In endeavouring to form a just conception of the history and characteristics of the early Celtic Churches of the British Isles, it is necessary at the very outset to discriminate between three consecutive periods, which are strongly contrasted. The first is that period which preceded the withdrawal of the Roman troops from Britain and the termination of the civil government of the Roman province there in the beginning of the fifth century; the second, the period of isolation which followed, when the invasion of the Roman provinces in Gaul and Britain by the Barbarians interposed a barrier of paganism between the churches of Britain and the Continent, and for the time cut off all communication between them; and the third, that which followed the renewal of that intercourse, when they again came into contact in the end of the sixth century.

During the Roman occupation of Britain the Christian religion had unquestionably made its way under their auspices into the island, and the Roman province in Britain was, in this respect, no exception to the other provinces of the empire. It can hardly be doubted that, as early as the second century of their occupation, a Christian Church had been established within its limits, and there were even reports that it had penetrated to regions beyond it. It is unnecessary for the purpose of this work, and it would be out of place here, to enter into any inquiry as to the actual period and history of the introduction of the Christian Church into the British province, a subject which has been fully discussed by other writers.^[1] Our more immediate concern is with the churches founded beyond its limits, among those tribes termed by the Roman writers Barbarians, in opposition to the provincial Britons. Suffice it to say that during the Roman occupation the Christian Church in Britain was a part of the Church of the empire. It was more immediately connected with that of Gaul, but it acknowledged Rome as its head, from whom its mission was considered to be derived, and it presented no features of difference from the Roman Church in the other western provinces.

Towards the end of the Roman occupation the Christian Church seems to have penetrated in two directions beyond the limits of the province, but in other respects to have possessed the same character. During that troublous time when the province was assailed by the barbarians on the north and west, and its actual boundary had been drawn back from its nominal limits, a Christian Church was established in the district extending along the north shore of the Solway Firth, where Ptolemy had placed the tribe of the Novantæ, its principal seat being at one of their towns situated on the west side of Wigtown Bay, and termed by him ‘Leukopibia.’ The fact is reported by Bede as one well known to have taken place. The missionary was Ninian, a bishop of the nation of the Britons, who had been trained at Rome in the doctrine and discipline of the western Church, and who built at Leukopibia a church of stone, which was vulgarly called Candida Casa, and dedicated to St. Martin of Tours.^[2] This is the earliest account we have of him, and shows very plainly both his relation to Rome as the source of his mission and his connection with the Church of Gaul. It is probable that Ailred of Rievaulx, in his Life of Ninian, written in the twelfth century, but derived from older materials, repeats a true fact when he says that Ninian heard of the death of Martin while he was erecting this church; and this fixes the date of its foundation at the year 397. From Bede’s statement we learn that the object of his mission seems to have been the conversion of the Pictish nation, with the view probably of arresting, or at least mitigating, their attacks upon the provincial Britons. He founded his church of Candida Casa among the people occupying the district on the north side of the Solway Firth, extending from the Nith to the Irish Channel, who afterwards appear as the Picts of Galloway; and we are told that through his preaching the Southern Picts, extending as far north as the great mountain range of the Grampians, abandoned their idolatrous worship and received the true faith.

While the Christian Church had thus been extended into the southern province of the Pictish nation, it appears to have by this time penetrated also to the Scots of Ireland. If the old Irish Life of Ninian can be trusted, he is said to have left Britain and spent the last years of his life in Ireland, where he founded a church in Leinster called Cluain Conaire, and it is certain that he was commemorated there on the 16th of September under the name of Monenn.^[3] The date of Ninian’s death is not recorded. It has been almost uniformly stated by modern writers to have taken place on the 16th September in the year 432, and has been given by some on the authority of Bede, by others on that of Ailred; but no such date is to be found in either writer, and this supposed year of his death rests upon no authority whatever.

