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king of the Burgundians, struck with his zeal and sanctity, invited him to settle in the Vosges country. This, like many other parts of Gaul, had almost wholly lapsed into heathenism. The Gallic clergy were out of heart, so many invading tribes had succeeded one another, each more savage than the last. They were content to keep the town-centres Christian, leaving the outlying people to paganism. Much of the country, too, was bare of inhabitants, and since the Hunnish inroads had been going back to primeval bush. Columban first fixed himself at Anagrates (Annegray), once a little Roman station; and in 590 moved eight miles further on to Luxovium (Luxeuil), once a famous Roman watering-place with baths and temples, but then a mass of jungle, strewn with statues and blocks of marble. Here he worked for twenty years, retiring occasionally to a cave which he made his private chapel; and gathering so many disciples that he soon had to found a second house on the ruins of Ad Fontanas (Fontenay), and was able to keep up the Laus perennis, that object of monastic ambition. Of course he wrought miracles: once, when setting to some hard work, he hung his coat on a sunbeam. Jonas accounts as a miracle his frightening off a pack of wolves, which surrounded him on the way to his cave, by swinging his staff and shouting, "God to the rescue;" especially as the rush of the retreating wolves scared away a party of robbers, who were even more to be dreaded than beasts of prey.

Such a man was sure to be unpopular with the clergy to whom his hard work and his rigid asceticism were a reproach. A synod of Gallic bishops sat upon him, to which he wrote claiming Christian liberty, and averring that he only followed "the error (if error it be) of his fathers." "I came here a stranger, for Christ's sake. Let Gaul receive into her bosom all who, if they merit it, will be received into the kingdom of heaven. Let me lay my bones with those of my seventeen disciples

who have already gone to their rest." But soon the court became bitterer against him than the clergy; for Brunehild, widow of Guntram's brother Sigebert, thought to keep the power for herself by managing her son Theodoric (Thierry). With this view she dissuaded him from marriage, encouraging him to indulge. his passions with numerous concubines. For their children she wished to get Columban's blessing; but he sternly refused. Then began a series of persecutions, aggravated doubtless by the saint's want of tact. At last came the sentence of banishment. One day, Thierry had burst into the monastery and got as far as the refectory, saying: If you wish our bounty, all must be open." "Take back your bounty," retorted Columban ; "but if you destroy this place you and all the seed royal shall be destroyed." After more rejoinders, the king, who kept his temper throughout, said: "You hope I shall give you the crown of martyrdom. I am not such a fool; but as your rule differs from that of others, do you return whence you

came.

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Columban would not go till he was forcibly dragged out. His tone of fearless superiority must have been very aggravating; and the wonder is that he did not share the fate of Didier, bishop of Vienne, who, because he had rebuked the immorality of the court, was waylaid and murdered on his way back to his diocese. Milman calls him "an intrepid asserter of the moral dignity of Christianity, this stranger monk, who dared to rebuke the all-powerful Brunehild, while her deadly hate did not venture to devise against him anything beyond banishment." But with the social politics of that bad time we need not concern ourselves. Columban kept as clear of them as he could. He would not take refuge with Theodebert lest he should accentuate the quarrel between the brothers. Perhaps, too, he felt he should not be safe in Austrasia; for he had (we are told) a divine monition

