bury, Lindisfarne, and many other monasteries in Britain. For from thence came Cælius Sedulius, a priest, Columba, Columbanus, Colman, Aidan, Gallus, &c." And he also says, that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors repaired from all quarters to Ireland, as to the mart of learning; whence it so often occurs in our writers of the holy men of their time, that they were sent to Ireland to perfect their religious education. (Amandatus est ad disciplinam in Hyberniam), and thence our Saxon countrymen appear to have received the use of letters, as they evidently made use of that alphabet or character, which to this day is in use amongst the Irish. "Nor is there, adds he, any reason to wonder, that Ireland, which, for the most part, does not now shine in polite literature, then abounded with men of eminent virtue and talents, in an age, in which learning was little hected throughout Christendom, when the wisdom of Providence has so ordered it, that religion and learning shall sometimes grow and flourish in one nation, and sometimes in another." Now, as no effect can exist without a cause, it is necessary to question the antepatrician school: If Ireland were not evangelized by St. Patrick, from whom did it receive the light of the gospel in the fifth century, and who were the individuals, from whose hands the Word of God was so productively sown. Not one of them has attempted to doubt the exuberance of the first crops of the christian harvest in this country; but they have the matchless pertinacity, to deny that the effect was produced by the labors of St. Patrick, against the unexcep Dr. Campbell believ tionable assent and concurrence of more than a thou sand years, without hazarding even a surmise, that any other individual had been the instrument of Divine providence in bringing about those extraordinary blessings of its special grace. We cannot anticipate, that a fourth person within the British empire will be so hardy, as to associate himself with the Pyrrhonian triumvirate of Ledwich, Gordon, and Carr. * Mr. Gordon has attempted to enlist Dr. Camped in the bell amongst the deniers of the existence of St. Pa existence of St. Patrick, trick. But we think we should do him real injustice, Civil esti mation in which St. Patrick was holden. were we to marshal him with the triumviri. Had he not believed, that St. Patrick onc eexisted, and that he had taken an active or the principal part in opposing and defeating the paganism of Ireland, he never could have said, that "Druidism was the religion before St. Patrick, who is said to have burnt 200 books of it in one fire." It will be useless to refer to the contents or nature of any of the old Irish annals, as against those, who purely from self-confidence aver them all to be mere fictions and dreams of the monks of the ninth century. Confiding, however, that there is a numerous class of persons taking an interest in the credit and welfare of the Irish people, who differ from the pretended opinions of the sceptic triumvirate, we feel it a duty to submit some few observations upon the general origin, tenor, and tendency of the early monuments of Irish history, which have reached our * Hist. Ire. vol. i. p. 13. Surv. of So. of Ire. p. 224. days. After Loaghaire, and a great part of the nation had adopted the christian faith, St. Patrick was looked up to by them with plenitude of confidence. They not only admitted him to be their director in all matters of religion, but wished him also to be their arbiter in civil concerns. Their conversion to christianity led them not to abandon, but to improve and regulate their national institutions. St. Patrick, as a wellwisher and friend to their nation, was admitted into the assemblies of state, and they paid the highest deference to his judgment. reformed after chris tianity. At the request of St. Patrick, the monarch sum- The annals moned a convention of the chiefs, historians, and antiquaries of the kingdom, in order to purify their records and annals from the corruptions of paganism. They were accordingly produced before this assembly, and a committee of nine was appointed to examine and reform them: viz. three kings, Loaghaire the monarch, David king of Ulster, and Core king of Munster; three christian bishops, St. Patrick, Binen, and Caernach; and three antiquaries or senachies, Dubhtach, Feargus, and Rosa. Their amendments. were approved of by the convention, and were deposited in the public archives as an authentic collection for future ages to have recourse to; and the veracity of this body of records was ever after relied upon by the nation, and was called Seneachas-More, or the Great Antiquity. Many copies were taken of this venerable code of records, history, and genealogies; and by general consent committed to the care of their bishops, to be deposited in their churches for the be Effects of the annals. nefit of posterity. To the multiplication of copies for this national purpose it is owing, that any of them have survived the ravages of the Danes and English, who systematically destroyed whatever they found in public repositories*; such as the Psalters of Armagh and Cashel, the book of Glean da Loch, and several others mentioned in Keating. Some of them appear to have been lost even since his time. It will be obvious to the impartial observer, that purifying by this species of christian baptism, which, under the direction of St. Patrick, the Irish annals underwent, three strong and very important effects were produced. 1. The annals themselves were cleansed and purified from all such passages or allusions to the heathenish or idolatrous system of religion (if any) as broke in upon the purity of evangelical morality, tended to provoke or countenance vice, or in any manner directly or indirectly derogated from the worship and homage due exclusively to Godt. 2. These new, 2 Keat. p. 19. We have before remarked, that the ancient Irish annals being free from the gross obscenities and horrors with which the corrupt idolatry of the Grecian and other nations polluted their religious rites, afforded a strong argument for the high antiquity of their religion, as proving the preexistence of the purer and therefore earlier institutions. Such Diodorus, the Sicilian, 1. v. c. 1. informs us, was the religious practice of his own country in the annual celebration of the feast of Ceres. "It is the custom amongst them, during all these ten days, to use obscene and filthy language in their converse with one another; because the goddess being cast into the dumps of melancholy for the loss of her daughter, is put to the smile, they say, æra. chastened, and reformed copies of the national annals being copied or recopied with omissions and amendments agreed upon in a public assembly, debarass the antiquarian of all the difficulties of proving the particular method by which their earliest records were preserved and transmitted down to the fifth age of the christian From that time, there is obviously no more difficulty in proving the authenticity of Irish manuscripts, than any other of equal or elder date before the invention of printing. 3. This emendation and multiplication of the annals readily account not only for the preservation of several copies in the hands of individuals, but for the christianized or unpaganized form in which, to the severe archaiological critic, they may appear. proofs of The extent of our attempt is to prove, that the Irish Internal are descended from a race of Scythians, and that a long the authen succession of princes of the Scythian dynasty conti- ticity of nued to govern them from 1300 years before the nals. by smutty discourse." Herodotus (Euterpe li.) says, he was informed, that although his countrymen had been taught many circumstances of religious worship from Egypt, it was from the Pelasgians they had learned to construct their figure of Mercury in a manner (too indecent even for a christian to mention). The same author adds, that of the truth of this, whoever has been initiated in the Cabyrian mysteries, which the Samothracians use, and learned of the Pelasgi, will be necessarily convinced; for the Pelasgians, before they lived near the Athenians, inhabited Samothracia, and taught the people of that country their mysteries. It would be endless and indecent to particularize the objects of stimulation to the grossest carnality, which these depraved idolaters exhibited in their solemn processions and other ceremonies of religion. these an |