it dear even to romance. The lesser and more distant isle, that of St.
Honorat, is one of the great historic sites of the world. It is the
starting point of European monasticism, whether in its Latin, its
Teutonic, or its Celtic form, for it was by Lerins that the monasticism
of Egypt first penetrated into the West.

The devotees whom the fame of Antony and of the Coenobites of the Nile
had drawn in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth
century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of
the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of
monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully
preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of
religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and
linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious
concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike
the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a
remote corner of Christendom. Patrick, the most famous of its scholars,
transmitted its type of monasticism to the Celtic Church which he
founded in Ireland, and the vast numbers, the asceticism, the loose
organization of such abbeys as those of Bangor or Armagh preserved to
the twelfth century the essential characteristics of Lerins. Nor is this
all its historical importance. What Iona is to the ecclesiastical
history of Northern England, what Fulda and Monte Cassino are to the
ecclesiastical history of Germany and Southern Italy, that this Abbey of
St. Honorat became to the Church of Southern Gaul. For nearly two
centuries, and those centuries of momentous change, when the wreck of
the Roman Empire threatened civilization and Christianity with ruin like
its own, the civilization and Christianity of the great district between
the Loire, the Alps, and the Pyrenees rested mainly on the Abbey of
Lerins. Sheltered by its insular position from the ravages of the
barbaric invaders who poured down on the Rhone and the Garonne, it
exercised over Provence and Aquitaine a supremacy such as Iona till the
Synod of Whitby exercised over Northumbria. All the more illustrious
sees of Southern Gaul were filled by prelates who had been reared at
Lerins; to Arles, for instance, it gave in succession Hilary, Caesarius,
and Virgilius. The voice of the Church was found in that of its doctors;
the famous rule of faith, "quod ubique, quo