Nor should we overlook the dark shadows of the picture.  Glory is to the victor, but woe to the vanquished.  The continual warfare between tribe and tribe, between chief and chief, which made every valley a home of warriors dominated by a rath-fortress, bore abundant fruits of evil.  Death in battle need not be reckoned, or may be counted as pure gain; but the fate of the wounded, maimed and miserable, the destitution of women and children left behind, the worse fate of the captives, sold as they were into exile and slavery,—­all these must be included in the total.

Nor are these material losses the worst.  The great evil of the epoch of tribal war is its reaction on the human spirit.  The continual struggle of ambition draws forth egotism, the desire to dominate for mere domination, the sense of separation and antagonism between man and man, tribe and tribe, province and province.

But our real human life begins only when these evil tendencies are abated; when we learn to watch the life of others as if it were our own,—­as being indeed a part of our own life,—­and in every act and motion of our minds do only that which shall be to the best advantage of both ourselves and our neighbor.  For only thus, only by the incessant practice of this in imagination and act, can the door of our wider and more humane consciousness be opened.

[Illustration:  Ruins on Scattery Island.]

Nor is this all.  There are in us vast unexplored tracts of power and wisdom; tracts not properly belonging to our personal and material selves, but rather to the impersonal and universal consciousness which touches us from within, and which we call divine.  Our personal fate is closed by death; but we have a larger destiny which death does not touch; a destiny enduring and immortal.  The door to this larger destiny can only be opened after we have laid down the weapons of egotism; after we have become veritably humane.  There must be a death to militant self-assertion, a new birth to wide and universal purposes, before this larger life can be understood and known.

With all the valor and rich life of the days of Cuculain and Ossin, the destructive instinct of antagonism was very deeply rooted in all hearts; it did endless harm to the larger interests of the land, and laid Ireland open to attack from without.  Because the genius of the race was strong and highly developed, the harm went all the deeper; even now, after centuries, it is not wholly gone.

The message of the humane and the divine, taught among the Galilean hills and on the shores of Gennesaret, was after four centuries brought to Ireland—­a word of new life to the warriors and chieftains, enkindling and transforming their heroic world.  Britain had received the message before, for Britain was a part of the dominion of Rome, which already had its imperial converts.  Roman life and culture and knowledge of the Latin tongue had spread throughout the island up to the northern barrier between the Forth and Clyde.  Beyond this was a wilderness of warring tribes.