Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine Friars in 1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating the surrounding plain.  Three miles further south, on the shore of Killone Lake, was yet another abbey of the same period, while twenty miles to the north, at Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay, the Cistercians had yet another home.

We might continue the list indefinitely.  Some of the most beautiful of our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do no more than give their names:  Bonamargy was built for the Franciscans in Antrim in the fifteenth century; the Dominican priory at Roscommon dates from 1257; the Cistercian Abbey of Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana Abbey, in Waterford, was built for the Augustinians on the site of a very old church; and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its fourteenth century frescoes, was begun in 1189.  We must remember that every one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates, an unbroken life through several centuries.  The death-knell of the old life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland as in England, was struck in the year 1537 by the law which declared their lands forfeited to the crown; as the result of the religious controversies of the beginning of the sixteenth century.

XIII.

The triumph of feudalism.

A.D. 1603-1660.

The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful qualities it brought forth in such abundance.  There is a perennial charm and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses—­in the world, yet not of the world—­which appeals to aesthetic and moral elements in our minds in equal degree.  From their lovely churches and chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join them in an unworldly peace on earth, a renewal of the golden age, a life full of aspiration and self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism laid aside.

Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came.  There was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all without was unregenerate, given up to wrath.  A barrier of feelings and hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.