Because of their isolated position, or for some cause at present unknown, these people do not seem to have degenerated into a nation of sensualists. It is true they had departed a long distance from the early conditions of mankind under which altruism and the abstract principle of Light or Wisdom were worshipped under the form of a Virgin Mother and her child, but they never wholly rejected the female element in their god-idea, nor never, so far as known, attempted to degrade womanhood. Women were numbered among their legislators, at the same time that they officiated as educators and priestesses. In fact wherever the Druidical order prevailed women exerted a powerful influence in all departments of human activity. Among the Germans, Valleda, a Druidess, was for ages worshipped as a deity. It is recorded that St. Bridget planted a monastery for women at Kildare and entrusted to its inmates the keeping of the sacred fire, and that in later times the Asiatic missionaries founded there a female monkish order. After the establishment of Western Christianity, however, no woman was permitted to enter into the monasteries, and we are assured that this ridiculous affectation of purity was extended even to the grave. During the earlier ages of Christianity, in many portions of Ireland there were cemeteries for men and women distinct from each other. "It had been a breach of chastity for monks and nuns to be interred within the same enclosure. They should fly from temptations which they could not resist." Although volumes have been written to prove that Christianity was carried to Britain by Paul, and although the energies of scores of Romish writers have been employed in attempting to prove that Ireland was in heathen darkness prior to its conversion by the priests of the Romish Church, yet these efforts so vigorously put forward seem only to strengthen the evidence going to show that the Christianity of the British Isles antedates that of either Paul or Rome. According to Scripture, Claudia, the wife of the Senator Pudens of Britain, was a Christian,(151) as was also Graecina, the wife of Plautus, who was governor of Britain in the first century. The latter, it is related, was accused before the Roman senate of "practicing some foreign superstition." Although Lingard, in his History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, has endeavored to annul the force of the evidence which places two Christian women from Britain in Rome during the first century of our era, he is nevertheless constrained to use the following language: "We are, indeed, told that history has preserved the names of two British females, Claudia and Pomponia Graecina, both of them Christians, and both living in the first century of our era."(152) 151) 2 Timothy, iv., 21. 152) Vol. i., p. 1.