Religion is the form behind which the Celtic races disguise their love of the ideal, but it would be a mistake to imagine that religion is to them a tie or a servitude.  No race has a greater independence of sentiment in religion.  It was not until the twelfth century, and owing to the support which the Normans of France gave to the See of Rome, that Breton Christianity was unmistakably brought into the current of Catholicism.  It would have taken very little for the Bretons of France to have become Protestant like their brethren the Welsh in England.  In the seventeenth century French Brittany was completely permeated by Jesuitical customs and by the modes of piety common to the rest of the world.  Up to that time the religion of the country had had features of its own, its special characteristic being the worship of saints.  Among the many peculiarities for which Brittany is noteworthy, its local hagiography is assuredly the most remarkable.  Going through the country on foot there is one thing which immediately strikes the observer.  The parish churches, in which the Sunday services are held, do not differ in the main from those of other countries.  But in country districts it is no uncommon thing to find as many as ten or fifteen chapels in a single parish, most of them little huts with a single door and window, and dedicated to some saint unknown to the rest of Christendom.  These local saints, who are to be counted by the hundred, all date from the fifth or the sixth century; that is to say from the period of the emigration.  Most of them are persons who have really existed, but who have been wrapped by tradition in a very brilliant network of fable.  These fables, which are of the most primitive simplicity, and form a complete treasure of Celtic mythology and popular fancies, have never been reduced to writing in their entirety.  The instructive compilations made by the Benedictines and the Jesuits, even the candid and curious work of Albert Legrand, a Dominican of Morlaix, reproduce but a very small fraction of them.  So far from encouraging these antique forms of popular worship, the clergy only just tolerate them, and would suppress them altogether if they could, feeling that they are the survivals of another and a much less orthodox age.  They consent to say mass once a year in these chapels, as the saints to whom they are dedicated have too great a hold in the country to be dislodged, but they say nothing about them in the parish church.  The clergy let the people visit these little sanctuaries of the antique rite, to seek in them the cure for certain complaints, and to worship there after their own way; they pretend to be blind to all this.  Where, then, it may be asked, lies concealed the treasure of all these old stories?  Why, in the memory of the people?  Go from chapel to chapel, get the good people who attend them into conversation, and if they think they can trust you they will tell you with a mixture of seriousness and pleasantry wonderful stories, from which comparative mythology and history will one day reap a rich harvest.[1]