The Roman dominion in Britain came to an end in 410, when the troops were withdrawn from the province and the provincial cities left to protect themselves. Roman Britain thus ceased, to all intents and purposes, to form part of the empire; her intercourse with the Continent was almost entirely cut off by the incursions of the barbarian tribes into Roman Gaul; and, with the exception of a few contemporary notices of the Church during some years after the termination of the Roman dominion, all is silence for a century and a half, till it is broken in the succeeding century by the querulous voice of Gildas. The few facts which we learn from contemporary sources are these: that in the year 429 the churches of Britain had been corrupted by the ‘Pelagian Agricola, son of the Pelagian bishop Severianus,’ who had introduced the Pelagian heresy among them to some extent;^[4] that the orthodox clergy communicated the fact to the Gallican bishops, by whom a synod was held, when it was resolved to send Germanus bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus bishop of Troyes, to Britain; and that, at the instance of Palladius the deacon, Germanus received a mission from Celestine, bishop of Rome, to bring back to the Catholic faith the Britons tainted with this heresy.^[5] Two years after, in 431, according to the same chronicler, Pope Celestine ordained Palladius a bishop, and sent him to the Christian Scots of Ireland as their first bishop; and thus, ‘having ordained a bishop to the Scots, while he endeavoured to preserve Roman Britain as Catholic, he made the barbarian island Christian,’^[6] in this sense at least that he had formed into a regular church those of its inhabitants who had already become Christian. Whether the Christian religion had been introduced into Ireland by the preaching of Ninian, or whether it had existed there from even an earlier period, there are now no materials to indicate;^[7] but the mission of Palladius seems to imply that Ninian was at this time dead.

Such are the few facts which we have from contemporary sources at this time; and all other accounts which we possess of the church among the barbarians are derived from tradition or legend, which will be dealt with in its proper place. These few isolated statements show us a church in Roman Britain, which had been extended, in one direction, into the districts north of the Roman wall, till arrested by the great mountain barrier separating the northern from the southern Picts, and, in another, to the island of Ireland, then the only country inhabited by the people called Scots. We find it in close connection with the Gallican Church, and regarding the Patriarch of Rome as the head of the Western Church and the source of ecclesiastical authority and mission. With the exception of the temporary prevalence of the Pelagian heresy in Britain, we can discover no trace of any divergence between them in doctrine or practice.^[8] There now follows a long period of utter darkness, during which all connection with the Continent was broken off; and we learn nothing further regarding the churches beyond the western limits of the empire, till the church of the extreme west came into contact with that of Gaul towards the end of the sixth century.

In the year 590 the ecclesiastical world in Gaul, in which the Franks and Burgundians were already settled, was startled by the sudden appearance of a small band of missionaries on her shores. They were thirteen in number—a leader with twelve followers. Their outward appearance was strange and striking. They were clothed in a garment of coarse texture made of wool, and of the natural colour of the material, under which was a white tunic. They were tonsured, but in a different manner from the Gaulish ecclesiastics. Their heads were shaved in front from ear to ear, the anterior half of the head being made bare, while their hair flowed down naturally and unchecked from the back of the head. They had each a pilgrim’s staff, a leathern water-bottle and a wallet, and a case containing some relics. They spoke among themselves a foreign language, resembling in sound the dialect of Armorica, but they conversed readily in Latin with those who understood that language.^[9] When asked who they were and whence they came, they replied,—‘We are Irish, dwelling at the very ends of the earth. We be men who receive naught beyond the doctrine of the evangelists and apostles. The Catholic faith, as it was first delivered by the successors of the holy apostles, is still maintained among us with unchanged fidelity;’ and their leader gave the following account of himself,—‘I am a Scottish pilgrim, and my speech and actions correspond to my name, which is in Hebrew Jonah, in Greek Peristera, and in Latin Columba, a dove.’^[10] In this guise they appeared before the people, addressing them everywhere with the whole power of their native eloquence. Some learned the language of the country. The rest employed an interpreter when they preached before the laity. To ecclesiastics they spoke the common language of the Latin Church. Their leader, Columbanus, was a man of commanding presence and powerful eloquence, and endowed with a determination of character and intensity of purpose which influenced, either favourably or the reverse, every one with whom he came in contact. From the kings he soon obtained permission to settle in their territories and to erect monasteries; and two monastic establishments soon arose within the recesses of the Vosges mountains, which now divide Alsace from France—those of Luxeuil and Fontaines, to which the youth of the country flocked in numbers for instruction, or for training as monks.

