Blair Collection > Treatise on the language, poetry, and music of the Highland clans

18 THE LANGUAGE
There is no evidence that natural theology, or the DruiJal religion of
Egypt, had ever become the handmaiden of despotism ; but the religion revealed
through man certainly had, first among the Jews, and since then among the
feudal Christians. Indeed, we cannot conceive a state of society in which the
people can be free and their spiritual government a despotism. No free people
ever will submit to a spiritual despotism. A spiritual despotism can make
hypocrites, but not Christians, as was proved by the French Revolution, where
a priest-ridden people proved a nation of infidels. There is no evidence of the
existence of any despotism, until God revealed his will to man through man.
Hence we find from the day that Joseph availed himself of Pharaoh's dream
for the establishment of despotism in Egypt, until Calvin and Knox gave a
representative government to the Presbyterian Church, that the clergy of all
countries and all religions were the deadly foes of civil and religious liberty.
Feudalism, unaided by priestcraft, never could have defrauded and disorganized
the Celtic clans of Scotland. " Prior to the marriage of Malcolm Canmore," says
a clerical historian, " and subsequently to that event, many families of Norman
and Saxon lineage found their way from the northern districts of England into
Scotland, where they settled, and became proprietors of land by feudal tenure. On
the property so acquired they erected fortresses" (to coerce the people.) " These
settlers were probably, without exception, the friends of Christianity, being
favourable to all influences likely to civilize their rude retainers," (or, in other
words, to that exhorbitant power of priestcraft, without which the people never
could have been made to submit to the feudal usurpation.) " Hence," continues
the historian, (who seems quite unconscious of the real motives of the feudal
lords for being, " without exception, the friends of Christianity,") " one of their
primary objects would be the building of a church, in such a position as might
be most convenient for the inhabitants of the town or village which sprung up
in the immediate vicinity, and under the protection of their own castles." The
progress of the "well matched pair," — civil usurpation and spiritual despotism,
—in denuding and making serfs of the people, are indelibly impressed on the
face of the country by these castles and churches ; but when the usurpation was
established, and the submission of the people insured, the castles battered down
the churches, and ungratefully resumed their well won wealth. We thus see that
a just retribution ultimately overtakes the inheritors of unjustly acquired wealth,
however saintly their garb or profession.
The Rev. Dr Blair, in his beautiful Dissertation of Ossian's poems, tries to
account for the singular circumstance that there are no traces of religion in
these poems; but the Druids, whose religion was founded on natural science,
could not make God give a victory to one hero and one army to-day, and to an
opposite hero and army to-morrow. In short, the religion of the Druids could
not be made subservient to the imaginary exigencies of poetry ; on the contrary,
the mixing up of God's name and power with human affairs, would have been
regarded as an impiety in the days of Ossianic ignorance and barbraity.
When the reader shall have acquired sufficient knowledge of the Gaelic to