ics of an elder light.

Did some echo of ancient wisdom, Druidic, survive in Britain from
Pre-roman days? It is a question that has been much fought over;
and one that, nowadays, the learned among my countrymen answer
very rabidly in the negative. You have but to propound it in a
whisper, to make them foam heartily at the mouth. Bless you,
they know that it didn't, and can prove it over and over;
because--because--it couldn't have, and you are a fool for
thinking it could. Here is the position taken by modern
scholarship (as a rule): we know nothing about the philosophy of
the Druids, and do not believe they had one. They could not have
had one; and the classical writers who said they had simply knew
nothing about it. It may be useful to quote what some of these
classical writers say.

"They (the Druids) speak the language of the Gods," says Diodorus
Siculus (v, 31, 4); who describes them also as "exhorting
combatants to peace, and taming them like wild beasts by
enchantment" (v, 31, 5). They taught men, says Diogenes
Laertius, "to worship the Gods, to do no evil, and to exercise
courage" (6). They taught "many things regarding the stars and
their motions, the extent of the universe and the earth, and the
nature of things, and the power and might of the immortal Gods,"
says Caesar (iv, 14.); and Strabo speaks of their teaching in
moral science (iv, 4, 4). "And ye, ye Druids," says Lucan, "to
you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the
Gods and the powers of heaven. . . . From you we learn that the
borne of man's ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale
realm of the monarch below." (i, 451 sq,) "The Druids wish to
impress this in particular: that souls do not perish, but pass
from one to another after death." (Caesar, iv, 14) Diodorus
testifies that "among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevailed,
that the souls of men are immortal, and after completing their
term of existence, live again, the soul passing into another
body" (v, 28). Says Valerius Maximus: "They would fain make us
believe that the souls of men are immortal. I would be tempted
to call these breeches-warers fools, if their doctrine were not
the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras"; and he goes on
to speak of the Celtic custom of lending money to be repaid in a
future life (vi, 6, 10). Timagenes, Strabo, and mela also bear
witness to their teaching the immortality of the soul.

I may say at once that