The best proof of the effect of the new revelation is to be found in that extraordinary burst of enthusiasm which marked the next few centuries.  The passion for conversion, for missionary labour of all sorts, seems to have swept like a torrent over the island, arousing to its best and highest point that Celtic enthusiasm and which has never, unhappily, found such noble exercise since.  Irish missionaries flung themselves upon the dogged might of heathenism, and grappled with it in a death struggle.  Amongst the Picts of the Highlands, amongst the fierce Friscians of the Northern seas, beside the Lake of Constance, where the church of St. Gall still preserves the name of another Irish saint, in the Black Forest, at Schaffhausen, at Wuertzburg, throughout, in fact, all Germany and North Italy, they were ubiquitous.  Wherever they went their own red-hot fervour seems to have melted every obstacle; wherever they went victory seems to have crowned their zeal[3].

[3] For an account of Irish missionaries in Germany, see Mr. Baring-Gould’s “Germany,” in this series, p. 46.

Discounting as much as you choose everything that seems to partake of pious exaggeration, there can be no doubt that the period which followed the Christianizing of Ireland was one of those shining epochs of spiritual and also to a great degree intellectual enthusiasm rare indeed in the history of the world.  Men’s hearts, lull of newly—­won fervour, burned to hand on the torch in their turn to others.  They went out by thousands, and they beckoned in their converts by tens of thousands.  Irish hospitality—­a quality which has happily escaped the tooth of criticism—­broke out then with a vengeance, and extended its hands to half a continent.  From Gaul, from Britain, from Germany, from dozens of scattered places throughout the wide dominions of Charlemagne, the students came; were kept, as Bede expressly tells us, free of cost in the Irish monasteries, and drew their first inspirations in the Irish schools.  Even now, after the lapse of all these centuries, many of the places whence they came still reverberate faintly with the memory of that time.

Before plunging into that weltering tangle of confusion which makes up what we call Irish history, one may be forgiven for lingering a little at this point, even at the risk of some slight over-balance of proportion.  With so dark a road before us, it seems good to remember that the energies of Irishmen were not, as seems sometimes to be concluded, always and of necessity directed to injuring themselves or tormenting their rulers!  Neither was this period by any means a short one.  It was no mere “flash in the pan;” no “small pot soon hot” enthusiasm, but a steady flame which burned undimmed for centuries.  “During the seventh and eighth centuries, and part of the ninth,” says Mr. Goldwin Smith, not certainly a prejudiced writer, “Ireland played a really great part in European history.”  “The new religious