lified by long experience
for the work, he proceeded to hold synods, and to make regulations for
the general government of the churches he had founded. Again and again
he was solicited to revisit his friends and relatives in Scotland, but
nothing could induce him to leave his post. In his "Confession," written
when far advanced in years, he touchingly describes how often he had
been requested to come among his kinsmen once more, but how a deep sense
of the spiritual love between himself and his flock ever retained him in
Ireland.

It was while he was staying at Saul that the apostle of Ireland was
seized with his last illness. He had lived to a good old age, and the
sunset of his life was calm and peaceful. Perceiving that his end drew
nigh, and desirous, as we are told, that Armagh should be the
resting-place of his remains, he set out thither, but was unable to
continue the journey. Increasing weakness, and, as it seemed to him the
voice of an angel, bade him return to the church of his first convert;
and there he closed his eyes in death, probably in the year A.D. 466,
leaving behind him the visible memorials of a noble work nobly done. He
and his fellow-laborers had made for themselves, by the labors of their
own hands, civilized dwellings amid the tangled forest and the dreary
morass. At a time when clan-feuds and bloodshed were rife, and princes
rose and fell, and all was stormy and changeful, they had covered the
islands with monastic schools, where the Scriptures were studied,
ancient books collected and read, and native missionaries trained for
their own country, and for the remotest parts of the European continent.

JUSTINIAN THE GREAT

(483-565)

[Illustration: Justinian. [TN]]

Flavius Anicius Justinianus, nephew on the mother's side of the Emperor
Justin, was born in 482 or 483 A.D., in the village of Tauresium, in
Illyria. His original name was Upranda. Although of obscure parentage,
and indeed slave-born, he shared the success of his maternal uncle,
Justin, being invited at an early age to Constantinople, where he
received an early education. When his uncle assumed the purple, in 518,
he appointed Justinian commander-in-chief of the army of Asia. His
tastes, however, inclining him rather to civic pursuits, he declined
this appointment, and remained attached to the court of Constantinople.
In 521, he was named consul, and during the remaining years of the reign
of his uncle he continued to ex