By CANON D'ALTON, M.R.I.A., LL.D.
Unlike the natives of Britain and Scotland, the Irish in
pre-Christian times were not brought into contact with Roman
institutions or Roman culture. In consequence they created and
developed a civilization of their own that was in some respects
without equal. They were far advanced in the knowledge of metal-work
and shipbuilding; they engaged in commerce; they loved music and had
an acquaintance with letters; and when disputes arose among them,
these were settled in duly constituted courts of justice, presided
over by a trained lawyer, called a brehon, instead of being settled
by the stern arbitrament of force. Druidism was their pagan creed.
They believed in the immortality and in the transmigration of souls;
they worshipped the sun and moon, and they venerated mountains,
rivers, and wells; and it would be difficult to find any ministers of
religion who were held in greater awe than the Druids.
Commerce and war brought the Irish into contact with Britain and the
continent, and thus was Christianity gradually introduced into the
island. Though its progress at first was not rapid, there were, by
431, several Christian churches in existence, and in that year
Palladius, a Briton and a bishop, was sent by Pope Celestine to the
Irish who already believed in Christ. Discouraged and a failure,
Palladius returned to Britain after a brief stay on his mission, and
then, in 432, the same Pope sent St. Patrick, who became the Apostle
of Ireland.
Because of the great work he did, St. Patrick is one of the prominent
figures of history; and yet, to such an extent has the dust of time
settled down on his life and acts that the place and year of his
birth, the schools in which he was educated, and the year of his
death, are all matters of dispute. There is, however, no good reason
to depart from the traditional account, which is, that the Apostle
was born at Dumbarton in Scotland, in the year 372; that in 388 he
was captured by the Irish king Niall, who had gone on a plundering
raid into Scotland; that he was brought to Ireland and sold as a
slave, and that as such he served a pagan chief named Milcho who
lived in what is now the county of Antrim; that from Antrim he
escaped and went back to his own country; that he had many visions
urging him to return to Ireland and preach the Gospel there; that,
believing these were from God, he went to France, and there was
educated and ordained priest, and later consecrated bishop; and then,
accompanied by several ecclesiastics, he was sent to Ireland.
From Wicklow, where he landed, he proceeded north and endeavored, but
in vain, to convert his old pagan master Milcho; thence he proceeded
south by Downpatrick and Dundalk to Slane in Meath, where, in sight
of Tara, the high-king's seat, he lighted the paschal fire. At Tara
he confounded the Druids in argument, baptized the high-king and the
chief poet; and then, turning north and west, he crossed the Shannon
into Connacht, where he spent seven years. From Connacht he passed
into Donegal, and thence through Tyrone and Antrim, after which he
entered Munster, and remained there seven years. Finally, he returned
to Armagh, which he made his episcopal see, and died at Saul, near
Downpatrick, in 493.
St. Patrick wrote two short works, both of which have survived, his
_Confession_ and his _Epistle to Coroticus_. In neither are there any
graces of style, and the Latin is certainly not that of Cicero or
Livy. But in the _Confession_ the character of the author himself is
completely revealed--his piety, his zeal, his self-sacrifice, his
courage in face of every danger and every trial. Not less remarkable
was the skill with which he handled men and used pagan institutions
for the purposes of Christianity; and equally so was the success with
which his bloodless apostolate was crowned.
One great difficulty which St. Patrick had was to provide the people
with a native ministry. At first he selected the chief men--princes,
brehons, bards--and these, with little training and little education,
he ordained. Thus, slenderly equipped with knowledge, the priest,
with his ritual, missal, and a catechism, and the bishop, with his
crozier and bell, went forth to do battle for the Lord. This
condition of things was soon ended. In 450 a college was founded at
Armagh, which in a short time grew to be a famous school, and
attracted students from afar. Other schools were founded in the fifth
century, at Noendrum, Louth, and Kildare. In the sixth century arose
the famous monastic schools of Clonfert, Clonard, Clonmacnois, Arran,
and Bangor; while the seventh century saw the rise of Glendalough and
Lismore.
