Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/18

  before being admitted. Disciples of all ranks flocked to them, despite the severity of the probation, tempted, no doubt, by the honours and great privileges attached to the order, amongst which exemption from every kind of taxation and servitude were not the least.

The Druids taught the immortality of the soul, and its transmigration from one body to another, till, by some extraordinary act of virtue or courage, it merited to be received into the assembly of the gods.

Cæsar, in his "Commentaries," informs us that they instructed their pupils in the movements of the heavenly bodies, and the grandeur of the universe. Their knowledge of mathematics must have been considerable, since we find it applied to the measurement of the earth and stars. In mechanics they were equally advanced, judging from the monuments which remain to us.



Of these the most remarkable in England are Stonehenge, consisting of 139 enormous stones, ranged in a circle; and that of Abury, in Wiltshire, which covers a space of twenty-eight acres of land. But the largest of all the Druid temples is situated at Carnac, in the department of Morbihan, in France. It is formed of 400 stones, varying from five to twenty-seven feet in height, and ranged in eleven concentric lines.

It is difficult to say precisely from what source the Druids drew their doctrines, which have a striking affinity with those of Pythagoras and the sages of the East; probably it was from the latter they borrowed them. It was not the least singular of their dogmas, that the earth which we inhabit had passed through—and was still to experience—a variety of changes, but would never be destroyed.

They knew something of botany and medicine, but mingled with the latter certain magical and superstitious practices.

Of the secret tenets of the order, which were communicated only to the initiated, little positive is known.

The following curious inscription, found in the neighbourhood of Metz, proves that the Celts believed in visions, and the phenomena of magnetism:—

Such was the institution of Druidism, on which so many opinions have been expressed. To judge it properly, the reader must not lose sight of the epoch in which it flourished; that cruelty and superstition were, before the Christian era, the common errors of mankind. Would we could add that they had disappeared from the world under a better dispensation!

The sacrifice of human victims was one of the great sins of antiquity. The Romans, with all their boasted civilisation, offered to the avenging gods the blood of their prisoners. It was the triumph of Christianity to abolish such impious rites.

Thus much may fairly be said in defence of the Druids. Unlike the Brahmins of India, they had not the presumption to give themselves out as the descendants of a race divine; none were excluded from their order, to which merit and long study alone gave access; and they held, with the sages of antiquity, that the government of nations belonged of right to the wisest amongst them.

Ancient writers have transmitted but little information touching the morals and customs of the Britons. Cæsar,