CHAPTER VI .-- --ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL.
When Christianity began to penetrate into Gaul, it encountered there two religions very different one from the other, and infinitely more different from the Christian religion; these were Druidism and Paganism-- hostile one to the other, but with a hostility political only, and unconnected with those really religious questions that Christianity was coming to raise.
[Illustration: Christianity established in Gaul----111] Druidism, considered as a religion, was a mass of confusion, wherein the instinctive notions of the human race concerning the origin and destiny of the world and of mankind were mingled with the Oriental dreams of metempsychosis--that pretended transmigration, at successive periods, of immortal souls into divers creatures.

This confusion was worse confounded by traditions borrowed from the mythologies of the East and the North, by shadowy remnants of a symbolical worship paid to the material forces of nature, and by barbaric practices, such as human sacrifices, in honor of the gods or of the dead.

People who are without the scientific development of language and the art of writing do not attain to systematic and productive religious creeds.

There is nothing to show that, from the first appearance of the Gauls in history to their struggle with victorious Rome, the religious influence of Druidism had caused any notable progress to be made in Gallic manners and civilization.

A general and strong, but vague and incoherent, belief in the immortality of the soul was its noblest characteristic.