St. Patrick was educated in Gaul, at the monasteries of Marmoutier
and Lerins; and, perhaps as a result, the monastic character of the
early Irish church was one of its outstanding features; moreover it
was to the prevalence of the monastic spirit, the desire for solitude
and meditation, that so many of the great monastic establishments
owed their existence. Fleeing from society and its attractions, and
wishing only for solitude and austerity, some holy man sought out a
lonely retreat, and there lived a life of mortification and prayer.
Others came to share his poverty and vigils; a grant of land was then
obtained from the ruling chief, the holy man became abbot and his
followers his monks; and a religious community was formed destined
soon to acquire fame. It was thus that St. Finnian established
Clonard on the banks of the Boyne, and St. Kieran, Clonmacnois by the
waters of the Shannon; and thus did St. Enda make the wind-swept
Isles of Arran the home and the resting place of so many saints.
Before the close of the sixth century, 3,000 monks followed the rule
of St. Corngall at Bangor; and in the seventh century, St. Carthage
made Lismore famous and St. Kevin attracted pious men from afar to
his lonely retreat in the picturesque valley of Glendalough.
And there were holy women as well as holy men in Ireland. St. Brigid
was held in such honor that she is often called the Mary of the Gael.
Even in St. Patrick's day, she had founded a convent at Kildare,
beside which was a monastery of which St. Conleth was superior; and
she founded many other convents in addition to that at Kildare. Her
example was followed by St. Ita, St. Fanchea, and many others; and if
at the close of the sixth century there were few districts which had
not monasteries and monks, there were few also which had not convents
and nuns.
Nor was this all. Fired with missionary zeal, many men left Ireland
to plant the faith in distant lands. Thus did St. Columcille settle
in Iona, whence he converted the Picts. Under his successors, St.
Aidan and his friends went south to Lindisfarne to convert
Northumbria in England; and the ninth abbot of Iona was the saintly
Adamnan, whose biography of St. Columcille has been declared by
competent authority to be the best of its kind of which the whole
Middle Ages can boast. Nor must it be forgotten that the monasteries
of Luxeuil and Bobbio owed their origin to St. Columbanus; that St.
Gall gave his name to a town and canton in Switzerland; that St.
Fridolin labored on the Rhine and St. Fursey on the Marne; and that
St. Cathaldus was Bishop of Tarentum, and is still venerated as the
patron of that Italian see.
And if we would know what was the character of the schools in which
these men were trained, we have only to remember that Colgu, who had
been educated at Clonmacnois, was the master of Alcuin; that Dicuil
the Geographer came from the same school; that Cummian, Abbot and
Bishop of Clonfert, combated the errors about the paschal computation
with an extent of learning and a wealth of knowledge amazing in a
monk of the seventh century; and that at the close of the eighth
century two Irishmen went to the court of Charlemagne and were
described by a monk of St. Gall as "men incomparably skilled in human
learning". The once pagan Ireland had by that time become a citadel
of Christianity, and was rightfully called the School of the West,
the Island of Saints and Scholars.
With this state of progress and prosperity the Danes played sad
havoc. Animated with the fiercest pagan fanaticism, they turned with
fury against Christianity, and especially against monks and religious
foundations. Armagh, Clonmacnois, Bangor, Kildare, and many other
great monastic establishments thus fell before their fury. Ignorance,
neglect of religion, and corruption of manners followed, and from the
eighth to the twelfth century there was a noted falling off in the
number of Irish scholars. At home indeed were Cormac and Maelmurra,
O'Hartigan and O'Flynn, and abroad was John Scotus Erigena, whose
learning was so great that it excited astonishment even at Rome. The
love of learning and zeal for religion lived on through this long
period of accumulated disasters. After the triumph of Brian Boru at
Clontarf, there was a distinct revival of piety and learning; and,
when a century of turmoil followed Brian's fall and religion again
suffered, nothing was wanted to bring the people back to a sense of
their duty but the energy and reforming zeal of St. Malachy.
Gerald Barry, the notorious Anglo-Norman, who visited Ireland towards
the close of the twelfth century, has been convicted out of his own
mouth when he states that Ireland was a barbarous nation when his
people came there. He forgot that a people who could illuminate the
Book of Kells and build Cormac's Chapel could not be called savages,
nor could a church be lost to a sense of decency and dignity that
numbered among its children such a man as St. Laurence O'Toole.