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of the battle of Tolbiac, in which Theodebert was utterly defeated, and had long before advised that prince to go into a monastery. "At least you will pray," asked some of the brethren of Luxeuil, "for Theodebert's success?" Nay, for God bade us pray for our enemies," was the reply. All this may have weighed with Brunehild, who, though doubtless not the estimable person that Gregory of Tours and Fortunatus of Poitiers make her, certainly did not deserve to be dragged to death at the tail of a wild horse. At any rate she let Columban slip away unmolested down the great highway of the Loire. He wished to visit the shrine of Saint Martin: the boatmen, acting under orders, refused to stop, but the boat would not go on, and he managed to spend a night in prayer at the tomb. "Why are you going, brother?" asked the Bishop of Tours, who entertained him at dinner. "Because a dog, Thierry, has driven me away," was the answer; and then he went on to foretell Thierry's sudden death and the triumph of Clotaire. At Nantes two pious ladies fed him; and thence he, with his Scotic monks, who had accompanied him, set sail for Ireland, after writing an affectionate letter to the rest of the Luxeuil brotherhood, urging them to come to him if they saw danger of disunion from the Paschal question. Shipwrecked on the coast of Neustria, he at once began preaching; and received from Clotaire a cordial invitation to settle in the country. However, he preferred pushing on to Thierry's brother at Metz, and thence up the Rhine, and the Aar and Reuss to Tugium (Zug), where, Milman says, "he showed little of the gentle perseverance of the missionary." They on their part were offended at his casting their idols into the lake; and a special grievance, says Jonas, was the bursting, at the breath of his displeasure, of a huge vat of beer brewed for the worship of Odin. So unpromising did the mission seem that the company of monks made a hasty retreat to Brigantium (Bregenz)

at the eastern corner of the lake of Constance, where Drusus and Tiberius Nero had crushed the Vindelici, having brought their army across from Gaul in the first fleet that ever sailed on those waters. At Bregenz there was more idol-breaking: one reads of three great brass images thrown into the lake; and here also were discovered the ruins of St. Aurelia's church, how Columban came to find out the dedication of which is a curious story. But either this new settlement seemed unpromising, or else Columban lost heart (as old men do now and then) after Theodebert's ruin had extended Brunehild's power over all that country. He set off towards Italy, accompanied as far as the Alps by some of his Scots, among them Saint Die, and Saint Gall who had had trials of his own at Bregenz.

He

was a great fisherman, and though the spirit of the waters called in vain to the spirit of the mountains "for help against one who is busy in me with nets, and them I cannot break by reason of the prevailing Name," he was much troubled by two demons in the form of girls, who would bathe where he had fixed his fishing station. Saint Gall, however, fell so ill that even his severe master had to leave him behind, finding shelter for him in an old Roman watch-tower, from which he first duly exorcised the evil spirits. Saint Gall recovered to found, not far from the lake of Constance, the famous monastery which bears his name; and Columban got from Agilulph, king of the Lombards, the grant of a wild gorge, between Genoa and Milan (near the Trebia), and there restored the church of Saint Peter, and founded the long famous monastery of Bobbio. Only three lines are given in the guidebook to this place, telling of catacombs, in which are "tombs of the canonised abbots." Is Columban's tomb among them? His body was

taken thither from the cave where he had set up a chapel to the Virgin and where he died. Miracles accompanied the translation: candles that

were blown out by the gusty wind lighted of themselves; and a woman who crouched down and bit off a piece of the arca which contained his body, and (saying nothing to her husband) put it under her pillow, died in her bed the same night. For centuries the print of the saint's foot was to be seen down by the Trebia. He became famous thereabouts; yet the church of San Colomban, near Lodi, seems to be the only one dedicated to him. Saint Gall had been warned of his death, and sent and got his staff 1; but even had he been asked, this saint, who had already refused a bishopric, and said "No" to the prayer of the Scots of Luxeuil that he would come and be their head, would surely not have accepted the abbey of Bobbio. Bobbio grew to be very important, though it never took the same rank as Luxeuil, which was long the monastic capital of Gaul and the first school in Christendom. The way the Bobbio monks treated Cicero's Republic, scribbling their accounts over the pages, where they effectually concealed the original writing till Cardinal Mai took these palimpsests in hand, bespeaks a lower literary level than that which at Saint Gall was kept up till comparatively modern times. Still they always had some culture: Muratori speaks of seven hundred manuscripts of the tenth century there; and the chief treasures of the Milan library in the way of Scotic manuscripts (among them a Scotic Psalter of the eighth century, with Jerome's commentary) came from Bobbio. The monastery was suppressed in 1803, and the church is now the parish church of the town.

But Columban had still a work to do before his death in 615. He liked Bobbio, finding there plenty of hard.

