say that it would be easy. What concerns us is that we are face to face in Britain with living forms of the oldest, lowest, most primitive religion in the world—one which would seem to have been once universal, and which, crouching close to the earth, lets other creeds blow over it without effacing it, and outlives one and all of them. It underlies the three great world-religions, and still forms the real belief of perhaps the majority of their titular adherents. It is characteristic of the wisdom of the Christian Church that, knowing its power, she sought rather to sanctify than to extirpate it. What once were the Celtic equivalents of the Greek “fountains of the nymphs” were consecrated as “holy wells”. The process of so adopting them began early. St. Columba, when he went in the sixth century to convert the Picts, found a spring which they worshipped as a god; he blessed it, and “from that day the demon separated from the water”.[596] Indeed, he so sanctified no less than three hundred such springs.[597] Sacred stones were equally taken under the ægis of Christianity. Some were placed on the altars of cathedrals, others built into consecrated walls. The animal gods either found themselves the heroes of Christian legends, or where, for some reason, such adoption was hopeless, were proclaimed “witches’ animals”, and dealt with accordingly. Such happened to the hare, a creature sacred to the ancient Britons,[598] but now in bad odour among the superstitious. The wren, too, is hunted to death upon St. Stephen’s Day in Ireland. Its crime is said to be that it has “a drop of the de’il’s blood in it”, but the real reason is probably to be found in the fact that the Irish druids used to draw auguries from its chirpings. * * * * * We have made in this volume some attempt to draw a picture of the ancient religion of our earliest ancestors, the Gaelic and the British Celts. We have shown what can be gathered of the broken remnants of a mythology as splendid in conception and as brilliant in colour as that of the Greeks. We have tried to paint its divine figures, and to retell their heroic stories. We have seen them fall from their shrines, and yet, rising again, take on new lives as kings, or saints, or knights of romance, and we have caught fading glimpses of them surviving to-day as the “fairies”, their rites still cherished by worshippers who hardly know who or why they worship. Of necessity this survey has been brief and incomplete. Whether the great edifice of the Celtic mythology will ever be wholly restored one can at present only speculate. Its colossal fragments are perhaps too deeply buried and too widely scattered. But, even as it stands ruined, it is a mighty quarry from which poets yet unborn will hew spiritual marble for houses not made with hands. ----- Footnote 558: In the year 55 B.C. Footnote 559: _Strabo_, Book IV, chap. IV. Footnote 560: _Annals_, Book XIV, chap. XXX.