e it is a point often lost sight of, and it
explains a good deal. And there is a good deal to explain. When
Columbanus and his twelve companions from Ireland burst suddenly upon Gaul
in the year 590, they formed a very strange apparition. Dressed in a
strange garb, tonsured in a strange manner, speaking a strange tongue, but
able to converse fluently enough in Latin with those who knew that
language, it was found that some of their ecclesiastical customs were as
strange as their appearance and their tongue; so strange that the Franks
and Burgundians had to call a council to consider how they should be
treated. Columbanus was characteristically sure that he was right on all
points. He wrote to Boniface IV, about the time when our first St. Paul's
was being built, to claim that he should be let alone, should be treated
as if he were still in his own Ireland, and not be required to accept the
customs of these Gauls. When Irish missionaries began to pass into this
island, on its emergence from the darkness that had settled upon it when
the pagan barbarians came, their work was of the most self-denying and
laborious character. But contact with the Christianity of the Italian
mission, or with that of travelled individual churchmen such as Benedict
and Wilfrid, revealed the existence of great differences between the
insular and the continental type. We rather gather from the ordinary
books that these differences came to a head, so far as these islands were
concerned, at the synod of Whitby, and that the Irish church not long
after accepted the continental forms and practices, and the differences
disappeared. But that is not the effect produced by a more extended
enquiry. In times a little later than the synod of Whitby, Irish
bishops--I say it with great respect--were a standing nuisance. One
council after another had to take active steps to abate the nuisance. The
Danish invasions of Ireland drove them out in swarms, without letters
commendatory, for there was no one to give due commendation. Ordination by
such persons was time after time declared to be no ordination, on the
ground that no one knew whether they had been rightly consecrated. There
was in this feeling some misapprehension, it may be, arising from the fact
of the government of bishops in a monastery by the presbyter abbat, but no
doubt the feeling had a good deal of solid substance to go upon. It was
reciprocated, warmly, hotly. Indeed, if I may cast my thought int