At their festivals, “men and women lay together in the fields, and behaved as did all other primitive peoples in their religious festivals.... Not until the Christian idea of morality was brought to them did the Celts grow conscious of any wickedness in their old rites. And even then they did not give them up at once. Indeed, to this day their descendants have not given them up entirely.”[203] “The difference between [the] Babylonian cult of Ishtar and the primitive Celtic cult of Bridget was entirely one of degree.... Both were inspired by dread of the same evil, sterility: and both sought to attain one end, fecundity. But one, the Babylonian, was far less primitive ... far less wildly promiscuous and bestial. The Babylonian rites were conducted within the confines of stone temples, not out in the furroughs of the torch-lit fields.”[204] This undoubtedly gave the Babylonians the ethical advantage. And it seems that the Celtic gods and goddesses were not only primitive, but continually kept their followers alarmed lest they (the goddesses) should forget how to become fecund. The ritual in the furrows of the torch-lit fields, “to this day not given up entirely,” was for the purpose of overcoming the deities’ “bashfulness,” Browne tells us, and to set them an example of what was desired. And if the spirit of Paul could have had its way, such a ritual, though perhaps conducted within stone temples, would have been established in Rome! And there it would doubtless have been practiced today--as it is, I gather from Browne, in present-day Ireland! “The spirit of Jesus flickering in Christianity made it at least nominally a religion of ethics,” Browne goes on. “For Jesus, one must remember, had not been in the least concerned with ritual. Like every other great Jewish prophet, he had preached only ethics. And despite all the compromises of the world-conquering Pauls, that ethical emphasis of the teaching of Jesus persisted as a mighty leaven in the church. It gave to the early Christians that gentle nobility which history tells us graced their faith.”[205] When was this? Brown says that “of the life of the first Nazarenes we know exceedingly little.”[206] He gives the year 67 as the date of St. Paul’s martyrdom. Can it be that the early Christians were gentle and noble even after the loose sex ideas and loose theological terms of the great Apostle had been given a chance to begin their deadly work?