Abuses there were, it is true, consequent on long continued war,
though these abuses were increased rather than lessened by the coming
of the Anglo-Normans, and to such an extent that for more than two
centuries there is not a single great name among Irish scholars
except Duns Scotus.
The fame of Duns Scotus was European, and the Subtle Doctor, as he
was called, became the great glory of the Franciscan, as his rival
St. Thomas was the great glory of the Dominican, order. But he left
no successor, and from his death, at the opening of the fourteenth
century, till the seventeenth century the number of Irish scholars or
recognized Irish saints was small. Yet, in the midst of disorders
within, and despite oppression from without, at no time did the love
of learning disappear in Ireland; nor was there ever in the Irish
church either heresy or schism.
The attempted reformation by Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth
produced martyrs like O'Hurley and O'Hely; and there were many more
martyrs in the time of the Stuarts, and especially under the short
but sanguinary rule of Cromwell.
Those were the days of the penal laws, when they who clung to the old
religion suffered much. But nothing could shake their faith; neither
the proclamations of Elizabeth and James, the massacres of Cromwell,
nor the ferocious proscriptions of the eighteenth century. The priest
said Mass, though his crime was punishable by death, and the people
heard Mass, though theirs also was a criminal offence; and the
schoolmaster, driven from the school, taught under a sheltering
hedge. The clerical student, denied education at home, crossed the
sea, to be educated at Louvain or Salamanca or Seville, and then,
perhaps loaded with academic honors, he returned home to face poverty
and persecution and even death. The Catholic masses, socially
ostracised, degraded, and impoverished, shut out from every avenue to
ambition or enterprise, deprived of every civil right, knowing
nothing of law except when it oppressed them and nothing of
government except when it struck them down, yet clung to the religion
in which they were born. And when, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, the tide turned and the first dawn of toleration
appeared on the horizon, it was found that the vast majority of the
people were unchanged, and that, after two centuries of the 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 intolerance.
Far different was the character of another Protestant bishop, the
great Berkeley, of Cloyne, a patriot, a philosopher, and a scholar,
who afterwards left money and books for a scholarship, which is still
in existence, at the then infant Yale College in New England. He
lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, when the whole
machinery of government was ruthlessly used to crush the Catholics.
But Berkeley had little sympathy with the penal laws; he had words of
kindness for the Catholics, and undoubtedly wished them well. Nor
must Swift be forgotten, for though he took little pride in being an
Irishman, he hated and despised those who oppressed Ireland, and is
rightly regarded as one of the greatest of her sons.
The short period during which Grattan's parliament existed was one of
great prosperity. It was then that Maynooth College was established
for the education of the Irish priesthood. But Catholics, though free
to set up schools, were still shut out from the honors and emoluments
of Trinity College, the one university at that time in Ireland.
Still, Charles O'Connor, MacGeoghegan, and O'Flaherty were great
Catholic scholars in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
In the following century, while Protestant ascendancy was still
maintained, the Catholics had greater scope. Away back in the days of
Queen Elizabeth, Campion found Latin widely spoken among the
peasantry, and Father Mooney met country lads familiar with Virgil
and Homer. In 1670, Petty had a similar story to tell, in spite of
all the savageries of Cromwell and the ruin which necessarily
followed. And in the eighteenth century the schoolmaster, though a
price was set on his head, was still active. With an inherited love
of learning, the Irish in the nineteenth century would have made
rapid progress had they been rich. But their impoverishment by the
penal laws made it impossible for them to set up an effective system
of primary education, and until the national school system came into
existence in 1831, they had to rely on the hedge-schools. Secondary
education fared better, for the bishops, relying with confidence on
the generosity of their flocks, were soon able to establish diocesan
colleges. And in higher education, equally determined efforts were
made by the establishment of the Catholic University under Cardinal
Newman. But in this field of intellectual effort, in spite of the
energy and zeal of the bishops, in spite of the great generosity of
the people, so many of whom were poor, and in spite of the fame of
Newman, it is failure rather than success which the historian has to
record.
