Page:The ancient Irish church.djvu/47

 Englishmen cannot understand this, and it forms one of the great difficulties in the government of the country.

The bards were also for the most part taken from among the monks. The great Columba was himself a bard. These kept alive by their songs the memory of the heroes, and were in fact the historians of the land. All this so revolutionized monasticism that it became in Ireland an entirely different thing from what it had ever been in the Thebaid of Egypt. In every important feature it is easier to find contrasts than resemblances. The Irish monks, if monks they can be called, were not of a kind who separated themselves from the world and the interests of men. On the contrary, they became at once an important factor in society. They instructed the youths and legislated for the people in time of peace, and they advised and encouraged the heroes in time of war.

How far celibacy was practised or encouraged in these communities it is difficult for us now to say. Most of the information we possess comes from men who found it impossible to conceive the idea of a monastic life without the vow of celibacy. Yet even they have preserved enough to show that such a vow was far from being of universal acceptance. All authorities agree in telling us that Saint Patrick's father was a deacon, and his grandfather a priest, and he himself states the fact as if there was nothing in it unusual or that required explanation. Very many monasteries were open to both sexes—a state of things to which we shall again refer when we come to speak of the position of women in the ancient Irish Church.

A curious document exists which is supposed to have been composed in the middle of the eighth cen-