The Church continued to flourish in Ireland after St. Patrick's death, and learning found a home there, while wars and conquests banished it from most other countries of the west. In the year 565, the Irish Church sent forth a famous missionary named Columba, who, with twelve companions, went into Scotland. He preached among the Northern Picts, and founded a monastery in one of the western islands, which from him got the name of Icolumbkill (that is to say, the _Island of Columba of the Churches_). From that little island the light of the Gospel afterwards spread, not only over Scotland, but far towards the south of England, and many monasteries, both in Scotland and in Ireland, were under the rule of its abbot. For hundreds of years the schools of Ireland continued to be in great repute. Young men flocked to them from England, and even from foreign lands, and many Irish missionaries laboured in various countries abroad. The chief of those who fall within the time to which this little book reaches, was Columban (a different person from Columba, although their names are so like). He left Ireland with twelve companions, in the year 589, preached in the east of France for many years, and afterwards in Switzerland and in Italy, and died in 615, at the monastery of Bobbio, which he had founded among the Apennine mountains. One of his disciples, Gall, is styled "The Apostle of Switzerland," and founded a great monastery, which from him is called St. Gall. CHAPTER XXVI. CLOVIS. A.D. 496. The most famous and the most important of all the conversions which took place about this time was that of Clovis, king of the Franks. From being the chief of a small, though brave people, on the borders of France and Belgium, he grew by degrees to be the founder of the great French monarchy. His queen, Clotilda, was a Christian, and long tried in vain to bring him over to her faith. "The gods whom you worship," she said, "are nothing, and can profit neither themselves nor others; for they are graven out of stone, or wood, or metal, and the names which you give them were not the names of gods but of men. But He ought rather to be worshipped who by His word made out of nothing the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that in them is." Clovis does not seem to have cared very much about the truth, one way or the other; but he had the fancy (which was common among the heathens, and which is often mentioned in the Old Testament), that if people did not prosper in this world, the god whom they served could not have the power to protect them and give them success. And, as he lived in the time when the Roman empire of the west came to an end, the fall of the empire, which had now been Christian for more than a hundred and fifty years, seemed to him to prove that the Christian religion could not be true.