They had not been long established there when the Gaulish clergy became aware that in the new monasteries the festival of Easter was occasionally celebrated on a different Sunday from that observed by the Roman Church, there being occasionally an interval of a week between the two, and sometimes even the violent discrepancy of an entire month. This arose from a difference in the mode of calculating the Sunday on which Easter ought to fall, both in regard to the week within which it ought to be celebrated and the cycle of years by which the month was to be determined. By the law of Moses the passover was to be slain on the fourteenth day of the first month of the year, in the evening (Exod. xii. 2, 3, 6), and the children of Israel were further directed to eat unleavened bread seven days:—‘In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one-and-twentieth day of the month’ (Ib. xii. 18). It was further declared that the month in which the fourteenth day or the full moon fell first after the vernal equinox was to be their first month. In applying this rule to the Christian Easter, the Eastern Church, in the main, adopted it literally, and celebrated Easter on the same day as the Jewish Passover, on whatever day of the week it might fall. The Western Church, however, held that, as our Saviour had risen from the dead on the first day of the week after the Passover, the festival of Easter should be celebrated on the Sunday between the fourteenth and the twentieth day of the moon on the first month of the Jewish lunar year. In order to bring the lunar date into connection with the solar year so as to fix the day of the month on which Easter was to be kept, various cycles were framed by the Church; till at length the Easter cycle of nineteen years was introduced at Alexandria by Anatolius, bishop of Laodicea, in 270, by which Easter was celebrated on the Sunday falling on the fourteenth day of the moon, or between that day and the twentieth on a cycle of nineteen years. In the Western Church, however, the time for celebrating Easter was calculated on a cycle of eighty-four years, which was improved by Sulpicius Severus in 410, and continued to be used till 457, when a longer cycle of 532 years was introduced by Victorius of Aquitaine, based upon the cycle of nineteen years; and in the year 525 the computation was finally fixed by Dionysius Exiguus on the cycle of nineteen years. By this time it was likewise held that, as the Passover was slain on the evening of the fourteenth day of the moon, according to the Jewish system of reckoning the days from evening to evening, the fifteenth, and not the fourteenth, ought to be considered as the first day of unleavened bread, and consequently Easter ought to fall on the Sunday between the fifteenth and twenty-first days of the moon; and by a canon of the fourth council of Orleans, held in the year 541, it was directed that the Easter festival should be observed by all at the same time, according to the tables of Victorius.^[11]

