Christians, but even monks and priests, as the last of their clansmen
and vassals. Every where else the lower orders chiefly have furnished
the first followers of Christ, the rich and the great being few at
the beginning, and forming only the exception.

The evident consequence of this well-attested fact is that the
pagan Celts, even of the highest rank, generally led pure lives,
and admired chastity. But there is something more. Morality rests
on the sense of duty; the deeper that sense is imprinted in the
heart of man, the more man becomes truly moral and holy. It can
be almost demonstrated that scarcely any thing gives more solidity
to the sense of duty than a simple and patriarchal life. Their
views of morals being no more complicated than their views of
any thing else; being accustomed to reduce every thing of a
spiritual, moral nature to a few feelings and axioms, as it were,
but at the same time becoming strongly attached to them on account
of the importance which every man naturally bestows on matters of
that sort; what among other nations forms a complicated code of
morality more or less pure, more or less corrupt, for the nations
of which we speak becomes compressed, so to speak, in a nutshell,
and, the essence remaining always at the bottom, the idea of duty
grows paramount in their minds and hearts, and every thing they
do is illumined by that light of the human conscience, which,
after all, is for each one of us the voice of God. False issues
do not distract their minds, and give a wrong bias to the
conscience. Hence Celtic tribes, by their very nature, were
strictly conscientious.

So preeminently was this the case with them that spiritual things
in their eyes became, as they truly are, real and substantial.