ght,
"Think not of what thou art, but of what thou shalt be"; its government
an autocracy depending wholly on the abbat; its scholarship not only
that of the Bible, but of the Latin classics--of Horace and of Vergil.
Its work was twofold. In the first place, it exemplified a strict life
of obedience, self-sacrifice, and prayer, the home of which was ever
ready to minister to sick souls without; and, secondly, it supplied the
religion of the age with a penitential system--in the penitential based
upon Irish models--which was of great influence in the secular and
ecclesiastical legislation of the future. Columban was not favourably
received by all the episcopate of his new country. They were men of
different ideals, unacquainted with the culture which meant so much to
him; and their acceptance of the general Western custom of observing
Easter caused a warm dispute with the Celtic monks. To Gregory the
Great and to the Gaulish bishops Columban alike appealed on behalf of
the custom he had received; but finally, after more than thirty {56}
years' residence in Burgundy, he consented to observe the Celtic custom
in silence, without endeavour to make converts to it. A more grave
enemy at the beginning of the seventh century was the wicked young
Burgundian king, Theodoric, at whose court was his grandmother,
Brunichild. His stern denunciations of vice, his refusal to recognise
the king's unlawful children, brought on Columban the fury of the
oppressor, and he was ordered away from Luxeuil into a sort of
semi-captivity at Besancon, and thence into exile. Long he wandered
through Gaulish lands, to Nevers, down the Loire to Nantes, whence it
was said that the ship refused to bear him back to Ireland. At last,
after a meeting with Chlothochar, King of Neustria, whose rule over all
the Franks he had prophesied, he found refuge at Bregenz, by the lake
of Constance. With him were several of his monks, among them the S.
Gall whose settlement in those lands has given the name to a canton of
what is now Switzerland. The long journey of the exiled monks, with
their strange tonsure, their holiness, their alms, their works of
healing, was a veritable mission. [Sidenote: Bobbio.] The journey
eventually ended in Italy; the internecine strifes of the Merwings
which ceased for the time in the union of the whole land of the Franks
under Chlothochar, left Columban without interest in Gaul, and the
Lombard sovereigns gave him a home at B