These changes in the mode of computation in the Western Church took place after the connection between Britain and the rest of the empire had ceased, and when the British Churches were left in a state of isolation. They therefore still retained the older mode of computation, which had been once common to the whole Western Church; and thus it came that when Columbanus went on his mission to Gaul he found the continental Churches celebrating the festival of Easter on the Sunday between the fifteenth and twenty-first days of the moon, calculated on the cycle of nineteen years, while the British and Irish Churches celebrated the same festival on the Sunday between the fourteenth and twentieth days of the moon, calculated according to the cycle of eighty-four years; the difference in the days of the moon causing an occasional divergence of a week, and that of the cycles a possible divergence of a month.^[12] The prelates of Gaul seem to have eagerly caught at a ground upon which they could charge these strange missionaries, who had taken such a hold upon the country, with following practices at variance with the universal Church, and thus pursuing a schismatical course. A council was summoned for the purpose of considering what steps they ought to take with regard to these strangers; but Columbanus, though probably included in the summons, contented himself by sending a letter, which is still extant, addressed to ‘our holy lords and fathers or brethren in Christ, the bishops, presbyters, and other orders of Holy Church,’^[13] in which he vindicates the mode of keeping Easter which he had received from his fathers, according to the cycle of eighty-four years, refers to Anatolius as having been commended by Eusebius and St. Jerome, and denounces the change made by Victorius as an innovation. He claimed his right to follow the course derived from his fathers, and remonstrated with them for endeavouring to trouble him on such a point. What the result of this synod was we do not know; but it was followed by an appeal by Columbanus to the Pope himself. To Columbanus Rome was still the traditional Rome of the fourth and fifth centuries. Since then the Irish Church had not come into contact with her, and inherited the same feelings of regard and deference with which the early church had regarded her before the period of their isolation, and while she was still to them the acknowledged head of the churches in the western provinces of the Roman empire. In this letter, which also is extant, he addressed Boniface IV. as ‘the holy lord and^[14] Apostolic Father in Christ, the Pope.’ He tells him that he had long desired to visit in spirit and confer ‘with those who preside in the apostolic chair, the most beloved prelates over all the faithful, the most revered fathers by right of apostolic honour.’ He vindicates the doctrine of his church as no way differing from that of other orthodox churches, but claims to be regarded ‘as still in his fatherland, and not bound to accept the rules of these Gauls; but as placed in the wilderness and, offending no one, to abide by the rules of his seniors;’ and he appeals to ‘the judgment of the 150 fathers of the Council of Constantinople, who judged that the churches of God established among the Barbarians should live according to the laws taught them by their fathers.’ This was the second œcumenical council held at Constantinople in the year 381. The second canon directs that the bishops belonging to each diocese shall not interfere with churches beyond its bounds. It then regulates the jurisdiction of the great patriarchates, and concludes by declaring that the churches of God among the Barbarian people—that is, beyond the bounds of the Roman empire—shall be regulated by the customs of their fathers.^[15] The position which Columbanus took up was substantially this—‘Your jurisdiction as Bishop of Rome does not extend beyond the limits of the Roman empire. I am a missionary from a church of God among the Barbarians, and, though temporarily within the limits of your territorial jurisdiction, and bound to regard you with respect and deference, I claim the right to follow the customs of my own church handed down to us by our fathers.’

