people who had made him their slave. The people whom
he Christianised were themselves rude; not likely to raise their
ecclesiastical conceptions higher than the standard their apostle set;
more likely to fall short of that standard. In isolation the infant Church
passed on towards fuller growth; developing itself on the lines laid down;
accentuating the rudeness of its earliest years; with no example but its
own.

And not only was the Irish Church isolated as a Church, its several
members were isolated one from another. It was a series of camps of
Christianity in a pagan land, of centres of Christian morals in a land of
the wildest social disorder. The camps were centred each in itself, like a
city closely invested. The monastic life, in the extremest rigour of
isolation, was the only life possible for the Christian, under the social
and religious conditions of the time. And each monastic establishment must
be complete in itself, with its one chief ruler, its churches, its
priests, and the means of keeping up its supply of priests. There was no
diocesan bishop, to whom men could be sent to be ordained, or who could be
asked to come and ordain. They kept a bishop on the spot in each
considerable establishment; to ordain as their circumstances might
require; under the rule of the abbat, as all the members were. Very
likely in great establishments they had several bishops. The groups of
bishops in sevens, named in the Annals, the groups of churches in sevens,
as by the sweeping Shannon at Clonmacnois or in the lovely vale of
Glendalough, these, we may surmise, matched one another. We read of
hundreds of bishops in existence at one time in Ireland, and people put it
down to "Irish exaggeration." But given this principle, that an Irish
monastery, in a land not as yet divided into dioceses, not possessing
district bishops, must have its own bishop, the not unnatural or unfounded
explanation of "Irish exaggeration" is not wanted. In some cases, no
doubt, a bishop did settle himself at the headquarters of a district, and
had a body of priests under his charge, living the monastic life with him
under his rule, and exercising ministrations in the district. But in the
large number of cases the bishops were only necessary adjuncts to
monasteries over which they did not themselves rule. A presbyter or a
layman ruled the ordinary monastery, including the bishop or bishops whom
the monastery possessed.

I have dwelt upon this becaus