d Emly, Clonard,
Ennismore, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, {54} Bangor, arose to teach and
govern the Church. Their monks lived by severe rule, based, no doubt,
upon the customs of the East, of Egypt or Syria, most strict in the
abasement of the selfish will, in penitence, in work, in prayer. "Good
is the rule of Bangor," said the ancient sequence, "strait, austere,
holy, and just." It was this rule, with the enthusiasm which marked
all classes for religion and for knowledge, which inspired S. Columban
in his great work. It was a work whose keynote was sacred study and
which found its harmony in monastic service. S. Columban was the type,
the representative _par excellence_, of the Irish monk, in his high
idealism, his thirst for self-sacrifice, his adventurous and missionary
spirit.

[Sidenote: His work in Gaul.]

He was trained at Bangor, but there he could not stay. He was fired
with the determination to spread the Gospel over sea, among the Gauls
who, under a veneer of Christianity, still often lived a pagan life.
There heathen superstitions still flourished, in worship of the old
gods, in veneration of trees and rocks and idols: the heathen morals
were hardly disguised. The Frankish society over which the Merwings
ruled, the Gaul of Sigebert and Chilperich and Chlothochar, was stained
with blood and lust. Apart from it altogether, it would seem, and
exercising hardly any influence, were a few holy bishops and very many
isolated monasteries, the homes of prayer and renunciation and
penitence. In the sixth century it is said that some two hundred
monasteries were founded in Gaul; but their protest against the vice of
their age was for the most part a silent one. Columban, when he
landed, was to make a more effective protest against the luxury of the
time, {55} the ineffective, unmeaning faith in the forgiveness of sins
apart from renunciation of them, which marked the semi-Christian
society into which he came.

[Sidenote: Luxeuil and its rule.]

Guntchramn, king of the Burgundians, gave him a settlement at Annegray,
and afterwards at Luxeuil, where there grew up, on the site of an
earlier Roman township, a monastery of stern and rigid rule.
Eventually he added a third foundation at Fontaine; and he presided
over three houses, governing according to a rule which he himself drew
up, after the examples of Clonard and Bangor. Its characteristic was
the completeness of the self-denial aimed at; its motto the thou