One characteristic of the Irish ascetics appears very clear through all the exaggeration and all the biographical absurdity; it is their spirit of intense mortification.  To understand this we have only to study one of the ancient Irish Monastic Rules or one of the Irish Penitentials as edited by D’Achery ("Spicilegium”) or Wasserschleben ("Irische Kanonensamerlung").  Severest fasting, unquestioning obedience and perpetual self renunciation were inculcated by the Rules and we have ample evidence that they were observed with extraordinary fidelity.  The Rule of Maelruin absolutely forbade the use of meat or of beer.  Such a prohibition a thousand years ago was an immensely more grievous thing than it would sound to-day.  Wheaten bread might partially supply the place of meat to-day, but meat was easier to procure than bread in the eighth century.  Again, a thousand years ago, tea or coffee there was none and even milk was often difficult or impossible to procure in winter.  So severe in fact was the fast that religious sometimes died of it.  Bread and water being found insufficient to sustain life and health, gruel was substituted in some monasteries and of this monastic gruel there were three varieties:—­(a) “gruel upon water” in which the liquid was so thick that the meal reached the surface, (b) “gruel between two waters” in which the meal, while it did not rise to the surface, did not quite fall to the bottom, and (c) “gruel under water” which was so weak and so badly boiled that he meal easily fell to the bottom.  In the case of penitents the first brand of gruel was prescribed for light offences, the second kind for sins of ordinary gravity, and the “gruel under water” for extraordinary crimes (vid.  Messrs. Gwynne and Purton on the Rule of Maelruin, &c.) The most implicit, exact and prompt obedience was prescribed and observed.  An overseer of Mochuda’s monastery at Rahen had occasion to order by name a young monk called Colman to do something which involved his wading into a river.  Instantly a dozen Colmans plunged into the water.  Instances of extraordinary penance abound, beside which the austerities of Simon Stylites almost pale.  The Irish saints’ love of solitude was also a very marked characteristic.  Desert places and solitary islands of the ocean possessed an apparently wonderful fascination for them.  The more inaccessible or forbidding the island the more it was in request as a penitential retreat.  There is hardly one of the hundred islands around the Irish coast which, one time or another, did not harbour some saint or solitary upon its rocky bosom.