Mr. Westropp considers that much of value escaped destruction, for Christianity in Ireland was a tactful, warm-hearted mother, and learned the stories to tell to her children. This is true to some extent, but in Britain there are extant many bardic laments at the intolerance with which old ideas were eradicated, _e.g._, "Monks congregate like wolves wrangling with their instructors. They know not when the darkness and the dawn divide, nor what is the course of the wind, or the cause of its agitation; in what place it dies away or on what region it expands." And implying that although one may be right it does not follow that all others must be wrong the same bard exclaims, "For one hour persecute me not!" and he pathetically asks: "Is there but _one_ course to the wind, but _one_ to the waters of the sea? Is there but _one_ spark in the fire of boundless energy?"
In the same strain another bard, in terms not altogether inapplicable to-day, alludes to his opponents as "like little children disagreeing on the beach of the sea".
Although bigotry and materialism have suppressed facts, stifled testimony, misrepresented witnesses, and destroyed or perverted documents, the prehistoric fairy faith was happily too deeply graven thus to be obliterated, and it is only a matter of time and study to reconstruct it. Most of the suggestions I venture to put forward are sufficiently documented by hard facts, but some are necessarily based upon "hints and equivocal survivals".[38] At the threshold of an essay of the present character one can hardly do better than appropriate the words of Edmund Spenser:--I do gather a likelihood of truth not certainly affirming anything, but by conferring of times, language, monuments, and such like, I do hunt out a probability of things which I leave to your judgment to believe or refuse.
[2] _The Lost Language of Symbolism_: An inquiry into the origin of certain letters, words, names, fairy-tales, folklore, and mythologies. 2 vols. London, 1912 (Williams & Norgate).
[3] _Manchester Guardian_, 23rd December, 1912.
[5] "Topographical comment--I will not say criticism--has been equally inefficient. A theory is not refuted by saying 'all the great antiquarians are against you,' 'the Psalter of Tara refutes that,' or 'O'Donovan has set the question past all doubt'. These remarks only prove that we have hardly commenced scientific archæology in this country."--Westropp, Thos. J., _Proc. of Royal Irish Acad._, vol. xxxiv., C., No. 8, p. 129.