Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/122

106 it is curious to observe that, while Christian missionaries appear to have made comparatively short work of the greater Celtic gods of Aryan origin, the Church fulminated in vain against the humble worship of wells and stocks and stones. That cult required no well-defined and costly priesthood which could be overturned once for all, and, a little modified, it thrives in some Celtic lands to this day. All that the Church could do was to ignore it for a time, and ultimately to assimilate it: to effect its annihilation has always been beyond her power. We have a good parallel in modern Greece, of which it has been well said, that 'the high gods of the divine race of Achilles and Agamemnon are forgotten, but the descendants of the Penestæ, the villeins of Thessaly, still dread the beings of the popular creed, the Nereids, the Cyclopes, and the Lamia.' The greater divinities of the Celts were undoubtedly Aryan; but to what extent the motley mob of lesser gods and goddesses were likewise Aryan is a question that must remain unanswered, until, at any rate, the ethnologist, the archæologist and the historian have succeeded in placing before us in a clearer light than has yet been done, the rôle played by those ancient peoples who occupied the west of Europe before the Celts first beheld the Atlantic or approached the sunny shores of the Mediterranean.