Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

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Old Irish
Religions.
To seek things beyond this is of no profit to man,
and they transcend the Hmits of his faculties." Not
a few learned men of our day are satisfied with Pliny's
principles.
That Nature worship is a natural impulse, has been
well illustrated in a pretty story told of a little English
girl, whose father was expected home from sea, and who
was seen to take up some water from a basin near her,
and say, " Beautiful water ! send home my father here."
We have a right to assume that our island races, existing
in the country long before the arrival of Celts in the west,
did indulge in Nature worship, and continued to do so
long after they came to these shores. Even Canute, at
the end of a thousand years after Christ, found occasion
to say, that " they worship heathen gods, and the sun or
the moon, fire or rivers, water, wells or stones, or forest
trees of any kind."
Baron d'Holbach said, "The word
Gods has been used
to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the
effects he (man) witnessed." And Dormer's Origin of
Primitive Superstitions declared that, "If monotheism had
been an original doctrine, traces of such a belief would
have remained among all peoples." Lubbock considered
the Andaman Islanders "have no idea of a Supreme
Being." Professor Jodl talks of " the day on which man
began to become God." Dr. Carus, while afiirming that
" the anthropomorphic idol is doomed before the tribunal
of science," says, "The idea of God is and always has been
a moral idea."
Pictet observes, " There existed very anciently in
Ireland
a particular worship, which, by the nature of its doctrines,
by the character of its symbols, by the names even of its
gods, lies near to that religion
of the Cabirs of Samothracia,
emanating probably from Phoenicia." He thought the