Gleaners and native lovers of Celtic literature generally ascribe a large share of the decadence to the influence and attitude of the Church in its local testimony. During the greater part of last century, especially in the Highlands, that influence has been such that, had the Dialogues been produced any time within that period, they would have hit the mark quite as surely as in the age in which they were written, if we conceived St Patrick as orthodox cleric and Ossian as the native genius of the Celtic people. But times have changed. The lights and shadows on the canvas have again shifted. Our modern habits of thought are different. Like Ossian, men look askance on morbid teaching, and have no great enthusiasm for unnatural asceticism. The prevailing theory of life, impatient of ethical dualism, objects to the identification of nature with evil quite as much as the bard did. If nature is not evil, it asks, where, then, is the necessity or the benefit of a renunciation which is incompatible with the conditions under which men have to exist? And so, concurrent with the decadence of ecclesiastical ideas and ecclesiastical authority, there is a return to nature; and in many quarters a fresh interest is being taken in the language, literature, and lore of the Gael. And new writers have arisen who breathe the spirit of the race, and voice its longings, yearnings, strivings, free from theological bias. Their medium is no longer the Gaelic, but the English, into which they have carried many quaint idioms, sentiments, and expressions. Indeed it is doubtful if ever the Gaelic will again adapt itself to any great literary work, since the gifted have adopted English as the more comprehensive vehicle. Yet now, looking dispassionately over the vicissitudes of Gaelic literature from the time it was first cradled in the rough bosom of the race, and nurtured by Christianity, we cannot forget the splendid services rendered by monks and Churchmen in the early days and during the Middle Ages down to the Reformation. Adverse periods of obscurantism there have been, blighting enough and painfully retrograde. But for ages the Church figured as the patron of letters, and even in later times there have been enthusiastic literary workers within its pale. In Scotland men like Sage, Macnicol, Smith, Maccallum, Drs. Norman Macleod, Macdonald, Clerk, Maclauchlan, Cameron, Dowden, Henderson, and Macneill; in Ireland Drs. Reeves, Todd, Wright, Stokes, and many others. And taking the influence of the Church at its best, we may surely apply to it, in its relation to literature, the remark of Dean Church in a wider connection: “History teaches us this, that in tracing back the course of human improvement, we come in one case after another upon Christianity as the source from which improvement derived its principle and its motive. We find no other source adequate to account for the new spring of amendment, and without it no other source of good could have been relied on.”