It is unnecessary for our purpose to enter further into the life and doings of Columbanus. They have been referred to here at the very outset, because it was by his mission that the churches of the extreme west were again, for the first time, brought into contact with the Roman Church; and he has left behind him authentic writings which present to us at once the points of contrast between the two churches, and the relation they bore to each other, and thus afford us a fixed point from which to start in our examination of the early history and peculiar characteristics of these Celtic churches during the dark period of their isolation, when all intercourse with the Continent was cut off.

There are two ancient documents, both belonging to the eighth century, which afford us, at the outset, a view of the characteristic features of the early Irish Church. One is a ‘Catalogue of the Saints of Ireland according to their different periods,’ in which they are arranged in three classes corresponding to three periods of the church;^[16] and the other is the Litany of Angus the Culdee, in which he invokes the saints of the early church in different groups.^[17] The Catalogue of the Saints proceeds thus:—‘The first order of Catholic saints was in the time of Patricius; and then they were all bishops, famous and holy and full of the Holy Ghost; 350 in number, founders of churches. They had one head, Christ, and one chief, Patricius; they observed one mass,^[18] one celebration, one tonsure from ear to ear. They celebrated one Easter, on the fourteenth moon after the vernal equinox, and what was excommunicated by one church, all excommunicated. They rejected not the services and society of women,’ or as another MS. has it, ‘they excluded from the churches neither laymen nor women; because, founded on the rock Christ, they feared not the blast of temptation. This order of saints continued for four reigns.^[19] All these bishops were sprung from the Romans, and Franks, and Britons, and Scots. The second order was of Catholic Presbyters. For in this order there were few bishops and many presbyters, in number three hundred. They had one head, our Lord; they celebrated different masses,^[20] and had different rules, one Easter on the fourteenth moon after the equinox, one tonsure from ear to ear; they refused the services of women, separating them from the monasteries. This order has hitherto lasted for four reigns.^[21] They received a mass from Bishop David, and Gillas and Docus, the Britons.^[22] The third order of Saints was of this sort. They were holy presbyters, and a few bishops; one hundred in number; who dwelt in desert places, and lived on herbs and water, and the alms; they shunned private property,’ or, as the other MS. has it, ‘they despised all earthly things, and wholly avoided all whispering and backbiting; they had different rules and masses, and different tonsures, for some had the coronal and others the hair (behind); and a different Paschal festival. For some celebrated the Resurrection on the fourteenth moon, or on the sixteenth with hard intentions. These lived during four reigns, and continued to that great mortality’^[23] in the year 666. This document presents us with a short picture of the church prior to the year 666, and it is hardly possible to mistake its leading characteristic features during each of the three periods. In the first period we find churches and a secular clergy. In the second, the churches are superseded by monasteries, and we find a regular or monastic clergy; and in the third, we see an eremitical clergy living in solitary places. But while this seems to indicate, and may to some extent have arisen from, a deepening asceticism—the clergy passing from a life under the ordinary canonical law of the church, through the discipline and strict rule of monastic observances, to a solitary life of privation and self-denial in what was called the Desert—there were probably causes connected both with the social state of the wild people among whom they exercised their clerical functions and with the result of their labours, which led to the church being reconstructed from time to time on a different basis, and thus presenting a different outward aspect. The distinction in order between the bishop and the presbyter, however, seems to have been preserved throughout, though their relation to each other, in respect to numbers and jurisdiction, varied at different periods.

