he most
relentless persecution since the days of Diocletian, Ireland was, in
faith and practice, a strongly Catholic nation still.

On a soil constantly wet with the blood and tears of its children, it
would be vain to expect that scholarship could flourish. And yet the
period had its distinguished Irish scholars both at home and abroad.
At Louvain, in the sixteenth century, were Lombard and Creagh, who
both became Archbishops of Armagh, and O'Hurley who became Archbishop
of Cashel. An even greater scholar than these was Luke Wadding, the
eminent Franciscan who founded the convent of St. Isidore at Rome. At
Louvain was John Colgan, a Franciscan like Wadding, a man who did
much for Irish ecclesiastical history. And at home in Ireland, as
parish priest of Tybrid in Tipperary, was the celebrated Dr. Geoffrey
Keating the historian, once a student at Salamanca. John Lynch, the
renowned opponent of Gerald Barry the Welshman, was Archdeacon of
Tuam. And in the ruined Franciscan monastery of Donegal, the Four
Masters, aided and encouraged by the Friars, labored long and
patiently, and finally completed the work which we all know as the
_Annals of the Four Masters_. This work, originally written in Irish,
remained in manuscript in Louvain till the middle of the nineteenth
century, when it was edited and translated into English by John
O'Donovan, one of Ireland's greatest Irish scholars, with an ability
and completeness quite worthy of the original.

On the Anglo-Irish side there were also some great names, and
especially in the domain of history, notably Stanyhurst and Hammer,
Moryson and Campion and Davies, and, above all, Ussher and Ware.
James Ware died in 1666, and though a Protestant and an official of
the Protestant government, and living in Ireland in an intolerant age
and in an atmosphere charged with religious rancor, he was, to his
credit be it said, to a large extent free from bigotry. He dealt with
history and antiquities, and wrote in no party spirit, wishing only
to be fair and impartial, and to set out the truth as he found it.
James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, was a much abler man and a much
greater scholar than Ware. His capacity for research, his profound
scholarship, the variety and extent of his learning raised him far
above his co-religionists, and he has been rightly called the Great
Luminary by the Irish Protestant church. It is regrettable that his
fine intellect was darkened by bigotry and intoleranc