y,--and as an indication of the vigorous Pantheism of
Pre-christian Irish thought.

"We are informed by all the means of knowledge that beneath the
apparent diversity of beings subsists the One Being which is
their common foundation."

"When we are told that God makes all things, we are to understand
that God is in all things, that he is the substantial essence of
all things. For He alone possesses in himself all that which may
be truly said to exist. For nothing which is, is truly of
itself, but God alone; who alone exists _per se,_ spreading
himself over all things, and communicating to them all that which
in them truly corresponds to the notion of being."

I think we can recognise here, under a not too thick disguise of
churchly phraseology, the philosophy of the _Bhagavad-Gita._
Again:

"Do you not see how the creator of the universality of things
hold the first rank in the divisions of Nature? Not without
reason, indeed; since he is the basic principle of all things,
and is inseparable from all the diversity which he created,
without which he could not exist as creator. In him, indeed,
immutably and essentially, all things are; he is in himself
division and collection, the genus and the species, the whole and
the part of the created universe."

"What is a pure idea? It is, in proper terms, a theophany:
that is to say, a manifestator of God in the human soul."

You would be mildly surprised, to say the least of it, to hear at
the present day a native, say in Abyssinia, rise to talk in terms
like these: it is no whit less surprising to hear a man doing so
in ninth-century Europe. But an Irishman in Europe in those days
was much the same thing as an Oxford professor in the wilds of
Abyssinia would be now;--with this difference: that Ireland is a
part of Europe, and affected by the general European cycles (we
must suppose). Europe then was in thick pralaya (as Abyssinia is
now); but in the midst of it all there was Ireland, with her
native contrariness, behaving better than most people do in
high manvantara.

The impulse that made that age great for her never came far
enough down to awaken great creation in the plastic arts; but it
touched the fringes of them, and produced marvelous designing, in
jewel-work, and it the illumination of manuscripts. Concerning
the latter, I will quote this from Joyce's Short History of
Ireland; it may be of interest:--

"Its most marked characteristic is interlaced