The first order of Saints representing the Church during the first period had Christ for their head, and St. Patrick for their leader or chief. They claimed therefore to be peculiarly the Church of Saint Patrick. And here we are struck at the outset by the fact that there is no mention whatever of the mission of Palladius; and if we turn to the few notices of the early Irish Church in contemporary writers of other countries, we find the equally striking contrast that, while they record the mission of Palladius, they make no mention of Patrick. The life of Patrick, as usually told and accepted in history, is derived in the main from his acts, as contained in Lives of the Saint compiled at different times ranging from the eighth to the twelfth century. Seven of these lives were published by Colgan in his Trias Thaumaturga, and he has attempted to assign fixed dates to those which are anonymous; but it is obvious that they are, to a large extent, composed of legendary and traditional matter. The Book of Armagh, which was compiled about the year 807,^[24] presents us with two older narratives. One was compiled by Muirchu Maccumachtheni, or the son of Cogitosus, at the suggestion of Aedh, bishop of Sletty, who died in 698; the other by Tirechan, who is believed to be the author of the Catalogue of the Saints. Both, therefore, belong to the same period. Muirchu’s life is imperfect, as we only possess a short summary of the first part;^[25] and we can gather from it that Patrick had gone to Rome to prepare for his mission, but went no farther than Gaul, as he there met the disciples of Palladius, at a place called Ebmoria, who reported the death of Palladius, who, having failed in his mission, had died on his return to Rome in the territory of the Britons; and that Patrick then received the episcopal degree from Matho the holy king and bishop, and proceeded on his mission to Ireland.^[26] Tirechan’s account is more precise. He says, ‘In the xiii. year of Theodosius the emperor, Patricius the bishop was sent by Bishop Celestine, Pope of Rome, for the instruction of the Irish; which Celestine was the forty-second bishop of the apostolic see of the city of Rome after Peter. Palladius the Bishop was the first sent, who is otherwise called Patricius, and suffered martyrdom among the Scots, as the ancient saints relate. Then the second Patricius was sent by an angel of God, named Victor, and by Pope Celestine, by whose means all Ireland believed, and who baptized almost all the inhabitants.’^[27] This account of his mission also appears in all the Irish Annals, and is apparently taken from the older chronicle of Marianus Scotus, who died in the year 1084, and who gives it thus:—‘In the eighth year of Theodosius, Bassus and Antiochus being consuls, Palladius, being ordained by Pope Celestine, was sent as first bishop to the Scots believing in Christ. After him St. Patricius, a Briton by birth, was consecrated by St. Celestine the Pope, and sent to the archiepiscopate of Ireland. There during sixty years, preaching with signs and miracles, he converted the whole island of Ireland to the faith.’^[28] As Pope Celestine died in July 432, this supposed mission of Patrick must have taken place within a year at least of that of Palladius; and while Probus records the latter alone, without any hint of its sudden termination, we are asked to believe that it had proved at once unsuccessful, and that Palladius having either suffered martyrdom or died within the year, a second mission, headed by Patrick, was sent either directly by or during the life of Pope Celestine. If this be so, if it be true that the mission of Palladius effected nothing and came to an end either by his martyrdom or flight within a year, and that Patrick’s mission, which succeeded it, was followed by the conversion of the whole island, it seems strange that nothing should have been known on the Continent at the time of this great event, and that it should be noticed by no contemporary author. Not a single writer prior to the eighth century mentions it; and even Bede, who quotes the passage in Probus recording the mission of Palladius, and mentions those of Ninian and Columba, is silent as to that of Patrick. Columbanus, and the other missionaries from Ireland who followed him, seem to have told their foreign disciples nothing about him, and in the writings of the former which have been preserved,—in his letters to the Popes and the Gaulish clergy, and in his sermons to his monks,—the name of Patrick, the great founder of his church, never appears. We should be tempted to conclude, as many have done, that the account of Patrick and of his mission was entirely mythical, and that neither the one nor the other had any real existence, were it not that, when we turn to the writings of two of the contemporaries of Columbanus at home, we do find an occasional mention of Patrick at a sufficiently early date to leave no reasonable doubt of his existence, and that two documents are attributed to him which may fairly be accepted as genuine. The oldest authentic notice of Patrick occurs in a letter which is still extant, written by Cummian to Segienus, abbot of Iona, in the year 634, regarding the proper time for keeping Easter. In it he refers to the cycle ‘introduced into use by our pope, Saint Patricius;’^[29] and Adamnan, writing in the end of the seventh century, in the second preface to his Life of Columba mentions ‘Maucta, a pilgrim from Britain, a holy man, a disciple of Saint Patricius the bishop.’^[30] These early notices, though few in number, seem sufficient to prove his existence; but if we are to receive as genuine documents his Confession and the Epistle to Coroticus, as undoubtedly we ought, they not only afford conclusive evidence of his own existence and the reality of his mission, but give us his own account of the leading particulars of his life.^[31] The information he gives us may be shortly stated thus:—Patricius was born of Christian parents and belonged to a Christian people; for he ‘was the son of Calpornius a deacon, son of the late Potitus a presbyter, who lived in the village of Bannavem of Tabernia, where he had a small farm.’^[32] He was of gentle birth, his father being also a ‘decurio,’ that is, one of the council or magistracy of a Roman provincial town.^[33] He lived at this little farm when, in his sixteenth year, he was taken captive and brought to Hibernia or Ireland with many thousands; and he adds, ‘as we deserved, for we had forsaken God, and had not kept his commandments, and were disobedient to our priests, who admonished us for our salvation.’ He remained six years in slavery in Ireland, where he was employed tending sheep; and then he escaped in a ship, the sailors of which were pagans, and after three days reached land, and for twenty-eight days journeyed through a desert. He was again taken captive, and remained two months with these people, when on the sixtieth night he was delivered from their hands. A few years after he was with his parents, or relations, in the Roman province of Britain,^[34] when he resolved, in consequence of a vision, to leave his native country and his kindred, and go to Ireland as a missionary to preach the gospel, which, he says, he was able to accomplish after several years.

