The author of a very interesting article in the Ulster Archaeological Journal (vol. ix. p. 256), brings forward a number of Irish customs for which he finds counterparts in India.  But he forgets that in Ireland the customs are Christianized, while in India, they remain pagan; and like most persons who consider the Irish pre-eminently superstitious, he appears ignorant of the teaching of that Church which Christianized the world.  The special “superstition” of this article is the devotion to holy wells.  The custom still exists in Hindostan; people flock to them for cure of their diseases, and leave “rags” on the bushes as “scapegoats,” ex votos, so to say, of cures, or prayers for cures.  In India, the prayer is made to a heathen deity; in Ireland, the people happen to believe that God hears the prayers of saints more readily than their own; and acting on the principle which induced persons, in apostolic times, to use “handkerchiefs and aprons” which had touched the person of St. Paul as mediums of cure, because of his virgin sanctity, in preference to “handkerchiefs and aprons” of their own, they apply to the saints and obtain cures.  But they do not believe the saints can give what God refuses, or that the saints are more merciful than God.  They know that the saints are His special friends, and we give to a friend what we might refuse to one less dear. Lege totum, si vis scire totum, is a motto which writers on national customs should not forget.

Customs were probably the origin of laws.  Law, in its most comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action laid down[152] by a superior.  Divine law is manifested (1) by the law of nature, and (2) by revelation.  The law of nations is an arbitrary arrangement, founded on the law of nature and the law of revelation:  its perfection depends obviously on its correspondence with the divine law.  Hence, by common consent, the greatest praise is given to those laws of ancient nations which approximate most closely to the law of nature, though when such laws came to be revised by those who had received the law of revelation, they were necessarily amended or altered in conformity therewith.  No government can exist without law; but as hereditary succession preceded the law of hereditary succession, which was at first established by custom, so the lex non scripta, or national custom, preceded the lex scripta, or statute law.  The intellectual condition of a nation may be well and safely estimated by its laws.  A code of laws that were observed for centuries before the Christian era, and for centuries after the Christian era, and which can bear the most critical tests of forensic acumen in the nineteenth century, evidence that the framers of the code were possessed of no slight degree of mental culture.  Such are the Brehon laws, by which pagan and Christian Erinn was governed for centuries.