Whoever of them, whether a private person or a people, does not stand to the award, they interdict from the sacrifices. This penalty is with them a most heavy one. Those who come under this interdict are looked upon as in the number of the impious and criminal. These all shun, avoiding touch or speech, lest they should be hurt by the contagion. Nor to these is justice given if they seek it, nor is any honour shared with them.
Then in the passage following Cæsar describes how strongly organised was the power which the Druids represented and which they had at their back:—
His autem omnibus Druidibus præest unus, qui summam inter eos habet auctoritatem. Hoc mortuo aut, si qui ex reliquis excellit dignitate, succedit, aut, si sunt plures pares, suffragio Druidum, nonnumquam etiam armis, de principatu contendunt. Hi certo anni tempore in finibus Carnutum, quæ regio totius Galliæ media habetur, considunt in loco consecrato. Huc omnes undique, qui controversias habent, conveniunt, eorumque decretis judiciisque parent.…
Above all these Druids, there is one who holds the chief authority among them. To him, if dead, if there be one of the others excelling in dignity, he succeeds, or if there be many equal, by the suffrage of the Druids, sometimes even by arms, they contend for the chieftainship. At a fixed time of year they hold session in a consecrated place in the district of the Carnutes, which region is held to be the centre of all Gaul. Here all, from everywhere, who have controversies, assemble and submit to their decrees and judgments.…
Druides a bello abesse consuerunt neque tributa una cum reliquis pendunt: militiæ vacationem omniumque rerum habent immunitatem. Tantis excitati præmiis et sua sponte multi in disciplinam conveniunt et a parentibus propinquisque mittuntur.
The Druids are accustomed to keep away from war, nor do they pay tribute with other people; they have exemption from military service and a general immunity. Induced by so great advantages, many join their order both of their own accord and sent by parents and relations.
It is not necessary here to follow further these familiar passages in the ‘De Bello Gallico’ or to inquire more deeply into the religion of the Gauls. It is enough that the religion or superstition of the Gauls was sufficient in itself, and sufficiently deeply believed in, to fortify the influence and power of the Druids with the necessary sanction, and to outlive the disintegration which Roman conquest, in spite of its tolerance to tribal religions, must have in degree produced. The testimony of Renan to the deep-rooted superstition of the Breton population, and the lingering presence even to this day of instincts and customs reaching back to a stratum of indigenous ideas underlying Roman and Christian civilisation, shows, as Irish and Welsh legends do also, that feelings of this kind are not subject to sudden change.
And when we try to realise the position and work of the early Gallic or Breton or Cornish or Welsh or Irish churches from the fifth century onwards, we seem to see how their position and work were made possible only by the fact that what was technically called the conversion of a people to Christianity was not after all so great a revolution as one might at first sight have thought.
The missionary monks or priests, it might almost be said, naturally took the place of the Druids in the minds of the people. They had power to shut out the criminal from the sacrifices of the Christian altar, just as the Druids could from theirs. The conversion, such as it was, meant at least that in the belief of the people the spiritual powers were transferred to the priest, and that the old sanctions of superstition naturally followed the transfer. Thereby was secured to the Church something of the same prestige and power which had once belonged to the priests of the old religion.