Baithene and Ethne had much to compare. All kinds of new questions, social and ecclesiastical, had arisen before them; the world divided itself so differently here from the old classifications of their childhood. “City” and “country” were in themselves new words to them, never having before their capture beheld any collection of houses worthy to be called a town. The terms “master” and “slave” were not so altogether new, since in Ireland also captives were held in bondage, and their own Patrick had been once a slave. But that the whole class of owners and employers should be slave-owners, and the whole class of labourers and servants slaves, with no natural human links between them of clan or race, was indeed new. As to the Church, there was less to perplex them, since from the beginning they had been brought face to face with the great perplexity of all times, that so many Christians were not in the least Christ-like. Heretics indeed they heard of, of various degrees and names—Arian, semi-Arian, Pelagian, semi-Pelagian, Nestorian, Eutychian, Manichean; but these seemed to them mostly of foreign growth: the Arians chiefly Gothic; the Eutychians (whatever that might mean) chiefly from the East; the Manicheans chiefly from Africa; the Pelagians from their own West, from the Britanniæ, the land of the pirates who had captured them. Rome had seldom originated the great heretics or the great theologians. And, moreover, of all these confusions the brother and sister had chiefly heard through a voice ringing clear, simple, sonorous above all the tumult like the voice of their own Patrick; and that was the voice of Leo, Bishop Leo, Pope Leo, Leo the Great of Rome. Lupus they knew was called Pope at Troyes, and Anianus at Orleans; but this Leo it seemed was pope and father of a wider world. Rome herself, many years before, they were told, the restless, divided city, had waited in peace for forty days, during his absence after his election, united in the unanimous choice of him as her shepherd and guide. And ever since in all perplexities she had always turned to him, never absent, as her defender and real lord; rock of strength amidst all the tossings of the waves and all the crumblings of the strongholds. Ethne said to Baithene— “It seems as though God had sent Leo to Rome, as He sent Patrick to Ireland. If ever thou, beloved, were to take Holy Orders in this strange land, surely it would be Leo’s hands that would consecrate thee.”