Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

the garment." Clement of Alexandria wrote, "The mysteries of the Faith are not to be divulged to all.--It is requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken." Even Augustine admitted that what "is now called the Christian religion really was known to the ancients." Druidism may, therefore, have had its secrets.

It is well to recollect, as Professor Rhys points out, that "what may seem to one generation of men a mere matter of mythology, is frequently found to have belonged to the serious theology of a previous one;" and that "early man is not beneath contempt, especially when he proves to have had within him the makings of a great race, with its highest notions of duty and right."

No one can deny that Wales--somehow or other, at a certain period, assuredly long after the establishment of Christianity in these Islands, and suspected by many, from philological investigations, to have been about the twelfth century--received a flood of mystical learning, conveyed in Welsh Triads of great beauty, but great obscurity. This mystical learning, conveyed in a Christian guise, is asserted to be a re-statement, in refined symbolism, of those ancient creeds, and associated with ideas drawn from megalithic monuments, as cromlechs and circles.

The Irish literature of the same period in the Middle Ages, though less tinctured than the Welsh with the Medieval mysticism, is not without a trace of it. England, judging from the sudden admixture of religious symbols, previously unknown in the Churches of that same era, was likewise affected. French literature shares the same suspicion, Brittany in particular, and especially in connection with the myths of Arthur, and the Quest of the Holy Grail. Morien is right in placing this French development of Pagan mysticism alongside that of his Welsh.

The Early Lives of St. Patrick, containing many foolish

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