This absence of historical evidence respecting Phœnician intercourse with Britain, supposing such intercourse to have existed, might have been in some measure explained—and not as the Privy Council explained the Ornaments Rubric of the Church of England, by arguing that omission implies prohibition—by assuming that the source of the tin supply was kept secret, like that of amber, by the traders in that commodity. It is the fact that no vestige of these Semitic navigators has been found either in Gaul or in Britain, which decisively excludes the supposition that they ever visited those countries. Dr. Birch in giving his judgment upon the bronze bull found in the garden of St. Just Vicarage states it as his conviction that no object has yet been found in Britain which can be satisfactorily identified with the Phœnicians,[22] and M. Déchelette is equally emphatic respecting the absence of similar objects in Gaul.[23] What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation, namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phœnicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of the Celtic religion. From Julius Cæsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods, the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury, patron of arts and crafts. Mars, Apollo, Minerva and Dis Pater were represented in the Celtic system, but it is not easy to equate them satisfactorily. After the Roman conquest the Britons followed the custom of other subject races and identified their gods with those of Olympus. Some of their gods found no corresponding analogue, like Nodens, whose temple overlooked the Severn; others again were purely local and patronal. During the three centuries while Britain remained a province of the Empire the Romanisation of the native religion had free scope, the spread of Christianity meanwhile striving with indifferent success to keep pace with it. “The larger half of the altars and shrines, discovered in Britain are simply set up to honour the ordinary gods of the Roman world.”[24] Among these latter were many strange divinities, who in origin were neither Celtic nor Roman, but were those of alien races led to Britain by the hope of profitable traffic or by compulsory military service. Mithras, for example, whose worship was introduced at Rome under the Emperors, found in this way a place in the British pantheon. There is no evidence to show that either nature worship or sun worship was the dominant religion of the Celts either before, during or after the Roman occupation. It is, of course, possible to say of the Romans that they practised both, but it is an abuse of language to say that they were either sun worshippers like the Egyptians or nature worshippers like the Phœnicians. The same holds good of the Celts.