says M. de Montalembert in his “Moines d’Occident,” “ne furent done autre chose a vrai dire qui des clans, reorganises sous une forme religieuse.”  New clans, that is to say, cut out of the old ones, their fealty simply transferred from a chief to an abbot, who was almost invariably in the first instance of chieftain blood.  “Le prince, en se faisant moine, devenait naturellement abbe, et restait ainsi dans la vie monastique, ce qu’il avait ete dans la vie seculiere le chef de sa race et de son clan.”

There was thus nothing to jar with that sense of continuity, that inborn love of the past, of old ways, old habits, old modes of thought which made and still makes an Irishman—­be he never so pronounced a republican—­the deepest at heart of Conservatives.  Whereas every later change of faith which has been endeavoured to be forced upon the country has met with a steady and undeviating resistance, Christianity, the greatest change of all, seems to have brought with it from the first no sense of dislocation.  It assimilated itself quietly, and as it were naturally, with what it found.  Under the prudent guidance of its first propagators, it simply gathered to itself all the earlier objects of belief, and with merely the change of a name, sanctified and turned them to its own uses.

[Illustration:  ST. KEVIN’S CHURCH, GLENDALOUGH.]

VI.

ST. COLUMBA AND THE WESTERN CHURCH.

About fifty years after the death of St. Patrick a new missionary arose, one who was destined to carry the work which he had begun yet further, to become indeed the founder of what for centuries was the real metropolis and centre of Western Christendom.

In 521 A.D., St. Columba was born in Donegal, of the royal race, say the annalists, of Hy-Nial—­of the royal race, at any rate, of the great workers, doers, and thinkers all the world over.  In 565, forty-four years later, he left Ireland with twelve companions (the apostolic number), and started on his memorable journey to Scotland, a date of immeasurable importance in the history of Western Christianity.

In that dense fog which hangs over these early times—­thick enough to try even the most penetrating eyesight—­there is a curious and indescribable pleasure in coming upon so definite, so living, so breathing a figure as that of St. Columba, In writing the early history of Ireland, one of the greatest difficulties which the historian—­great or small—­has to encounter is to be found in that curious unreality, that tantalizing sense of illusiveness and indefiniteness which seems to envelope every figure whose name crops up on his pages.  Even four hundred years later the name of a really great prince and warrior like Brian Boru, or Boruma, awakens no particular sense of reality, nay as often as not is met by a smile of incredulity.  The existence of St. Columba no one, however, has been found rash enough to dispute!