Yet our author well says that Columbanus had more of that fascination which attracts for a day or for a generation than of that depth of genius which creates for ages. (ii. 451.) However this may be, the Abbey of Luxeuil opened its doors to the rule of S. Benedict. The eminent saint, Eligius (ii. 543), when forming his Limousin foundation, took care to require by his charter that the monks should follow at the same time both rules. The ultimate predominance of the Benedictine rule is to be traced to the closer and more intimate union of the 'Benedictine rule with the authority of the Roman See.’ Neither legislators sought the sanction of the Pontiff for his But the Benedictine rule, naturally, through the influence of the memory of S. Gregory, was the favourite at Rome; and received the sanction of many popes. Boniface IV. in council at Rome declared it to be the supreme monastic law. John IV. calls Benedict the Abbot of the city of Rome.

Count Montalembert has dedicated his third volume to his friend, the Earl of Dunraven, within whose picturesque domains in Ireland are to be found some of the most beautiful and interesting of ecclesiastical remains. This volume opens with an eloquent tribute to the irregular greatness of the English character. We may, indeed, challenge the statement that no nation has been more frequently conquered, and in the matter of religious despotism endured by the English people; we are disposed not to overlook the reign of John when making mention of the House of Tudor. Again, when speaking of the 'ferocious and rapacious' conduct of England to Ireland, so accomplished an historian cannot but know who it was sent the sword of the invader against the wretched and divided Celts; and further entailed centuries of sorrow on that nation by identifying its national Church with that of England, and so extinguishing that which in the Celtic nation is its predominant characteristic, its spiritual individuality. Yet of England he can say, that of all Christian nations-we commend the courteous admission that we are yet a Christian nation to Dr. Manning and the Dublin Review-she is the one which has best preserved the three great fundamental bases of true society, the spirit of freedom, the domestic character, and the religious mind. She has remained, even in the bosom of error,' the most religious of all European nations. Here he is careful to strengthen himself by quoting the authority of M. Le Play. English Christianity has converted Germany, Scandinavia, and the Sclaves. The Christianity of nearly half of 'the world flows or will flow from the fountain which first burst 'forth on British soil.' Our author accounts for this by the fact that the country was exclusively Christianised by monks,

6

who came from two very distinct sources, Rome and Ireland. 'British Christianity was produced by the rivalry, and sometimes by the conflict of the monastic missionaries of the Roman and 'Celtic Church' (iii. 9). But in the subversion of the Ancient Church of Britain by the Saxon invaders and Saxon heathen, from what source was light to be brought to re-illumine the land? Not from the Church of S. David, who, consecrated Archbishop at Jerusalem, left behind him a race whose hatred of the strangers unfitted them for the work of Evangelization. Not from the Irish Church, although their monastic institutions, each reckoning their members by thousands, predominated. In 586 the two last Bishops of London and York had fled into Wales, carrying with them the sacred vessels, aud the holy relics. The missionaries must come from Rome (313). At the moment of Columba's approaching the consummation of his labours, a year before his death, the envoys of Gregory the Great landed on the shores of England.

Our author gives a graceful version of the history of the 'Dove of the Rocks, S. Columba.' Bound by penance to leave his native land, and win as many to Christ as he had caused to be slain in battle, he devoted himself to the conversion of the Picts, and settled in Iona, thence purposing to re-conquer for the Cross the savage Scythic race which had forsaken the obedience of Rome, and the memory of S. Ninian. He was forty-two when he landed in Iona, with thirty-four years of life before him. From the narrow enclosure of Iona he furnished forth 300 monasteries or churches, as many in Ireland as in Caledonia; and to him Scotland owes, and is honest enough even by her Protestant writers to avow that she owes, all her primitive churches and her parochial division. Nor is Columba's immense popularity due only to his ecclesiastical labours. The Bards were saved by his good offices from proscription and extinction, and the same unwearying charity which has preserved to our own day the poetical and musical endowments of a race has been requited with the boon which embalms in a thousand legends the worth of S. Columba.1

