Irish Nationality

								

the monks of Iona passed men ran to be signed by their hand and
blessed by their voice. Their missionaries wandered on foot over
middle England and along the eastern coast and even touched the
Channel in Sussex. In 662 there was only one bishop in the whole of
England who was not of Irish consecration, and this bishop, Agilberct
of Wessex, was a Frenchman who had been trained for years in Ireland.
The great school of Malmesbury in Wessex was founded by an Irishman,
as that of Lindisfarne had been in the north.
For the first time also Ireland became known to Englishmen. Fleets of
ships bore students and pilgrims, who forsook their native land for
the sake of divine studies. The Irish most willingly received them
all, supplying to them without charge food and books and teaching,
welcoming them in every school from Derry to Lismore, making for them
a "Saxon Quarter" in the old university of Armagh. Under the influence
of the Irish teachers the spirit of racial bitterness was checked, and
a new intercourse sprang up between English, Picts, Britons, and
Irish. For a moment it seemed as though the British islands were to be
drawn into one peaceful confederation and communion and a common
worship bounded only by the ocean. The peace of Columcille, the
fellowship of learning and of piety, rested on the peoples.
Columcille had been some dozen years in Iona when Columbanus (c.
575) left Bangor on the Belfast Lough, leading twelve Irish monks clad
in white homespun, with long hair falling on their shoulders, and
books hanging from their waists in leathern satchels. They probably
sailed in one of the merchant ships trading from the Loire. Crossing
Gaul to the Vosges Columbanus founded his monastery of Luxeuil among
the ruined heaps of a Roman city, once the meeting-place of great
highways from Italy and France, now left by the barbarians a
wilderness for wild beasts. Other houses branched out into France and
Switzerland. Finally he founded his monastery of Bobio in the
Apennines, where he died in 615.
A stern ascetic, aflame with religious passion, a finished scholar
bringing from Ireland a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, of
rhetoric, geometry, and poetry, and a fine taste, Columbanus battled
for twenty years with the vice and ignorance of a half-pagan
Burgundy. Scornful of ease, indifferent to danger, astonished at the
apathy of Italy as compared with the zeal of Ireland in teaching, he
argued and denounced with "the freedom of speech which accords with
the custom of my country." The passion of his piety so awed the
peoples, that for a time it seemed as if the rule of Columbanus might
outdo that of St. Benedict. It was told that in Rome Gregory the Great
received him, and as Columbanus lay prostrate in the church the Pope
praised God in his heart for having given such great power to so small
a man. Instantly the fiery saint, detecting the secret thought, rose
from his prayer to repudiate the slight: "Brother, he who depreciates