characteristics and purer life of Christianity. They asked and obtained a settlement in some small and valueless island. There they settled down as a little Christian colony, living under a monastic rule requiring the abandonment of all that was attractive in life. They exhibited a life of purity, holiness, and self-denial. They exercised charity and benevolence, and they forced the respect of the surrounding pagans to a life the motives of which they could not comprehend, unless they resulted from principles higher than those their pagan religion afforded them; and, having won their respect for their lives and their gratitude for their benevolence, these monastic missionaries went among them with the Word of God in their hands, and preached to them the doctrines and pure morality of the Word of Life. No wonder if kings and nations became converted to Christianity and incorporated the church into their tribal institutions in a manner which now excites our wonder, if not our suspicion. The lives of the saints show us these missionaries, owing to their devoted and self-denying lives, first received with respect by some chief, then obtaining a grant of land to found their monastery, and the people soon after converted by the preaching of the Word of God. Their influence, however, was soon enhanced by a less legitimate feature. We know how readily a rude and primitive people invest with superstitious and supernatural power those claiming superior sanctity, and the newly converted people soon surrounded these saints, as they termed them, with the same old halo of reverence and awe which had belonged to their pagan priests, such as they were. The power with which the latter were supposed to be endowed, of influencing the action of their native gods, was transferred to the Christian missionary, who was believed to exercise a similar power with regard to the Christian Deity. Their intercession was sought for, their malediction dreaded, and the claims and rites of the Christian Church invested with superstitious sanctions which brought the people more readily and universally into subjection to her. We can trace this feeling in the Brehon Laws. We are there told that ‘there are three periods at which the world is worthless: the time of a plague, the time of a general war, the dissolution of express contracts. There are three things which remedy them: tithes and first fruits and alms; they prevent the occurrence of plague; they confirm peace between the king and the people; they prevent the prevalence of war; they confirm all in their good contracts and in their bad contracts; they prevent the worthlessness of the world.’[150] And again, in explaining the rights of the _Graid Feine_, or country people, as to marriage, the commentary adds, ‘That is, the daughter of each of them to the other, such a person as is not under the word, or curse, of a patron saint.’[151] [Sidenote: Monasteries were seminaries of instruction.]