It does not, however, seem to have affected the position of the Irish Church at home, nor yet to have diminished the number of its foreign converts.  Safe in its isolation, it continued to go on in its own way with little regard to the rest of Christendom, although in respect to the points chiefly in dispute it after a while submitted to the Roman decision.  Armagh was the principal spiritual centre, but there were other places, now tiny villages, barely known by name to the tourist, which were then centres of learning, and recognized as such, not alone in Ireland itself, but throughout Europe.  Clonard, Tallaght Clonmacnois; Slane in Meath, where Dagobert II. one of the kings of France, was educated; Kildare, where the sacred fire—­not lamp—­of St. Bridget was kept burning for centuries, all are places whose names fill a considerable space in the fierce dialectical controversy of that fiery theological age[4].

[4] For an excellent account of early Irish monastic life see “Ireland, and the Celtic Church,” by Professor G. Stokes.

This period of growth slipped all too quickly away, but it has never been forgotten.  It was the golden time to which men looked wistfully back when growing trouble and discord, attack from without, and dissension from within, had torn in pieces the unhappy island which had shone like a beacon through Europe only to become its byword.  The Norsemen had not yet struck prow on Irish strand, and the period between the Synod of Whitby and their appearance seems to have been really one of steady moral and intellectual growth.  Heathenism no doubt still lurked in obscure places; indeed traces of it may with no great difficulty still be discovered in Ireland, but it did not hinder the light from spreading fast under the stimulus which it had received from its first founders.  The love of letters, too, sprang up with the religion of a book, and the copying of manuscripts became a passion.

[Illustration:  WEST CROSS OF MONASTERBOICE, CO.  LOUTH.]

As in Italy and elsewhere, so too in Ireland, the monks were the painters, the illuminators, the architects, carvers, gilders, and book-binders of their time.  While outside the monastery walls the fighters were making their neighbours’ lives a burden to them, and beyond the Irish Sea the whole world as then known was being shaken to pieces and reconstructed, the monk sat placidly inside at his work, producing chalices, crosiers, gold and silver vessels for the churches, carving crosses, inditing manuscripts filled with the most marvellously dexterous ornament; works, which, in spite of the havoc wrought by an almost unbroken series of devastations which have poured over the doomed island, still survive to form the treasure of its people.  We can have very little human sympathy, very little love for what is noble and admirable, if—­whatever our creeds or our politics—­we fail, as we look back across that weary waste which separates us from them, to extend our sympathy and admiration to these early workers—­pioneers in a truly national undertaking which has found only too few imitators since.