Sacraments; and so free were they from avarice, that
it was only when compelled by the rich and noble that they would accept
lands for the erection of monasteries.'

Page xliii. _For both countries that early time was a period of
wonderful spiritual greatness._

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of quoting the following passage
illustrating the religious greatness both of the Irish and the English
at the period referred to:--

'The seventh and eighth centuries are the glory of the Anglo-Saxon
Church, as the sixth and seventh are of the Irish. As the Irish
missionaries travelled down through England, France, and Switzerland, to
Lower Italy, and attempted Germany at the peril of their lives,
converting the barbarian, restoring the lapsed, encouraging the
desolate, collecting the scattered, and founding churches, schools, and
monasteries as they went along; so amid the deep pagan woods of Germany,
and round about, the English Benedictine plied his axe, and drove his
plough, planted his rude dwelling, and raised his rustic altar upon the
ruins of idolatry; and then, settling down as a colonist upon the soil,
began to sing his chants and to copy his old volumes, and thus to lay
the slow but sure foundations of the new civilisation. Distinct, nay
antagonistic, in character and talents, the one nation and the other,
Irish and English--the one more resembling the Greek, the other the
Roman--open from the first perhaps to jealousies as well as rivalries,
they consecrated their respective gifts to the Almighty Giver, and,
labouring together for the same great end, they obliterated whatever
there was of human infirmity in their mutual intercourse by the merit of
their common achievements. Each by turn could claim pre-eminence in the
contest of sanctity and learning. In the schools of science England has
no name to rival Erigena in originality, or St. Virgil in freedom of
thought; nor (among its canonised women) any saintly virgin to compare
with St. Bridget; nor, although it has 150 saints in its calendar, can
it pretend to equal that Irish multitude which the Book of Life alone is
large enough to contain. Nor can Ireland, on the other hand, boast of a
doctor such as St. Bede, or of an apostle equal to St. Boniface, or of a
martyr like St. Thomas; or of so long a catalogue of royal devotees as
that of the thirty male or female Saxons who, in the course of two
centuries, resigned their crowns; or as the roll of twenty-three kin