Irish Nationality

								

government and their ambitions. In the synod the tone of imperial
contempt made itself heard against those marked out for
conquest--Celts "rude and barbarous"--"Picts and Britons, accomplices
in obstinacy in those two remote islands of the world." "Your father
Columba," "of rustic simplicity" said the English leader, had "that
Columba of yours," like Peter, the keeping of the keys of heaven? With
these first bitter words, with the condemnation of the Irish customs,
and the sailing away of the Irish monks from Lindisfarne, discord
began to enter in. Slowly and with sorrow the Irish in the course of
sixty years abandoned their traditional customs and adopted the Roman
Easter. But the work of Columcille was undone, and the spiritual bond
by which the peoples had been united was for ever loosened. English
armies marched ravaging over the north, one of them into Ireland
(684), "wasting that harmless nation which had always been most
friendly to the English, not sparing even churches or monasteries."
The gracious peace which had bound the races for a hundred and twenty
years was broken, and constant wars again divided Picts, Scots,
Britons, and Angles.
Ireland, however, for four hundred years to come still poured out
missionaries to Europe. They passed through England to northern France
and the Netherlands; across the Gaulish sea and by the Loire to middle
France; by the Rhine and the way of Luxeuil they entered Switzerland;
and westward they reached out to the Elbe and the Danube, sending
missionaries to Old Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, Salzburg and
Carinthia; southwards they crossed the Alps into Italy, to Lucca,
Fiesole, Rome, the hills of Naples, and Tarentum. Their monasteries
formed rest-houses for travellers through France and Germany. Europe
itself was too narrow for their ardour, and they journeyed to
Jerusalem, settled in Carthage, and sailed to the discovery of
Iceland. No church of any land has so noble a record in the
astonishing work of its teachers, as they wandered over the ruined
provinces of the empire among the pagan tribes of the invaders. In the
Highlands they taught the Picts to compose hymns in their own tongue;
in a monastery founded by them in Yorkshire was trained the first
English poet in the new England; at St. Gall they drew up a
Latin-German dictionary for the Germans of the Upper Rhine and
Switzerland, and even devised new German words to express the new
ideas of Christian civilisation; near Florence one of their saints
taught the natives how to turn the course of a river. Probably in the
seventh and eighth centuries no one in western Europe spoke Greek who
was not Irish or taught by an Irishman. No land ever sent out such
impassioned teachers of learning, and Charles the Great and his
successors set them at the head of the chief schools throughout
Europe.
We can only measure the originality of the Irish mission by comparing
with it the work of other races. Roman civilisation had not inured its