when writing of the early Irish missionaries: "They did not encounter any Archdruid as the representative or head of a national religion,--they found no priesthood occupying a definite political position which the ministers of the new religion could appropriate." The Welsh Archdruid Myfyr took higher ground, when saying, "This Gorsedd has survived the bardic chairs of Greece and Rome--it has survived the institutions of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Palestine." He declared, "Druidism is a religious system of positive philosophy, teaching truth and reason, peace and justice." He believed of Druids what Burnouf thought of the Hindoo Rishis, that their metaphysics and religion "were founded on a thorough grasp of physical facts."

Morien, his favourite disciple, boldly avows that Druidism, like Freemasonry, was a philosophy, founded on natural law, and not religion in the ordinary sense of that term. So L. Maclean regarded Ossian's heroes "for the greater part cabalistic, and indicative of the solar worship. Phion (Fingal) bespeaks the Phœnician; Cual, the Syrian or Dog-star worshipper, of which Conchulain with his

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