Nor was society and the Church merely indebted to him for his monastic and agricultural labours, the latter being in due proportion to the former. As a nautical discoverer, S. Colomba has rendered the greatest services. For while it was neither

1 Our author says (iii. 202): Nevertheless, the harp has remained the emblem of Ireland, even in the official arms of the British empire.' He does not seem to be aware of the fact that when the Irish nation hailed unanimously Henry VIII. as their king, the crowned harp was adopted in the cognizance of the Crown, partly in reference to the comparative harmony then prevailing, partly perhaps with a thought of the Crown and the harp lost so long ago at Clontarf.

nor even

curiosity or love of gain' which led the Saint and his comrades in their dangerous coracles over those formidable seas, a desire to convert the Pagans,' but a longing and insatiable anxiety to find some solitude unviolated by the foot of man, this pursuit made them the discoverers of S. Kilda, of the Faroe Isles, and of Iceland. And yet in transcribing this, though it may seem ad nauseam, we must raise our protest against this vulgar fanaticism, this unchristlike and dangerous, because selfish love of seclusion. During these wanderings, those bold navigators encountered, of course, many storms. On these occasions his comrades naturally entreated his intercessions. On one occasion, he replied, 'It is not my turn, it is the Holy Abbot Kenneth who must pray for us.' Kenneth was the abbot of a monastery in Ireland, and a staunch friend of Columba's :

'He at the very same hour heard the voice of his friend echo in his heart, and warned by an external voice, left the refectory where he was, and bastened to the church to pray for the shipwrecked, crying, "We have something else to do than to dine when Columba is in danger of perishing at sea.' He did not even take the time to put on both his shoes before he went to the church.'-Vol. iii. p. 230.

Besides his nautical adventures and discoveries, S. Columba bestowed no few blessings on agriculture. When the legend tells how he, by a stroke of his crozier, made sweet fountains spring, and lowered the fall of the cataracts, so that salmon might be able to leap them; when by a word he bade the wild trees bear good fruit, our author understands, and we presume is prepared to extend the same principle of interpretation to the other speciosa miracula he has collected in these volumes, that in all this we have recorded the services which the Saint rendered to the tillers of the soil, and to those interested in the culture, and the grafture of trees. After his laborious life, the first great Apostle of Great Britain was found dead before the altar in his church. Thither, in the darkness of the early summer morn, he had gone to cast himself under the wings of the Almighty. His funeral was performed by the monks alone, a storm, which raged for three days, having prevented any outside the island reaching it in time. In the ninth century the Saint's remains were carried to Ireland, to secure them from the Danes. Nearly 300 years after his decease the reverential care of his monks conveyed the relics of the royal Saint to Ulster, and since then

'In Down's cathedral slumber side by side

S. Patrick, Columbkille, and gentle Bride.'

It is said that he prophesied that so it would be. Count

1 The touching anecdote, p. 264, vol. iii., of his farewell to the old white horse recalls to mind a like incident in the closing years of the great Burke.

Montalembert admits that the legends are not verified that he visited Rome 'in order to renew the bonds of respectful affection ' and spiritual honour which are supposed to have united him to the great Pope S. Gregory.' As long as the Saint's body remained in Iona, Iona continued to be 'the spiritual centre of the Celtic race. Seventy kings or princes were buried there, and Iona all that time retained an undisputed supremacy over all the monasteries and churches of Caledonia, and over half of the land, maintaining its unique right over all bishops who had there professed religion, or who came there to be consecrated after their elections, a right which took its rise in the immense influence of S. Columba. His monastical usages and principles were substantially identical with those of the Thebaid. As to alleged discrepancies between the Celtic and the Roman Church, we forbear discussing them here.' Beside the culture of the fine arts, and of the classics-Orelli speaks of a Horace, the Codex of Berne, with an Irish gloss of the eighth or ninth century—the Monks of Ireland were deeply engaged in the study and transcription of the Bible, and yet none the less did they found in other lands one hundred monasteries :

