again.  The scholars fled abroad, taking their precious manuscripts with them; for which reason many of the most valuable of these have been found in monasteries on the continent.  The age of brilliance was over.  For a couple of centuries, the Norwegians, and then the Danes, were ruining Ireland; until Brian Boru did their quietus make at Clontarf in 1014.  Before the country had had time to recover, the Norman conquest began:  a thing that went on for centuries, and never really finished; and that was much more ruinous even than the invasions of the Norsemen.  As to the Celtic Church, which had fostered all that brilliance, its story is soon told.  In Wales, the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England were at pains to bring the see of St. Davids under the sway of Canterbury and into close communion with Rome:  they and the Roman Church fought hand in hand to destroy Celtic liberties.  The Church of the Circled Cross had never been an independent organization in the sense that the Greek Church was:  it had never had its own Patriarchs or Popes; it was always in theory under Rome.  But secular events had kept the two apart; and while they did so, the Celtic Church was virtually independent.  In the eleventh and twelfth Centuries the Welsh Church fought hard for its existence; but Norman arms backed by Papal sanction proved too strong for it; and despite the valor of the princes, and especially of that gallant bishop-historian Gerald the Welshman, it succumbed.  As to Ireland:  an English Pope, Adrian IV, born Nicholas Brakespeare, presented the island to King Henry II; and King Henry II with true courtesy returned the compliment by presenting it to the Pope.  The Synod of Cashel, called by Henry in 1172, put Ireland under Rome; and the Church of the Circled Cross ceased to be.  There, in short and simple terms, you have the history of it.

And therein, too, as I guess, you may see all sorts of interesting phases of karmic working.  For the Church of the Circled Cross, that had done so well by Ireland in some things, had done marvelously badly in others.  There was a relic of political stability in ancient Ireland,—­in the office of the High-kings of Tara.  It is supposed now that it had grown up, you may say out of nothing:  had been established by some strong warrior, to maintain itself as it might under such of his successors as might be strong too.  I have no doubt, on the other hand, that it was really an ancient institution, once firmly grounded, that had weakened since the general decay of the Celtic Power.  The Gods in their day had had their capital at Tara; and until the middle of the fifth century A.D.  Tara stood there as the symbol of national unity.  When Patrick came the position was this:  all Ireland was divided into innumerable small kingdoms with their kinglets, with the Ard-righ of Tara as supreme over them all as he could make himself.  The hopefullest thing that could have happened would have been the abolition of the kingdoms and kinglets, and the establishment of the Ard-righ’s authority as absolute and final.