_Lérins._--St. Honoratus and his companions, when they landed in the archipelago, built on the principal island a chapel surrounded by the cells and buildings necessary for a confraternity. This took place about 375-390 A.D. The members of the budding community were learned monks, who had accepted the religious rule which had now become their law. They instructed neophytes sent them from the mainland, and their reputation grew so rapidly that Lérins soon took rank as a school of theology, a seminary or nursery whence the mediæval church chose the bishops and abbots best fitted to govern her. The school of Lérins was so esteemed for learning that it took an active part in the great Pelagian controversy which agitated Christendom at the time,[44] and zealously advocated the doctrines of semi-pelagianism, but this tendency was finally subdued by St. Vincent of Lérins, whose ideas were more orthodox. The theological teaching of Lérins seems to have dominated, or at least to have directed religious opinion in Gaul down to the sixth century. [44] _Pelagianism_ was the heresy of the monk Pelagius, who flourished in the fourth century. He contested the doctrine of original sin, as imputed to all mankind from the fall of Adam, and taught that the grace of God is accorded to us in proportion to our merits. _Semi-pelagianism_ taught that man may begin the work of his own amelioration, but cannot complete it without Divine help. _Ireland._--So early as the sixth century Ireland was the centre of art and science in the West. The Irish monks had followed the oriental tradition as modified by its passage through Scandinavia; they exercised a considerable influence on continental art by their manuscripts and illuminations, and prepared the way for the renascence of the days of Charlemagne, to which such importance was given by the monuments of the Romanesque movement. St. Columba was a monk of the seminary of Clonard in Ireland, whence towards the close of the sixth century he passed over to the continent, founding the Abbeys of Luxeuil and Fontaine, near Besançon, and later that of Bobbio, in Italy, where he died in 615. His principal work was the _Rule_ prescribed to the Irish monks who had accompanied him, and those who took the vows of the monasteries he had founded. In this famous work he did not merely enjoin that love of God and of the brethren on which his _Rule_ is based; he demonstrated the utility and beauty of his maxims, which he built upon Scriptural precepts, and upon fundamental principles of morality. The school of Luxeuil became one of the most famous of the seventh century, and, like that of Lérins, the nursery of learned doctors and famous prelates.