According to Nennius, a British writer quoted by Dr. Geoffrey Keating, St. Patrick founded in Ireland “three hundred and fifty-five churches, and consecrated an equal number of bishops; and of priests, he ordained three thousand.” “Let whomsoever may be surprised,” says Dr. Keating, “at this great number of bishops in Ireland, contemporary with St. Patrick, read what St. Bernard says in his Life of St. Malachias, as to the practice in Ireland with regard to its bishops. He there says that ‘the bishops are changed and multiplied at the will of the metropolitan, or archbishop, so that no single diocese is trusting to one, but almost every church has its own proper bishop.’” After this statement of St. Bernard no one can be astonished at the number of prelates mentioned above, for the Church was then in its young bloom. The number of bishops there mentioned will appear less wonderful on reading her domestic records. In them we find that every deaconry in Ireland was, formerly, presided over by a bishop. Irish annals show, also, that St. Patrick consecrated in Ireland two archbishops, namely, an archbishop of Armagh, as Primate of Ireland, and an archbishop of Cashel. After the great apostle’s death, a long and illustrious line of native Irish missionaries took up his sacred work and completed his moral conquest of the Irish nation. Nor did their labors terminate with the needs of their own country. They penetrated to the remotest corners of Britain, which it is said they first converted to the Christian faith, and made holy pilgrimages to the continent of Europe, founding in every district they visited abbeys, monasteries, and universities. Ireland herself became for a long period the centre of knowledge and piety in insular Europe, and the ecclesiastical seminaries at Lismore, Bangor, Armagh, Clonmacnois, and other places attracted thousands of students, both native and alien, to her shores. Gaelic, the most ancient, it is claimed by many savants, of the Aryan tongues, was the national language, and continued so to be for more than a thousand years after the era of Patrick; but Latin, Greek, and Hebrew formed important parts of the collegiate curriculum, and the first-named tongue was the ordinary means of communication with the learned men of other countries. The art of illuminated writing on vellum was carried to unrivaled perfection in the Irish colleges and monasteries, and the manuscripts of this class preserved in Dublin and London, facsimilies of which are now placed in many American public libraries, as well as in those of European universities, bear witness to the high state of civilization attained by the Irish people during the peaceful and prosperous centuries that followed the coming of St. Patrick and continued until the demoralizing Danish invasion of the eighth century.