ea ————————e 
By the Rev. J. L. Ross. 185: 
doubtedly was handed down to them by tradition; and there is. 
great reason to believe that they expected (like Socrates' in Plato) 
he would rectify all the abuses that had crept into their religion, 
and that he would reign for ever among men. Thus in every 
nation we meet with something of a traditional hope of the coming 
of the Messiah, although some are ignorant of the character he is 
to assume.”’ 
Druidism, as a system, though some of its more innocent prac- 
tices and temple-ruins still linger in our island, was finally abolished 
by the Romans under Suetonius, a.p. 62, owing to a rebellion of 
the Britons, who, goaded by Roman oppression, had taken up arms 
against their invaders. The Druids in a body withdrew to the 
island of Mona or Anglesea, in North Wales, where, after a san- 
guinary conflict with the Britons, in which most of them perished, 
the Romans took nearly four thousand Druids prisoners, and by a 
retributive justice (if the accounts of their barbarous practices are 
true), burned them alive on their own altars. Fires, it is said, had 
been lighted by the Druids in their groves, to consume the Romans, 
had the British arms, as they fully expected, been successful; these 
groves, both in Mona and other parts of England, were cut down 
by their conquerors, and their religion effectually destroyed. Many 
of the Druids had, however, previously removed to Ireland, where, 
and in the Highlands of Scotland, still exist the only pure descen- 
_ dants of the Pheenician colonists and Druids. 
We can only briefly here refer to the high estimation in which 
Druidism was held for a long period in Europe, where it exercised a 
supreme authority over the political and religious affairs of the coun- 
tries where it was established.? The antiquity of Druidism was ac- 
1 Plato, Alcib. ii. 
*The following is a list of the countries where Druidism was established :— 
1, Germans, Gauls, and Britons, of Celtic extraction, 2. Saxons, Danes, 
Swedes, Norsemen, Muscovites, Russians, Pomeranians, &c., chiefly of Scandi- 
navian origin. The Laplanders are supposed to be a Tartar race. 3. Scythians, 
Getes or Goths, Thracians, Cymbrians or Cimerians, Lusitanians, of a mixed 
extraction, Tartar and Scandinavian. 4, Lithuanians, Polonians or Poles, 
Hungarians, Samogethians (whose country borders on Prussia, Livonia, and 
Lithuania): these last-mentioned nations, like the preceding, are probably 
partly Tartars and partly Scandinavians. 
