He was trained at Bangor, but there he could not stay. He was fired with the determination to spread the Gospel over sea, among the Gauls who, under a veneer of Christianity, still often lived a pagan life. There heathen superstitions still flourished, in worship of the old gods, in veneration of trees and rocks and idols: the heathen morals were hardly disguised. The Frankish society over which the Merwings ruled, the Gaul of Sigebert and Chilperich and Chlothochar, was stained with blood and lust. Apart from it altogether, it would seem, and exercising hardly any influence, were a few holy bishops and very many isolated monasteries, the homes of prayer and renunciation and penitence. In the sixth century it is said that some two hundred monasteries were founded in Gaul; but their protest against the vice of their age was for the most part a silent one. Columban, when he landed, was to make a more effective protest against the luxury of the time, {55} the ineffective, unmeaning faith in the forgiveness of sins apart from renunciation of them, which marked the semi-Christian society into which he came. [Sidenote: Luxeuil and its rule.] Guntchramn, king of the Burgundians, gave him a settlement at Annegray, and afterwards at Luxeuil, where there grew up, on the site of an earlier Roman township, a monastery of stern and rigid rule. Eventually he added a third foundation at Fontaine; and he presided over three houses, governing according to a rule which he himself drew up, after the examples of Clonard and Bangor. Its characteristic was the completeness of the self-denial aimed at; its motto the thought, "Think not of what thou art, but of what thou shalt be"; its government an autocracy depending wholly on the abbat; its scholarship not only that of the Bible, but of the Latin classics--of Horace and of Vergil. Its work was twofold. In the first place, it exemplified a strict life of obedience, self-sacrifice, and prayer, the home of which was ever ready to minister to sick souls without; and, secondly, it supplied the religion of the age with a penitential system--in the penitential based upon Irish models--which was of great influence in the secular and ecclesiastical legislation of the future. Columban was not favourably received by all the episcopate of his new country. They were men of different ideals, unacquainted with the culture which meant so much to him; and their acceptance of the general Western custom of observing Easter caused a warm dispute with the Celtic monks. To Gregory the Great and to the Gaulish bishops Columban alike appealed on behalf of the custom he had received; but finally, after more than thirty {56} years' residence in Burgundy, he consented to observe the Celtic custom in silence, without endeavour to make converts to it. A more grave enemy at the beginning of the seventh century was the wicked young Burgundian king, Theodoric, at whose court was his grandmother, Brunichild.