Saint Patrick’s narrative of his early life conveys the impression that he was a simple youth, of an earnest and enthusiastic temperament, who, in the solitude of his captivity in Ireland, had communed with his own spirit and been brought under a deep sense of religion; and, when again restored to his native country and his home, had brooded over the desire which strong religious conviction creates in many a youth to devote himself to missionary labour, till he became persuaded that he had received a divine call. If he was taken captive in his sixteenth year and remained six years in captivity, he was twenty-two when he escaped, and was probably now between twenty-five and thirty years old. He had early been made a deacon,^[35] and must at this time have gone to Ireland probably in priest’s orders; for he tells us that he had lived and preached among the Irish from his youth up, and given the faith to the people among whom he dwelt.^[36] At the age of forty-five he was consecrated a bishop, and in his epistle to Coroticus he designates himself ‘Patricius, a sinner and unlearned, but appointed a bishop in Ireland.’^[37]

It is clear from Patrick’s own account of himself that he was a citizen of the Roman province in Britain;^[38] that his family had been Christian for at least two generations, and belonged to the aristocracy of a Roman provincial town, and that the district of Tabernia, in which it was situated, was exposed to the incursions of the Scots; that he had laboured among the Irish as a missionary for at least fifteen, if not twenty, years before he was consecrated a bishop, and it was only latterly that his labours were crowned with much success. His Confession appears to have been written towards the end of his life, as he concludes it by saying that it was written in Ireland, and that this was his confession before he died;^[39] and his epistle was written to Coroticus while the Franks were still pagan—that is, before their conversion in the year 496. In his Confession he tells us that through his ministry clerics had been ordained for this people newly come to the faith, and that in Hiberio or Ireland ‘those who never had the knowledge of God, and had hitherto only worshipped unclean idols, have lately become the people of the Lord, and are called the sons of God. The sons of the Scoti and the daughters of princes are seen to be monks and virgins of Christ.’^[40] In the epistle to Coroticus he addresses his ‘beloved brethren and children whom he had begotten in such numbers to Christ.’^[41] It is, however, remarkable that he does not in either document make the slightest allusion to Palladius or his mission, and this leads certainly to the inference that it had failed and had never become an efficient and operative episcopal mission in the country. Patrick’s episcopate must certainly have followed that of Palladius, and that possibly at no great distance of time; and if he was then forty-five years of age, this would throw his sixteenth year, when he was taken captive, to the first decade of the century, when the Roman province was exposed to the incursions of the Scots, and thus he must have himself already laboured as a missionary among the Irish people, to whom Palladius was sent as their first bishop.

Such is the account which Patrick gives of himself inhimself in these documents, which we accept as undoubtedly genuine; and we shall see how, at a later period, this simple narrative became incrusted with a mass of traditional, legendary, and fictitious matter, which had gradually accumulated in the minds of the people, and was brought into shape and added from time to time to the story of Saint Patrick’s life and labours by each successive biographer.

Patrick states in his Confession simply that he ordained clerics, but we are told in the Catalogue of the Saints that ‘they were all bishops, famous and holy, and full of the Holy Ghost, 350 in number, founders of churches;’ and this is confirmed by Angus the Culdee, in his Litany, where he invokes ‘seven times fifty holy bishops, with three hundred priests, whom Patraic ordained,’ and quotes the verse—

Upwards of one half of his clergy seem, therefore, to have been bishops, and he appears to have placed a bishop, consecrated by himself, in each church which he founded. The difference in order between bishop and presbyter is here fully recognised; and there was nothing in this very inconsistent with the state of the primitive church before it became a territorial church, and its hierarchical arrangements and jurisdiction were adapted to and modelled upon the civil government of the Roman empire.^[44] In the earlier period of the Christian Church there was, besides the chief bishop in each city, whose consecration required the action of at least three bishops, an order of ‘Chorepiscopi,’ or country bishops,^[45] who were consecrated by the chief bishop; and the relative proportion of bishops and presbyters was very different from what it afterwards became. We find in the Apostolical Constitutions in the ordinances of the church of Alexandria that ‘if there should be a place having a few faithful men in it, before the multitude increase, who shall be able to make a dedication to pious uses for the bishop to the extent of twelve men, let them write to the churches round about the place, in which the multitude of believers are established. If the bishop whom they shall appoint hath attended to the knowledge and patience of the love of God, with those with him, let him ordain two presbyters when he hath examined them, or rather three;’^[46] and we are told that in Asia Minor alone there were upwards of four hundred bishops.^[47] Such a church as this could not have been very unlike the Irish Church at this period—the relative proportion of bishops and presbyters much the same; and Patrick seems to have adapted it to the state of society among the people who were the objects of his mission. Their social system was one based upon the tribe, and it consisted of a congeries of small septs united together by no very close tie. Anything like a territorial church, with a central jurisdiction, was hardly possible among them. Patrick tells us nothing of the mode in which he was consecrated a bishop; but the expression in his epistle to Coroticus, that he was constituted the bishop in Ireland, seems to imply that he regarded himself as chief bishop for the whole people. He founded churches wherever he could obtain a grant from the chief of the sept, and appears to have placed in each Tuath or tribe a bishop, ordained by himself, who may have had one or more presbyters with him. It was, in short, a congregational and tribal episcopacy, united by a federal rather than a territorial tie under regular jurisdiction; and this is implied by the statement that ‘what was excommunicated by one church was excommunicated by all.’ During Patrick’s life, he no doubt exercised a superintendence over the whole; but we do not see any trace of the metropolitan jurisdiction of the church of Armagh over the rest.

