Take one of the most universal symbols of all:  the Cross.  In one form or another we find it all over the world.  In ancient Egypt, where it is called the Ankh, and is drawn as a capital T with a circle above.  There it symbolizes life in the largest sense.  The circle above stands for Spirit; the Tau or cross below, for matter:  thus it pictures the two in their true relation the one to the other.—­The Christian Church, as it grew up in the last centuries of the Roman empire, chose for itself a symbol,—­in which Constantine went forth to conquer.  It was the four limbs of the cross:  simply the symbol of Matter.

But somehow, the Christian Church in the Celtic Isles did not adopt this symbol, or rather this form of it.  It took what is called the Celtic Cross:  the Cross, which is matter, with the Circle, which is Spirit, imposed over the upper part of it.  Now if you brought a man from India, or China, or anywhere, who knew nothing about European history or Christianity, but understood the ancient science of symbolism; and showed him these two crosses, the Celtic and the Latin; he would tell you at once that the one, the Latin, stood for a movement wholly unspiritual; and that the other, the Celtic, stood for a movement with some spiritual light in it.  How much, I am not prepared to say.

One of the chief formative forces in Christian theology was Saint Augustine of Hippo, born in 354, died in 430.  He taught that man was Originally sinful, naturally depraved; and that no effort of his own will could make him otherwise:  all depended on the Grace of God, something from without, absolutely beyond control of volition.  Then rose up a Welshman by the name of Morgan,—­or he may have been an Irishman; some say so; only Morgan is a Welsh, not an Irish name; and evidence is lacking that there were Irish Christians at that time; he was a Celt, ’whatever’;—­and went to Rome, teaching and preaching.  His doctrine was that man is not originally sinful and naturally depraved; he had the temerity to declare that pagans, especially those who had never heard of Christianity, were not by God’s ineffable mercy damned to everlasting hell; that unbaptized infants were not destined to frizzle eternally; that what a man ought to do, that he had the power, within his own being, to do; and that his salvation lay in his own hands.  They translated his Welsh name (which means ‘Sea-born’) into the Greek—­Pelagius; and dubbed his damnable heresy ‘Pelagianism’; and it was a heresy that flourished a good deal in the Celtic Isles;—­his writings came down in Ireland.  The incident is not much in itself; but something.  Not that the Celtic Church of David and Patrick was Pelagian; it was not.  In the matter of doctrine it is impossible to distinguish it from the Church on the continent.  But Pelagianism may suggest that there were in Britain relics of an elder light.