land, along the eastern coast to the Thames, and to the European continent. Columbanus entered on his mis- sion to the partially Christianized, but more especially to the pagan portions of Europe, in the year 589. That he was an evangelical missionan,^ may be confidently inferred from the tenor of his life, and from the records of his Christian experience. He thus writes : ' O Lord, give me, I beseech thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, thy Son, my God, that love which can never cease, that will kindle my lamp but not extinguish it, that it may burn in me and enlighten others. Do thou, O Christ, our dearest Saviour, thyself kindle our lamps, that they may evermore shine in thy temple ; that they may re- ceive unquenchable light from thee that will enlighten our darkness and lessen the darkness of the world. INIy Jesus, I pray thee, give thy light to my lamp, that in its light the most holy place may be revealed to me in which thou dwellest as the eternal Priest, that I may always behold thee, desire thee, look upon thee in love, and long after thee.' Columbanus went first to France, taking with him twelve young men, as Columba had done, to be his co-laborers — men who had been trained under his special guidance. Here, as a consequence of continual wars, political disturbances, and the remiss- ness of worldly-minded ecclesiastics, the greatest confu- sion and irregularity prevailed, and there was great de- generacy in the monastic orders. Columbanus preferred casting his lot among the pagans of Burgundj-, and chose for his settlement the ruins of an ancient castle in the midst of an immense wilderness, at the foot of the Vosges Mountains. There they often suffered hun- ger, until the wilderness had been in some measure sub- dued and the earth brought under cultivation. The mission then became self-supporting, but we are not in- formed by what means the previous expenses were de- frayed. Preaching was a part of their duty, though there is less said of this than of their efforts to impart the benefits of a Christian education to the children of the higher classes. The surrounding poor were taught gratuitously. All the pupils joined in tilling the fields, and such was their success in education that the Frank- ish nobles were forward to place their sons under their care. It was the most famous school in Burgundy, and there was not room in the abbey for all who pressed to gain admittance; so that it became necessarN^ to erect other buildings, and to bring a large number of teachers over from Ireland to meet the demand. Here the emi- nent missionary pursued his labors for a score of years. As he represents himself to have buried as many as seventeen of his associates during twelve years, the number of his co-laborers must have been large. The discipline which Columbanus imposed on the monastic life was severe, but perhaps scarcely more so than was required by the rude spirit of the age; and he took pains to avoid the error, so prevalent in the Romish Church, of making the essence of piety consist in ex- ternals. The drift of his teaching was that everything depended on the state of the heart. Both by precept and example he sought to combine the contemplative with the useful. At the same time he adhered, with a free and independent spirit, to the peculiar religious usages of his native land. As these differed in some important respects from what were then prevalent among the degenerate Prankish clergy, he had manj' enemies among them, who sought to drive him from the country. This they at length effected, with the aid of the wicked mother of the reigning prince. Columbanus was ordered to return to Ireland, and to take his countrymen with him. This he did not do, but repaired first to Germa- ny, and then to Switzerland. He spent a year near the eastern extremity of the Lake Constance, laboring among the Suevi, a heathen people in that neighbor- hood. This territory coming at length under the do- minion of his enemies, he crossed the Alps, in the year 612, into Lombardy, and founded a monastery near Pa- via ; and there this apostle to Franks, Swabians, Bava- rians, and other nations of Germany, passed the remain-
der of his days, and breathed out his life Nov. 21, 6L5, aged seventy-two years. Gallus, a favorite pupil and follower of Columbanus, remained behind in consequence of illness, and became the apostle of Switzerland. He also was an Irishman, and was characterized, as was his master, by love for the sacred volume. In what was then a wilderness he founded a monastery, ' which led to the clearing up of the forest, and the conversion of the land into cultivable soil, and it afterwards became celebrated under his name, St. Gall.' Here he labored for the Swiss and Swabian population till his death, in the year 640. This monastery was pre-eminent for the number and beauty of the manuscripts prepared by its monks; many of which, and, among others, some frag- ments of a translation of the Scriptures into the Alle- manni language, about the year 700, are said to be pre- served in the libraries of Germany.
" Neander is of the opinion that the number of mis- sionaries who passed over from Ireland to the continent of Europe must have been great, though of very few is there any exact information. Wherever they went, cloisters were founded, and the wilderness soon gave place to cultivated fields. According to Ebrard, there were more than forty cloisters in the vicinity of the Loire and Rhone, which were governed according to the rules of Columbanus, and to which emigrants came from Ireland as late as the close of the 7th centurj-. He also affirms that Germany was almost wholly heathen when that missionary entered it. But before the year 720 the Gospel had been proclaimed by himself and his countrymen from the mountains of Switzerland down to the islands in the delta of the Rhine, and eastward from that river to the River Inn, and the Bohemian forest, and the borders of Saxony, and still farther on the sea- coast; and all the really German tribes within those borders were in subjection to the Christian faith as it had been taught by the Irish missionaries. Ebrard's earnest testimony to the evangelical nature of the Irish missions should not be overlooked. He declares that they read the Scriptures in the original text, translat- ed them wherever they went, expounded them to the congregations, recommended the regular and diligent perusal of them, and held them to be the living Word of Christ. The Scriptures were their only rule of faith. They preached the inherited depravity of man, the atoning death of Christ, justification without the merit of works, regeneration as the life in him who died for us, and the sacraments as signs and seals of grace in Christ. They held to no transubstantiation, no purga- tory, no prayers to saints, and their worship was in the native language. But, though they used neither pict- ures nor images, they seem to have been attached to the use of the simple cross; and Gallus, the distin- guished champion of Columbanus, is said, when mark- ing out a place on which to erect a monaster}^, to have done it by means of a cross, from which he had sus- pended a capsule of relics. Complete exemption from superstition was perhaps among the impossibilities of that age" (Anderson's Foreign Missions, p. 69-82).