1 Saint Gall kept up all through life his reverence for Columban. For curing his betrothed, King Sigebert of Austrasia gave him gold and silver vessels for the use of the altar. Nay,” said the saint, "I shall give them to the poor, for my master always used brass, because the Lord was nailed to the cross with brass nails."

labour, and feeling, too, that he was near the great intellectual centre. One cannot help wondering why he never went to Rome. Anyhow he took an active part in combating Arianism; and he also engaged in the controversy about the Three Chapters of Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Eutychian and Monothelite heresies, condemned by the Fifth General Council. In his discussion of this subject with Boniface the Fourth he anticipates the subtleties of his countryman, Duns Scotus, whose tomb, behind the high altar in the Minorites' church, ought to be visited by every Oxford man who goes to Cologne. His contention is that the Nestorians are wrongly included in the condemnation passed on Eutychianism; and he warns the Pope that he only holds the keys so long as he gives right judgment. To the Gallic Synod of 602 he had written with a good deal of bravado: "I am glad you are sitting on me: I only wish you would sit oftener, as the canons require. If I am the cause of this tempest, make it to cease by treating me like Jonas; but, remember, I am only doing as the fathers did." With the Pope he was equally free, apologising for venturing to write, as he says, "too incisively," being only "a silly Scot." He is profuse in titles.

"To the most fair head of all the churches of all Europe, the very sweet Papa, the very lofty president, the shepherd of the shep

herds.

Thus he addresses the Pope, and then goes on to say:

"You are almost a heavenly being; and Rome is the head of the world's churches. Watch, therefore, Papa, I beseech you. So long power will be yours as right reason abides with you. For he is the sure doorkeeper of the realm of heaven who by true knowledge is able to open to the worthy and to shut against the unworthy."

Well may Montalembert talk of the "boundless liberty of the Christians of this epoch, when a stranger monk could, by virtue of his sanctity, venture to school bishops and to set a Pope right." We must re

member that the Scotic Church held very different views about bishops, and therefore about the Pope, or chief of them, from those which were held elsewhere in Christendom. It was essentially a monastic church. The abbot (whose office was often hereditary in the family of the chief of the clan among whom the monastery stood) was the central figure: power and dignity were his. Bishops were chiefly valuable for ordination. As Dr. Henthorn Todd, in his Life Of St. Patrick, neatly puts it, they were a sort of ecclesiastical queen - bees, indispensable at certain seasons, but not coming into prominence at ordinary times. About keeping Easter

:

Columban seems to have made the same oversight which Colman afterwards made when arguing with Wilfrid. "Ours is the old use, the use of Saint John the Beloved," was in both cases their plea neither of them pointed out (perhaps neither knew) that Rome herself had only just recently changed to the new style. "There is nothing more wearying and more complicated than this difference about Easter; nothing harder to understand and above all to explain," says Montalembert, speaking of the Synod of Whitby. "And yet on this difference, seemingly so trifling and so ridiculous, hinged the grand dispute between the Roman and the Celtic monks." He goes on to point out that the Scots were not quarto-decimans (that is, heretics, who followed the custom of the Jews): their mistake was that they did not keep pace with the times, but insisted on doing as Rome had done in the days when Saint Patrick began his preaching; whereas, since then, the Alexandrians (better astronomers than the other Christians) had found that the old Jewish cycle of eighty-four years was wrong, and had substituted that of Dionysius Exiguus which ran to a hundred and nineteen years. The Popes had not accepted the Dionysian cycle till the middle of the sixth century, so that no wonder the Scotic Churches, half-a-century

later, should have been wholly ignorant of it, cut off as they were from Rome by reason of the invasions in Gaul and Britain. The Irish have

always been stubbornly conservative; so, even when the authority of Rome was invoked in favour of the change, those Scotie bishops and abbots who had not been to Rome (as Ronan, Paulinus's Scotic presbyter, had) clung to the old use, though it brought with it the practical inconvenience that while King Oswiu was keeping Easter, his Kentish queen and her chaplains were only at Palm Sunday.

Besides three tracts (one a homily on the nothingness of life) and five letters, Columban has left six poems. At sixty-eight years old he strung together several score of adonics, talking of Danae, the Golden Fleece, the Judgment of Paris, and the other tales which through the monks filtered so thoroughly into the Gaelic folk lore. Here is a sample.

