Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

Idol' Worship.
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struck many inquirers.
Meyrick's Dniidical Religion during
the residence of the Romans, points to this strange unic^n
in Britain. It was his opinion that " at the commencement
of the fourth century, the Druids felt a common cause with
the Roman priests in the extermination of Christianity."
Bergmann detected the same influence in Snorrc's Scandinavian
Fascination of Gjilfi. He separated the two
elements for us. Leflocq remarked the mixture in the
"transferring the gods themselves, and placing in the
mouth of Odin an echo of the language of Moses." He
might well say, "We are surprised to find the teaching
of Genesis, and the morals of the Evangelists, in a book
of the Eddas." Many may be equally surprised at the
same in the MSS. of Erin.
"The Druids and Bards of these far-reaching bardic
times," says Mrs. Bryant, "were practically heretics with
respect to the more ancient forms of religious idea, which
linger without meaning in the Irish peasants' tenacious
memory, or adhere to his habits by the same persistence
of conservative instinct."
While the cultured Egyptians, Assyrians, Hindoos, Jews,
and Greeks, bowed to other gods than the First Cause,
no Irishman need be astonished at a similar weakness in
his half-civilized ancestors. It might be that the moral
infirmities of the former were greater than th()se in the
men and women of old Erin.
IDOL-WORSHIP.
Some Irish writers, from a spirit of patriotism, have
expressed the opinion that, though English, J-rcnch,
Germans, &c. may have bowed before idols, their countrymen
had never been subject to that error.