But it is on the power of his name in after times that we wish more particularly to dwell. There have been no people who honoured their heroes so much as the Celts. With them valour and value were synonymous terms. Theirs was not a nobility of money, or literature, or æsthetics, or even of territory. Nobleness should be the qualification of a nobleman, and strange as it may seem, it was among the uncivilised Celts of Ireland and Scotland that such a character was properly appreciated. But they held nobleness and heroism to be identical. They seem to have thoroughly believed that cowardice was but the result of vice. A fearless man, they felt, must be a true man, and he was honoured accordingly. Flath-innis, the Isle of the Noble, was their only name for heaven. Allail or divine they applied to their heroic men. To imitate such was the old Celtic religion as it was the primitive religion of most other peoples.
Among all the heroes whom the ancient Gael worshipped there was no name so influential as Fingal's. Through the ages he has been the idol and ideal of the Celt. His example was their rule of justice. His maxims were cited much as we would quote Scripture. To the youth he was held up as the model after which their lives should be patterned, and where Christianity had not yet eradicated the old creed, a post mortem dwelling with him in Flath-innis was deemed no mean incentive to goodness. He was, in fact, the god of the Gaelic people, worshipped with no outward altar, but enshrined in the hearts of his admirers. How far the more admirable traits of Highland character may be attributed to the assimilating influence of the idea of Fingal we cannot decide. That our character as a people has been largely influenced for good by the power of his example we have no doubt. The bards, an order of the old Druidic hierarchy, became the priests of the Fingalian hero-worship. Songs, elegies, and poetic legends formed their service of praise. To induce their countrymen to reverence and imitate so great and glorious a Gael as Fingal was the object of many of their bardic homilies. Taking into account the nature and circumstances of the ancient Caledonians, we must conclude that from position and influence none were more suitable to become their ethical and æsthetical advisers than these minstrel ministers of the Fingalian hero-olatry.
Of course such a faith could not long withstand the more generous and cosmopolitan spirit of Christianity, yet we venture to assert that it was vastly preferable in its effects to some abortions of our common creed. That there was a conflict between the two religions we know. As late as the sixteenth century a Christian ecclesiastic complains that the leaders of Gaelic thought of the period were heathen enough to delight in "stories about the Tuath de Dhanond and about the sons of Milesius, and about the heroes and Fionn (Fingal), the son of Cumhail with his Fingalians ... rather than to write and to compose and to support the faithful words of God and the perfect way of truth."
Down to the present day the name of Fionn is reverenced by the less sophisticated Highlanders and Islanders. That his name will in future be more extensively, if less intensely, respected we may confidently predict. As men's views become more broad and just, and their feelings become more cultivated and refined, we may hope that a superior character such as Fingal will by-and-bye be appreciated. Even now he is widely admired and we begin to read in the signs of the times the fulfilment of his own words:—
When then art crumbled into dust, O! stone;
Lost in the moss of years around thee grown;
My fame, which chiefs and heroes love to praise,
Shall shine a beam of light to future days,
Because I went in steel and faced th' alarms
Of war, to help and save the weak in arms.—Tem. B. VIII.
MINNIE LITTLEJOHN.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] The quotations in prose are from Macpherson's translation.