The means by which religion was supported was by voluntary offerings and tithes, and in this respect we find a similarity with all nations of antiquity. Despite the corruptions and philosophical atheism in which the Druidical religion became involved, candour demands of us that the Druids were in possession of learning as extensive and more useful than some of their Christian posterity, who, from the eighth century to the Reformation, were almost wholly employed in scholastic divinity, metaphysical or chronological disputes, legends, miracles, and martyrologies, and Dr. Kennedy informs us that in St. Patrick’s time no fewer than 300 volumes of their books were burnt, and no doubt the same was practised so long as a volume could be found. By this destruction a wide chasm has been made in the historical details of this country. Julius Cæsar, in his “_Commentarii de Bello Gallico_,” informs us that the Druids inculcated the doctrine of the immortality and transmigration of the soul, and discoursed with the “Youth about the heavenly bodies, their motion, the size of the heavens and the earth, the nature of things, and the influence and power of the immortal Gods.” The misletoe was their chief specific in medicine, and nothing was held so sacred as the misletoe of the oak, which, being scarce, was gathered with great ceremony on a certain day appointed for their general festival. In the civil government of this ancient people capital offenders were sentenced to death, and sacrificed in the most solemn manner. The spoils of war were often devoted to their divinities on the altars of their temples. At the time of the Roman invasion the British Druids exerted their utmost zeal in opposing the usurpation of that foreign power. The invaders on the other hand fired with equal resentment, endeavoured to establish their security by the extermination of the Druidic order, and its priests were sacrificed to this barbarous policy; many fled to the island of Anglesey, and afterwards perished in the flames by the orders of Seutonius, and great numbers were cut off in an unsuccessful revolt of the Britons, under Queen Boadicea, after which the power and splendour of the Druids rapidly declined. No species of superstition was ever more terrible than that of the Druids; no idolatrous worship ever attained such an ascendant over mankind; and the Romans after their conquest finding it impossible to reconcile those notions to the laws and institutions of their masters, while it maintained its authority, were at last obliged to abolish it by penal statutes—a violence which had never in any other instance been practised by these tolerating conquerors.