‘All these bishops,’ we are told in the Catalogue of the Saints, ‘were sprung from the Romans, and Franks, and Britons, and Scots.’ By the Romans and Britons probably those are meant who belonged to the Roman province in Britain, and followed Patrick in his mission; by the Franks those who came from Gaul appear to be intended; and whenever it was possible, he no doubt appointed a native Scot, and one of the tribe among whom he founded a church, to be its bishop. The extent to which the foreign element entered into the clergy of his church may be learnt from the Litany of Angus, who invokes ‘the Romans in Achudh Galma, in Hy Echach; the Romans in Letar Erca; the Romans and Cairsech, daughter of Brocan, in Cill Achudh Dallrach; Cuan, a Roman, in Achill; the Romans in Cluan Caincumni; and the Romans with Aedan in Cluan Dartada; the Gauls in Saillidu; the Gauls in Magh Salach; and the Gauls in Achudh Ginain; the Saxons in Rigar; and the Saxons in Cluan Muicceda; fifty men of the Britons with Monan, in Lann Leire.’ And, in another tract by Angus the Culdee on the Mothers of the Saints, he has, ‘Dina, daughter of the king of the Saxons, was the mother of the ten sons of Bracan, king of Britain, son of Bracha Meoc: viz. St. Mogoroc of Struthuir; St. Mochonoc, the pilgrim of Kil Mucraisse and of Gelinnia in the region of Delbhna Eathra; Dirad of Eadardr uim; Duban of Rinndubhain alithir; Carenn of Killchairinne; Carpre, the pilgrim of Killchairpre; Isiol Farannain; Iust in Slemna of Alban; Elloc of Kill Moelloc, near Lochgarman; Pian of Killphiain in Ossory; Coeman, the pilgrim of Kill Choeman, in the region of Gesille and elsewhere. She was also mother of Mobeoc of Gleanngeirg, for he was a son of Brachan, son of Bracha Meoc.’^[48]

The first order, too, ‘rejected not the services and society of women,’ or, according to another MS., ‘they excluded from their churches neither laymen nor women,’ which indicates their character as secular clergy, in contradistinction to those under a monastic rule. ‘They celebrated Easter on the fourteenth moon after the vernal equinox,’ that is, as we have seen elsewhere, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first day of the moon; and there appears to have been no difference in this respect between them and the Church of Rome prior to the year 457. Their clergy were tonsured; but at this time there were in the Church various forms of tonsure, and the first form, ‘from ear to ear,’ that is, having the hair removed from the fore part of the head and leaving it to grow behind the ears, was also practised in Gaul, from whence it was probably derived.^[49]

Although Patrick alludes to the great numbers he converted, there does not seem to have been anything like a national adoption of Christianity. It is remarkable enough that the Ardri or chief king of Ireland appears to have remained pagan during the entire period of his mission, and it was not till the year 513 that a Christian monarch ruled in Tara. Neither did the arrangement by which isolated bishops were placed in each sept or tribe whose chief or petty king had been converted prove well calculated to disseminate Christianity through the whole tribe, and to leaven the entire people with its influence.