Irish Nationality

								

the querns of the townsfolk to compel them to bring their corn to the
abbey mill. Again, the broad tolerance of the church in Ireland never
allowed any persecution for religion's sake, and thus shut the door on
the worst form of human cruelty. At the invasion of the Normans a
Norman bishop mocked to the archbishop of Cashel at the imperfection
of a church like the Irish which could boast of no martyr. "The
Irish," answered the archbishop, "have never been accustomed to
stretch forth their hands against the saints of God, but now a people
is come into this country that is accustomed and knows how to make
martyrs. Now Ireland too will have martyrs." Finally, the Irish
church never became, as in other lands, the servant, the ally, or the
master of the state. It was the companion of the people, the heart of
the nation. To its honour it never served as the instrument of
political dominion, and it never was degraded from first to last by a
war of religion.
The free tribes of Ireland had therefore by some native instinct of
democratic life rejected for their country the organisation of the
Roman state, and had only taken the highest forms of its art,
learning, and religion, to enrich their ancient law and tradition: and
through their own forms of social life they had made this culture
universal among the people, and national. Such was the spectacle of
liberty which the imperial Agricola had feared.

CHAPTER III
THE IRISH MISSION
c. 560--c. 1000

The fall of the Roman Empire brought to the Irish people new dangers
and new opportunities. Goths and Vandals, Burgundians and Franks,
poured west over Europe to the Atlantic shore, and south across the
Mediterranean to Africa; while the English were pressing northward
over Great Britain, driving back the Celts and creating a pagan and
Teutonic England. Once more Ireland lay the last unconquered land of
the West.
The peoples that lay in a circle round the shores of the German Ocean
were in the thick of human affairs, nations to right and left of them,
all Europe to expand in. From the time when their warriors fell on the
Roman Empire they rejoiced in a thousand years of uninterrupted war
and conquest; and for the thousand years that followed traders, now
from this shore of the German sea and now from that, have fought and
trafficked over the whole earth.
In Ireland, on the other hand, we see a race of the bravest warriors
that ever fought, who had pushed on over the Gaulish sea to the very
marge and limit of the world. Close at their back now lay the German
invaders of Britain--a new wave of the human tide always flowing
westward. Before them stretched the Atlantic, darkness and chaos; no
boundary known to that sea. Even now as we stand to the far westward
on the gloomy heights of Donegal, where the very grass and trees have
a blacker hue, we seem to have entered into a vast antiquity, where it