houses,” says Mr. Green in his Short History, “looked for their ecclesiastical traditions, not to Rome, but to Ireland, and quoted for their guidance the instructions not of Gregory, but of Columba.”  “For a time,” he adds, “it seemed as if the course of the world’s history was to be changed, as if that older Celtic race which the Roman and German had swept before them, had turned to the moral conquest of their conquerors, as if Celtic and not Latin Christianity was to mould the destinies of the Church of the West.”

V.

THE FIRST IRISH MONASTERIES.

At home during the same period the chief events were the founding of monasteries, and the settling down of monastic communities, every such monastery becoming the protector and teacher of the little Christian community in its vicinity, educating its own sons, and sending them out as a bee sends its swarms, to settle upon new ground, and to fertilize the flowers of distant harvest fields.

At one time, “The Tribes of the Saints” seem to have increased to such an extent that they threatened to absorb all others.  In West Ireland especially, little hermitages sprung up in companies of dozens and hundreds, all over the rock-strewn wastes, and along the sad shores of the Atlantic, dotting themselves like sea gulls upon barren points of rock, or upon sandy wastes which would barely have sufficed, one might think, to feed a goat.  We see their remains still—­so tiny, yet so enduring—­in the Isles of Arran; upon a dozen rocky points all round the bleak edges of Connemara; in the wild mountain glens of the Burren—­set often with an admirable selection of site, in some sloping dell with, perhaps, a stream slipping lightly by and hurrying to lose itself in the ground, always with a well or spring brimming freshly over—­an object still of reverence to the neighbouring peasants.  Thanks to the innate stability of their material, thanks, too, to the super-abundance of stone in these regions, which makes them no temptation to the despoiler, they remain, roofless but otherwise pretty much as they were.  We can look back across a dozen centuries with hardly the change of a detail.

[Illustration:  CROSS IN CEMETERY OF TEMPUL BRECCAIN, ARANMOR. From a drawing by M. Stokes (after Sir F.W.  Burton).]

In these little western monasteries each cell stood as a rule by itself, containing—­one would say very tightly containing—­a single inmate.  In other places, large buildings, however, were erected, and great numbers of monks lived together.  Some of these larger communities are stated to have actually contained several thousand brethren, and though this sounds like an exaggeration, there can be no doubt that they were enormously populous.  The native mode of existence lent itself, in fact, very readily to the arrangement.  It was merely the clan or sept re-organized upon a religious footing.  “Les premieres grands monasteres de l’Irelande,”