be forced upon the country
has met with a steady and undeviating resistance, Christianity, the
greatest change of all, seems to have brought with it from the first no
sense of dislocation. It assimilated itself quietly, and as it were
naturally, with what it found. Under the prudent guidance of its first
propagators, it simply gathered to itself all the earlier objects of
belief, and with merely the change of a name, sanctified and turned them
to its own uses.

[Illustration: ST. KEVIN'S CHURCH, GLENDALOUGH.]

VI.

ST. COLUMBA AND THE WESTERN CHURCH.

About fifty years after the death of St. Patrick a new missionary arose,
one who was destined to carry the work which he had begun yet further,
to become indeed the founder of what for centuries was the real
metropolis and centre of Western Christendom.

In 521 A.D., St. Columba was born in Donegal, of the royal race, say the
annalists, of Hy-Nial--of the royal race, at any rate, of the great
workers, doers, and thinkers all the world over. In 565, forty-four
years later, he left Ireland with twelve companions (the apostolic
number), and started on his memorable journey to Scotland, a date of
immeasurable importance in the history of Western Christianity.

In that dense fog which hangs over these early times--thick enough to
try even the most penetrating eyesight--there is a curious and
indescribable pleasure in coming upon so definite, so living, so
breathing a figure as that of St. Columba, In writing the early history
of Ireland, one of the greatest difficulties which the historian--great
or small--has to encounter is to be found in that curious unreality,
that tantalizing sense of illusiveness and indefiniteness which seems to
envelope every figure whose name crops up on his pages. Even four
hundred years later the name of a really great prince and warrior like
Brian Boru, or Boruma, awakens no particular sense of reality, nay as
often as not is met by a smile of incredulity. The existence of St.
Columba no one, however, has been found rash enough to dispute! His, in
fact, is one of those essentially self-lit figures which seem to shed
some of their own light upon every other they come in contact with, even
accidentally. Across the waste of centuries we see him almost as he
appeared to his contemporaries. There is something friendly--as it were,
next-door-neighbourly--about the man. If we land to-day on Iona, or
stand in any of the little chapels in Donegal