or Stones as they would at altars, or offer candles or gifts, as if any divinity resided there capable of conferring good or evil.[1]
Lastly, a decree of Charlemagne, dated Aix-la-Chapelle in 789, utterly condemns and execrates before God Trees, Stones, and Fountains, which foolish people worship.[2]
Even as late as in the time of Canute the Great, there is a statute forbidding the barbarous adoration of the Sun and Moon, Fire, Fountains, Stones, and all kinds of Trees and Wood.[3]
The above which are taken from Keysler[4] are not all he quotes, nor certainly all that could be added, if it were worth while, from other sources; but they are sufficient to show that, from Toledo to Aix-la-Chapelle—and from the departure of the Romans till the tenth, or probably the eleventh century—the Christian priesthood waged a continuous but apparently ineffectual warfare against the worship of Stones, Trees, and Fountains. The priests do not condescend to tell us what the forms of the Stones were which these benighted people worshipped, whether simple menhirs or dolmens, or "grottes des fées," nor why they worshipped them; whether they considered them emblems of some unnamed and unknown God, or memorials of deceased ancestors, in whose honour they lighted candles, and whom they propitiated with offerings. Nor do they tell us what the form of that worship was; they did not care, and perhaps did not know. Nor do we; for, except an extreme veneration for their dead, and a consequent ancestral worship,[5] mixed with a strange adoration of Stones, Trees, and Fountains, we do not know now what the religion was of these rude people. The testimony of these edicts is, therefore, not quite so
- ↑ Si aliqais vota ad arbores, vel fontes, vel ad Lapides quosdam, quasi ad altaria, faciat aut ibi candelam, seu quolibet munus deferet velut ibi quoddam Numen sit quod bonum aut malum possit inferre.—Baluz, 1. 2, p. 210.
- ↑ Item de arboribus vel Petris vel fontibus ubi aliqui stulti luminaria vel aliquas observationes faciunt omnino mandamus, ut iste pessimus usus et deo execrabilis ubicunque iuvenitur tolletur et distruatur.—Baluz, t. i. p. 235.
- ↑ Barbara est autem adoratio, sive quas idola (puta gentium divos), Solem,Lunam, Ignem, Profluentem, Fontes, Saxa, cujusque generis arbores lignam coluerunt.—Keysler, 'Antiquitates Septemtrion.' (Hanoveræ, 1720), p. 18. He quotes also a canon of Edgar (967) to the same effect.
- ↑ 'Ant. Sept.' chap. ii.
- ↑ Laing in his wrath seems to have, by accident, very nearly guessed the truth, when, refuting the authenticity of Ossian, he accuses Macpherson of "having rendered the Highlanders a race of unheard-of infidels, who believed in no Gods but the ghosts of their fathers."
