humility and of charity. The Northern religion
was an endless warfare, and so was that early Persian religion from
which its higher element was derived; but by degrees that warfare had,
for the many, ceased to be the warfare between light and darkness,
between Good and Evil. To the speculative it had become a conflict
between all the wild and illimitable forces of Nature and some unknown
higher Law; but to the common herd it meant only an endless feud between
race and race. Thus understood it could have no affinities with
Christianity, either in her militant character, or as the religion of
peace.

In explanation of the frequent outbreaks against Christianity on the
part of the Anglo-Saxons, after their conversion, Montalembert assigns
another cause, viz. that the Roman missionaries had sometimes relied too
much upon the converted kings, and their authority over their subjects.
The work had in such cases to be done again; and it was largely done by
Irish missionaries, who had left Iona only to seek as lonely a retreat
in Lindisfarne. They shunned cities, drew the people to them, and worked
upwards through that people to the great.

The Irish mission in England during the seventh century was one among
the great things of history, and has met with an inadequate
appreciation. The ancient name of the Irish, 'Scoti,' commemorative of
their supposed Scythian origin, the name by which Bede always
designates them, had been frequently translated 'Scottish' by modern
historians; and those who did not know that an Irish immigrant body had
entered Scotland, then called Alba, about the close of the second
century, had conquered its earlier inhabitants, the Picts, after a war
of centuries, and had eventually given to that heroic land, never since
subdued, its own name and its royal house, naturally remained ignorant
that those 'Scottish' missionaries were Irish. A glance at Bede,[18] or
such well known recent works as Sir W. Scott's 'History of
Scotland,'[19] makes this matter plain; yet the amount of work done in
England by those Irish missionaries is still known to few.

They came from a country the fortunes, the character, and the
institutions of which were singularly unlike those of England; one in
which ancient Rome had had no part; which, in the form of clan-life,
retained as its social type the patriarchal customs of its native East,
all authority being an expansion of domestic authority, and the idea of
a family, rather th