'At the same time nothing was more common in Ireland than the armed intervention of the monks in civil wars, or in the struggles between different communities. We may be permitted to believe that the spiritual descendants of Columba reckoned among them more than one monk of character as warlike as their great ancestors, and that there were as many monastic actors as victims in these desperate conflicts. Two centuries after Columba, two hundred monks of his abbey at Durrow perished in a battle with the neighbouring monks of Clonmacnoise; and the old Annalists of Ireland speak of a battle which took place in 816, at which eight hundred monks of Ferns were killed. The Irish religious had not given up either the warlike humour or the dauntless courage of their race.'-Vol. iii. p. 303.

It is as strange as it is true, that our author adds not one word of censure upon this dismal instance of a prostituted profession and dishonoured rule.

Count Montalembert, with his usual brilliancy, narrates the story of Augustine's bloodless mission. The main point and moral of the narrative is that the English people were converted by monks, Benedictine monks. Bossuet has well said. that the history of the Church contains nothing finer than the entrance of Augustine into Kent,' with his forty monks. There the Church received that liberty of teaching from the

1 Yet in a note we may observe: 1. Celtic Ecclesiastical Remains contain no allusions to the ultrices pænæ of purgatory; 2. The Architecture of the Churches; 3. the groupings of the Churches in sets of Seven; and 4. Liturgies; all point to an Oriental origin. To these points Count Montalembert does not refer. (Appendix ii. vol. iii.).

King which she has enjoyed in this empire all the centuries ever since. Nor were the labours of the monks left unaided by special manifestations of divine favour. On this subject, quoting Burke, our author says:

'Miracles of old time, accepted with a blind credulity, have been since rejected with " as undistinguishing a disregard." "But," adds the great orator, "it is the reality or opinion of such miracles that was the principal cause of the early acceptance and rapid progress of Christianity in this island." It is singular that neither Bede, nor any other historian, gives the least detail of these wonders which awoke at once the admiration, the gratitude, and the prudent deprecations of S. Gregory the Great. But of all possible miracles the greatest is assuredly "to have detached from Paganism without violence a violent people; to have introduced it into the Christian Commonwealth, not man by man, and family by family, but at one stroke, with its kings, its warlike nobility, and all its institutions." This king, who believes himself descended from the gods of Scandinavian paradise, yet who resigns his capital to the priests of the Crucified God; this people, fierce and idolatrous, which by thousands prostrates itself at the foot of a few foreign monks, and by thousands plunges into the icy waters of the Thames, in mid winter, to receive baptism from these unknown strangers; the rapid and complete transformation of a proud and victorious, and at the same time sensual and rapacious race, by means of a doctrine preeminently fitted to quell lust, pride, and sensuality, and which, once received into these savage hearts, rests for ever implanted there is not this of all miracles the most marvellous as it is the most indisputable?'1-Vol. iii. p. 367.

In

We will not follow our author into his candid discussion of the relations which subsisted between the British Prelates and the Roman Missionary. While he seems to justify S. Augustine's sitting as being more Romano, a plea, curious, to say the least, Count Montalembert is willing to admit that Augustine probably did treat these prelates with some want of tact. closing these volumes we feel that to their many readers they will be none the less welcome for the large amount of legendary matter which they inclose. Modern poetry contains few narratives more touching than that of 'S. Kentigern and the Ring,' or 'the Story of the Exile of the Fiery Columba.'

The monastic institution, as we urged in a former number of this Review 2 is not an instrumentality devised by the Church ; it is recognised by Holy Scripture; it was originally ordained by God Himself in the elder dispensation; it finds its evangelical outline in the divine society of the Redeemer and his Apostles. Like every other heavenly gift entrusted to us by Him, it has been cruelly and shamefully perverted and abused; it has done much, much that we know of,-much that we shall not

1 Arnold, in his 'Lectures on History,' has made a statement akin to that of Burke.

2 See article on 'Early Struggles of the Church of God.'