Is it wonderful that again and again the romantic soul of the Celtic peasantry has risen against the grey dogmas of official Theology, and has expressed itself in terms such as those taken down from the mouth of a Gaelic old woman in 1877: "We would dance there till we were seven times tired. The people of those times were full of music and dancing stories, and traditions. The clerics have extinguished these. May ill befall them! And what have the clerics put in their place? Beliefs about creeds and disputations about denominations and churches! May lateness be their lot! It is they who have put the cross round the heads and the entanglements round the feet of the people. The people of the Gaeldom of to-day are anear perishing for lack of the famous feats of their fathers. The black clerics have suppressed every noble custom among the people of the Gaeldom--precious customs that will never return, no, never again return."[76] There are features about the wisdom of the ancients which the theologian neither understands nor tries to understand,[77] and it is like a breath of fresh air to find the Bishop of Oxford maintaining, "We have got to get rid of everything that makes the sound of religion irrational, and which associates it with bygone habits of thought in regard to science and history". Sir Gilbert Murray has recently expressed the opinion that "it is the scholar's special duty to trim the written signs in our old poetry now enshrined back into living thought and feeling"; but at present far from forwarding this desideratum scholarship not only discountenances imagination, but even eliminates from consideration any spiritual idea of God. To quote from a modern authority: "Track any God right home and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath from which he slowly emerges, first as a _dæmon_ or spirit of the year, then as a full-blown divinity.... The May King, the leader of the choral dance, gave birth not only to the first actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the God, be he Dionysus or be he Apollo."[78] The theory here assumed grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals.