Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/247

Rh I say of course nothing, lest the Calvinism of my early training should prove to have made me incapable of forming an impartial estimate; and I need scarcely add, that I am quite willing to leave the conflict of the creeds to be decided by the inexorable logic of natural selection, feeling confident, as I do, that the fittest of them and best calculated to meet the wants of man will survive.

It is right, however, to say that we are not compelled to account for the fact, that druidism seems to have been most flourishing in the western parts of the Celtic world of Caesar's time, wholly by postulating a mixture of race to which it may have been more congenial than to the thoroughbred Aryan Celt: the explanation may partly be, that in the more progressive parts of southern Gaul, the neighbourhood of the Rhone and the Roman province, the palmy days of druidism were even then over. In Ireland, for instance, druidism and the kingship went hand in hand; nor is it improbable that it was the same in Gaul, so that when the one fell, the other suffered to some extent likewise. It would thus seem probable that druidism had here and there begun to lose a good deal of its power and influence during the revolutions, which had resulted in the abolition of the ancient kingship in most of the more important Gaulish communities mentioned by Caesar. This would be the political side of the question; but it had also a more purely religious aspect, and there was a cause at work the action of which cannot have tended to the greater glory of druidism: I allude to the change which must have come over Gaulish paganism some time or other, and the outward effect of which was to make the Gaulish Mercury or