88 FOUKTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
life ! how many hast thou deceived, seduced, and blinded ! Thou fliest and art nothing; thou appearest and art but a shade; thou risest and art but a vapor; thou fliest every day, and every day thou comest; thou fliest in coming, and comest in flying, the same at the point of departure, different at the end ; sweet to the foolish, bitter to the wise. Those who love thee know thee not, and those only know thee who despise thee. What art thou, then, O human life? Thou art the way of mortals, and not their life. Thou beginnest in sin and endest in death. Thou art then the way of life and not life itself. Thou art only a road, and an unequal road, long for some, short for others; wide for these, narrow for those; joyous for some, sad for others, but for all equally rapid and without return. It is necessary, then, O miserable human life ! to fathom thee, to question thee, but not to trust in thee. We must traverse thee without dwelling in thee — no one dwells upon a great road; we but march over it, to reach the country beyond." l i
Several of the disciples, of Columbanus labored in eastern Hel vetia and Rhsetia.
SIGISBEET separated from him at the foot of the St. Gothard, crossed eastward over the Oberalp to the source of the Rhine, and laid the foundation of the monastery of Dissentis in the Orisons, which lasts to this day.
ST. GALL (Gallus), the most celebrated of the pupils of Co lumbanus, remained in Switzerland, and became the father of the monastery and city called after him, on the banks of the river Steinach. He declined the bishopric of Constanz. His double struggle against the forces of nature and the gods of hea thenism has been embellished with marvelous traits by the legen dary poetry of the middle ages.2 When he died, ninety-five
1 Montalembert, II. 436.
2 See the anonymous Vita S. Oalli in Pertz, Monumenta, II. 123, and in the Acta Sanct., Tom. VII. Octobris. Also Greith, Geschichte der cdtirischen Kirche . . cds Einleitung in die Gesch. des Stifts St. Gotten (1857), the chapter on Gallus, pp. 333 sqq.
§21. GERMAN MISSIONARIES BEFORE BONIFACE. 89
years old, A. D. 640, the whole .surrounding country of the Allemanni was nominally christianized. The monastery of St. Gall became one of the most celebrated schools of learning in Switzerland and Germany, where Irish and other missionaries learned German and prepared themselves for evangelistic work in Switzerland and Southern Germany. There Notker Balbulus, the abbot (died 912), gave a lasting impulse to sacred poetry and music, as the inventor or chief promoter of the mediae val Laudca or Prcfccc, among which the famous " Media vita in morte sumus " still repeats in various tongues its solemn funeral warning throughout Christendom.
FRIDOLD or FRIDOLIN, who probably came from Scotland, preached the gospel to the Allemanni in South Germany. But his life is involved in great obscurity, and assigned by some to the time of Clovis I. (481-511), by others more probably to that of Clovis II. (638-656).
IVILIAN or KYLLIXA, of a noble Irish family, is said to have been the apostle of Franconia and the first bishop of Wiirzburg in the seventh century.
§ 24. German Missionaries before Boniface.
England derived its Anglo-Saxon population from Germany in the fifth century, and in return gave to Germany in the eighth century the Christian religion with a strong infusion of popery. Germany afterwards shook off the yoke of popery, and gave to England the Protestant Reformation. In the seventeenth century, England produced Deism, which was the first act of modern unbelief, and the forerunner of German Rationalism. The revival of evangelical theology and religion which followed in both countries, established new points of contact between these cognate races, which meet again on common ground in the Western hemisphere to commingle in the American nationality.
The conversion of Germany to Christianity and to Romanism was, like that of England, the slow work of several centuries. It was accomplished by missionaries of different nationalities,