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The matter was decided, scientifically and categorically, and no appeal allowed. The Celts were a people from India. Europeans are all descended from Indians, driven from home by some powerful pressure, a political or religious revolution, or one of those fearful famines which periodically devastate that immense and inexhaustible storehouse of nations.
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At first, we good people, artists, poets, or authors, who generally claim to possess some little knowledge, were rather surprised at such a decision. But the wise men had said so; Bengal and Bretagne had to fraternize; the Brahmins of Benares speak Breton and the Bretons of Bretagne speak Sanskrit. Bretagne is Indian and India is Breton.
Comparative Philology has taught the children of our day, that two syllables which are identical in the idioms of two different races, prove the connection between two nations; hybridism means kinship.
What happy people scholars are! They can converse with people who have been dead these three thousand years, and the grave has no secrets for them! A single word bequeathed to us by an extinct people, enables them to reconstruct that whole race.
But I am bound to ask them another question, a question of much greater importance to myself. What were the religious convictions of these first inhabitants of Europe? I am answered by Mr. Simon Pelloutier, a minister of the Reformed Church in Berlin, of French descent, who has studied the primitive creed of the Celts most thoroughly and successfully. He tells us that these people, before they had Druids, worshipped, or rather held in honor the sun, the moon, and the stars, a kind of Sabaism, which, however, did not exclude the belief in a God, who was the creator, but not the ruler, of all things.