But these monastic establishments probably acquired a still greater influence from the extent to which they had obtained possession of the instruction of the young. They soon became, in fact, great educational seminaries to which the youth of the tribe were sent, not only to be trained to monastic life, but also for the purpose of receiving secular education. Each monastic church had, besides her community of monks, a body of young people who received instruction; thus in one of the laws it is said, ‘purity benefits the church in receiving every son for instruction, every monk to his proper penance, with the proper payments of all to their proper church.’[152] Even in the smaller monasteries, the number of scholars was usually fifty.[153] In the larger, of course, a much greater number were taught. Hence a single generation was sufficient to convert the mass of the people to be devoted adherents of the Church. [Sidenote: Early Churches founded in the Western Isles.] The great evidence, however, of life and energy in a church is her missionary spirit towards foreign countries, and the irrepressible desire of her members to carry her teaching and her institutions into the neighbouring countries; and this evidence of her vitality the Irish Church at this period manifested in a very remarkable degree. It was natural that the opposite coast of North Britain and the islands which lay between it and Ireland should attract these missionaries at once to their shores. The first impulse seems to have been given by Brendan of Clonfert, who, it is said, soon after he had been ordained priest by Bishop Erc and assumed the monastic habit, sailed with fourteen of his monks in search of the land of promise of the saints, and spent seven years in the search before he returned home. The narrative of his seven years’ voyage became one of the most popular tales of the Middle Ages, and numerous editions exist of it. In its present shape it is, no doubt, a mere romance or monkish dream, in which the narrator, under the fiction of an imaginary voyage to different unknown islands, endeavours to realise his ideal of monastic and eremitical life, and it possesses some truly picturesque features. But there must have been some historic foundation for it; and such a romance could hardly have been interwoven into the acts of a real Brendan, if there had not been in the events of his life a missionary adventure in which he sought to extend the Christian Church to some distant island. There are not wanting some indications that this was so; but be this as it may, there seems no reason to refuse credit to the statement that, after his return from this voyage, he went to Britain to visit St. Gildas,[154] who, as we have seen, was one of those from whom the monastic life passed to Ireland through the medium of Finnian of Clonard and his twelve disciples, of whom Brendan was one. After leaving Gildas, Brendan