they also been given then to St.
Columba?" It was owned with some reluctance that the Irish saint had
been less favoured. "Then I give my verdict for St. Peter," said Oswin,
"lest when I reach the gate of heaven I find it shut, and the porter
refuse to open to me." This sounds prudent, but scarcely serious; it
seems, however, to have been regarded as serious enough by the Irish
monks. The Synod broke up. Colman, with his Irish brethren, and a few
English ones who threw in their lot with them, forsook Lindisfarne, and
sailed away for Ireland. From that moment the rift between them and
their English brethren grew steadily wider, and was never afterwards
thoroughly healed.

It does not, however, seem to have affected the position of the Irish
Church at home, nor yet to have diminished the number of its foreign
converts. Safe in its isolation, it continued to go on in its own way
with little regard to the rest of Christendom, although in respect to
the points chiefly in dispute it after a while submitted to the Roman
decision. Armagh was the principal spiritual centre, but there were
other places, now tiny villages, barely known by name to the tourist,
which were then centres of learning, and recognized as such, not alone
in Ireland itself, but throughout Europe. Clonard, Tallaght Clonmacnois;
Slane in Meath, where Dagobert II. one of the kings of France, was
educated; Kildare, where the sacred fire--not lamp--of St. Bridget was
kept burning for centuries, all are places whose names fill a
considerable space in the fierce dialectical controversy of that fiery
theological age[4].

[4] For an excellent account of early Irish monastic life see "Ireland,
and the Celtic Church," by Professor G. Stokes.

This period of growth slipped all too quickly away, but it has never
been forgotten. It was the golden time to which men looked wistfully
back when growing trouble and discord, attack from without, and
dissension from within, had torn in pieces the unhappy island which had
shone like a beacon through Europe only to become its byword. The
Norsemen had not yet struck prow on Irish strand, and the period between
the Synod of Whitby and their appearance seems to have been really one
of steady moral and intellectual growth. Heathenism no doubt still
lurked in obscure places; indeed traces of it may with no great
difficulty still be discovered in Ireland, but it did not hinder the
light from spreading fast under the stimulus which i