"Inclyta vates Nomine Sappho Versibus istis Dulce solebat Edere carmen.

Doctiloquorum Carmina linquens Frivola nostra Suscipe laetus."

"That famed bard named Sappho in this kind of verse used to utter forth her sweet songs. Leaving the poems of the learned cheerily take in hand my trifles."

To Fedolius he writes in a more solemn strain.

"Haec tibi dictaram morbis oppressus acerbis, Corpore quos fragili patior tristique senecta. Nam dum præcipiti labantur tempora cursu Nunc ad Olympiadis ter senæ venimus annos. Omnia prætereunt, fugit irreparabile tempus;

Vive vale lætus, tristisque memento senectæ."

"What I now send thee I've been dictating, weighed down with sharp disease, which I suffer through bodily weakness and sad old age. For whilst my time glides by in swift career, I've come to the years of my eighteenth Olympiad. Good-bye; live happy, and forget your sad old friend,"

This is the man, and this his work, of which Bellarmine says: "Like a new apostle he threw a wonderful amount of of light on the Gauls and on Italy;" and at Luxeuil certainly his work lasted, while Bobbio also became a flourishing school, and a stronghold against Arianism.

Of the man we may say he was even greater morally than he was intellectually. He may have been hot-tempered and now and then wanting in tact, but his success with so many kings shows that he must have had a personal charm, connected perhaps with that fine presence which at the first forced him to take refuge in Bangor. Such a man, "the great champion of morals at a court notorious for its corruption, and a preacher in lands where the Gospel was all but forgotten," deserves something more than the oblivion to which he has been too generally consigned. The old Scotic saints have been universally ignored by the English Church. It is not easy to understand why, while Saint George and Saint David are in our calendar, Saint Patrick is conspicuous only by his absence. We forget that at least half of England was Christianised by Scotic missionaries: they even refounded the see of London after Saint Augustine's followers had lost heart and withdrawn. And of this missionary spirit, continued through many generations, Columban gives one of the earliest and one of the brightest examples. The writer of his life in Smith's Dictionary, claims for him. "sound judgment, solid ecclesiastical learning, elegant taste, and deep. spirituality"; and the claim is pretty well established. Neander says that he gave the impulse to that "missionary rage" which sent out Cilian, the Franconian martyr, Livin of Belgium, Thaddeus of Ratisbon, Fridolin the traveller, and a score of others a good century before Winfrid of Romsey, known in religion as Saint Boniface, began his work. So widespread was the Scotic missionary work that of the nation it began to be said

that, "this custom of wandering hath already almost become a part of their nature."

Probably this wandering spirit was not wholly missionary. With some there would be a love of adventure, with others the longing for a com pleter isolation than any part of Ireland could afford from the free manners and very social life of the clan 1; but along with other impulses there was always that spirit of self-sacrifice which sent Chinese Buddhists across deserts and mountains to Thibet, and by which the Mohammedan, too, has been inspired in almost as large a measure as the Christian. The fascination of travel would naturally have been great for a cultured Irishman of the sixth century. Ireland then was not the land of desolation that it now is. What a different place Donegal must have been, for instance, when Columbkill was, in most undovelike style, setting two clans by the ears. What can be drearier, not for the tourist who admires its beauties but for the inhabitant, than Kilmacrenan, then the headquarters of the O'Donnells? In those days it was full of life, more or less like the life of a New Zealand pah. So, to change the scene and go down into Clare, were the Kilfenora and Kincora of old times now scarcely alive, then centres where the greatest of the western clans, the O'Briens, made their home. But still, for a man who knew Latin and some Greek, and for whom Rome was the mother of culture and polity even more than of religion, such a life, however full, must have been mean and unsatisfying. In his ears, whenever he read his Priscian or whatever book he might have access to, would ring echoes of the great

1 Most piteous is the lament of Oisin that, since the clerics had come in with the hoarse booming of their hymns, the glad old time of hunting and feasting, and music and wrestling, and ball play and flirting with fair women (all that made up the free life of the clan), is wholly gone. Columban says he desudavit, struggled hard, to get free from the wiles of female society.

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