Page:The ancient Irish church.djvu/80

 of Columbanus. When carelessness and indifference abounded, the intense earnestness of these men must have been the more remarkable; and when the people thought of religion at all, they could scarcely help being attracted by those to whom the Faith was such a reality that they were ready to give up everything of pleasure and indulgence for its sake.

In the work of Columbanus we have the Irish Church brought for the first time into contact with the outside world. Columba and the monks of Iona, when they invaded Pictland, left the isolation of Ireland for a still greater isolation. Columbanus, on the other hand, found himself surrounded by an ecclesiastical organization in some respects very different from any that he had known at home. The bishops were real spiritual magnates, instead of being, as often in Ireland, subject to the abbot of a monastery. They exercised territorial jurisdiction, and they all of them paid allegiance to the Bishop of Rome. In Ireland, Rome seemed to be a very distant and unknown place; and they had but little conception of that great system of Church government which was being perfected under her auspices.

Columbanus, when he went to France, carried with him all the ideas in which he had been brought up. He never thought of conforming himself to the usages of those into whose land he had come. His monasteries were in Gaul, but they were not Gallic. Whatever was the country in which he sojourned, he was still an Irishman, and it never entered his head that he should belong to any other than the Irish Church.

The differences soon became apparent. Columbanus computed the time for celebrating the feast of