It was this newer cycle of which the British Church was found to be ignorant, and their ignorance of it is eloquent proof of the isolation into which the ravages of the invading English had driven them. One of the indications of difference between the Irish and the British Church is rather amusing. When the Irish had conformed to Roman customs, well on in the seventh century, they solemnly rebuked the Britons of Wales for cutting themselves off from the Western Church. We are not to suppose that the only intercourse with Ireland was through Britain by way of the English Channel. The south of Ireland, at least, was in direct communication with the north-western part of France by sea. When a province of the Third Lyonese was formed, with Tours as its capital, in 394, its area including Britany and the parts south of that, Martin was still Bishop of Tours, and he became the metropolitan. He at once sent into Britany the monasticism which he had founded in Gaul, and it passed thence direct to the south-west corner of Wales. Thence it passed to Ireland. We hear of a ship at Nantes, ready to sail to Ireland. And in Columba's time, when the Saint was telling them of an accident that was at that moment happening in Istria, he assured them that in the course of time Gallican sailors would come and bring the news[48]. This double contact must be kept in mind, when we find the south of Ireland different in Christian tone and temper from the north. It would seem that there were race-differences too, but on that I must not enter. I am not clear that the Irish Church, as such, had anything to do with missionary enterprise among our pagan English ancestors. Columbanus merely passed through Britain, on his way to do a much more widely-extended missionary work in Gaul than Augustine, his contemporary, did in England. But it is a very different matter when we come to the great off-shoot from the Irish Church, the vigorous Church whose centre was the island of Hii, its moving spirit St. Columba. Iona--to adopt the familiar blunder which makes a _u_ into an _n_ in a name all vowels--Iona did indeed pay back with a generous hand all and more than all that Ireland had owed to Britain.