een had certain new elements not been added. Thus we may try
to picture to ourselves what would have been our history had our life
moved forward from the times of Cuculain and Concobar, of Find and
Cormac son of Art, without that transforming power which the fifth
century brought. We may imagine the tribal strife and stress growing
keener and fiercer, till the whole life and strength of the people was
fruitlessly consumed in plundering and destroying.

Or we may imagine an unbroken continuance of the epoch of saintly
aspiration, the building of churches, the illumination of holy books, so
dividing the religious from the secular community as almost to make two
nations in one, a nation altogether absorbed in the present life, with
another nation living in its midst, but dwelling wholly in the thought
of the other world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy
would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening
their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of
paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice,
hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and
women torturing their bodies for the saving of their souls.

The raids of the Norsemen turned the strong aspirations of the religious
schools into better channels, bringing them to a sense of their identity
with the rest of the people, compelling them to bear their part of the
burden of calamity and strife. The two nations which might have wandered
farther and farther apart were thus welded into one, so that the spirit
of religion became what it has ever since remained, something essential
and inherent in the life of the whole people.

After the waning of the Norsemen, a period opened full of great national
promise in many ways. We see the church strengthened and confirmed,
putting forth its power in admirable works of art, churches and
cathedrals full of the fire and fervor of devotion, and conceived in a
style truly national, with a sense of beauty altogether its own. Good
morals and generous feeling mark the whole life of the church through
this period, and the great archbishop whose figure we have drawn in
outline is only one of many fine and vigorous souls among his
contemporaries.

[Illustration: Dunluce Castle.]

The civil life of the nation, too, shows signs of singular promise at
the same time, a promise embodied in the person of the king of Connacht,
Ruaidri Ua Concobar,