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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
liable to the death penalty, by the mere act of living
and thinking at the command of the sovereign changed
their religion three different times. The popular agitation
furnished a spectacle of national and individual cowardice
that set neither form nor limit to its servility. It is to the
honor of Ireland that not even in the sixth century could
absolutism thus ride roughshod over the national spirit.
Even at that early period the individual in the clan and
in the kingdom, claiming kinship with its rulers, recog-
nized himself as a unit in a great patriarchal organization,
and yielded obedience to the law and honor to the head
of the State, while holding inviolate his personal sense of
freedom and dignity.
3. ANCIENT PAGAN AND MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN IRELAND
Ireland is the only one of the northern nations that was
not first civilized by Christianity and indeed it is one of
the boasts of Irishmen that there has never been a period
in their ascertainable history when they were not a civi-
lized people. The distinctive old Irish civilization grew
out of the same soil and was fed by the same sap that
gave life and birth to Greco-Roman civilization. Its
inner strength and soundness are illustrated by the carrying
forward from a remote antiquity to the age of Greek
and Roman letters the masterpieces of Irish literature
on which the subsequent literature of Ireland levied con-
stant tribute. This was a tremendous feat. It placed
Ireland at a single bound among the literary nations of
antiquity, and in the field of heroic literature side by
side with Greece alone. For Ireland's literature is not
like Roman literature, a reproduction and imitation of
Greek literature, but a parallel growth. In her ursgeula,
no