Nor has the love of the Irish for religion, any more than their love
of learning, been lessened or enfeebled by time. The mountain side as
the place for Mass in the penal days gradually gave way to the rude
stone church without steeple or bell; and when steeple and bell
ceased to be proscribed, and the people were left free to erect
suitable houses of sacrifice and prayer, the fine churches of the
nineteenth century began gradually to appear. The unfettered exercise
of freedom of religious worship, the untiring efforts of a zealous
clergy and episcopate, the unstinted support of a people, who out of
their poverty grudged nothing to God or to God's house, formed an
irresistible combination, and all over the country beautiful churches
are now to be found.
In every diocese in Ireland, with scarcely an exception, there is now
a stately cathedral to perpetuate the renown of the patron saint of
that diocese, and even parish churches have been built not unworthy
to be the churches of an ancient see. At Armagh, a cathedral has been
built which does honor to Irish architecture, and worthily
commemorates the life and labors of St. Patrick, the founder of the
primatial see; at Thurles, a cathedral stands, the chief church of
the southern province, statelier far than any which ever stood on the
Rock of Cashel; at Tuam, a noble building, associated with the memory
of John MacHale, the Lion of the Fold of Judah, perpetuates the name
of St. Jarlath; at Queenstown, the traveller, going to America or
returning from it to the old land, has his attention attracted to the
splendid cathedral pile sacred to St. Colman, the patron saint of the
diocese of Cloyne; and if we would see how splendid even a parish
church may be, let us visit the beautiful church in Drogheda,
dedicated to the memory of Oliver Plunkett.
Nor are these things the only evidence we have that zeal for religion
among the Irish has survived centuries of persecution. Columbanus and
Columcille have still their successors, eager and ready as they were
to bring the blessings of the Gospel to distant lands. In recent
years an Irish-born Archbishop of Sydney has been succeeded by an
Irish-born Archbishop; an Irishman rules the metropolitan see of
Adelaide; and an Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne has as his
coadjutor a former president of the College of Maynooth. In South
Africa, the work of preaching and teaching and ruling the church is
largely the work of Irish-born men. In the great Republic of the West
the three cardinal-archbishops at the head of the Catholic Church
have the distinctively Irish names of Gibbons and Farley and
O'Connell; and in every diocese throughout the United States the
proportion of priests of Irish birth or descent is large.
Nor must the poorer Irish be forgotten. How much does the Catholic
Church, both in Ireland and in America, owe to the generosity of
Irish-American laborers and servant girls! Out of their scanty and
hard-earned pay they have contributed much not only towards the
building of the plain wooden church in the rural parishes, but also
of the stately cathedrals of American cities. And many a church in
old Ireland owes its completion and its adornment to the dollars
given by the poor but generous Irish exiles.
And if the zeal of the Irish for religion has thus survived to the
twentieth century, so also in an equally remarkable degree has their
zeal for learning. We have evidence of this in the numerous primary
schools in every parish, filled with eager pupils and presided over
by hard working teachers; in the colleges where the sciences and the
classics are studied with the same energy as in the ancient monastic
schools; and in Maynooth College, which is the foremost
ecclesiastical college in the world. And if there are now new
universities, the National and the Queen's, sturdy and vigorous in
their youth, this does not imply that Trinity College suffers from
the decreptitude of age. For among those whom she sent forth in
recent times are Dowden and Mahaffy and Lecky, to name but three, and
these would do credit to any university in Europe.
It would be difficult to find in any age of Irish history a greater
pulpit orator than the famous Dominican, Father Tom Burke, or a more
delightful essayist than Father Joseph Farrell; and who has depicted
Irish clerical life more faithfully than the late Canon Sheehan,
whose fame as a novelist has crossed continents and oceans? O'Connell
was a great orator as well as a great political leader, and Dr. Doyle
and Archbishop John MacHale were scholars as well as statesmen and
bishops. We have thus an unbroken chain of great names, a series of
Irishmen whom the succeeding ages have brought forth to enlighten and
instruct lesser men; and Ireland, in the twentieth century, is not
less attached to religion and learning than she was when Clonmacnois
flourished and the saintly Carthage ruled at Lismore.