soldiers. Their duties are to
attend church, to pay first-fruits, tithes and oblations, to avoid evil
and do good, and to obey their pastors.

There is nothing original in all this; and some parts of it must have
been very puzzling to stay-at-home Irishmen. For example, what were they
to make of Gilbert's comparison of primates, archbishops, bishops and
priests to kings, dukes, earls and knights? They knew as little of dukes
and earls in the civil order as they did of primates and archbishops in
the ecclesiastical; and they had far more kings than suited Gilbert's
scheme. But the tract is important, both as a summary of the teaching
which Gilbert had no doubt been inculcating far and wide for years, and
as a permanent record, for future use, of the aims of the Reformers.

However unintelligible the treatise may have been in parts, it brought
out with startling clearness one or two essential points. First the
Church must be ruled by bishops. Even the monasteries are subject to
them. How amazing such a statement must have sounded to men who had
inherited the tradition, many centuries old, that the abbots of
monasteries were the true ecclesiastical rulers, bishops their
subordinate officials.

Moreover, bishoprics and dioceses could not be set up at random. The
number of bishops and by consequence the size of dioceses must be
carefully considered. The puny bishoprics of Meath, for example, could
form no part of a scheme such as Gilbert adumbrated.

It was manifest that if his guidance were to be followed, no mere
modification of existing arrangements would suffice. The old hierarchy
must be torn up by the roots, and a new hierarchy planted in its place.

We shall meet Gilbert again in the course of our story. But we may now
turn aside from him to make the acquaintance of a new actor in the
drama of the Reformation. Like O'Dunan he was a Northern.

Cellach was born in 1080. He was an Armagh man, sprung from the family
which for centuries past had provided abbots for the monastery of that
city, the grandson of a former abbot. He first appears on the scene in
1105, when on the death of Abbot Donnell he became coarb of Patrick and
abbot of Armagh. He was elected, we may assume, in the customary way. He
was then under twenty-six years of age, and was apparently still a
layman. But his subsequent action shows that he was already a convinced
disciple of the new movement. Doubtless he had fallen under the spell of
Gilbert of