There are two positions that command the whole field of Irish Church history. The first is the original connection of the Irish Church with the See of Rome; the second is that her hierarchy has remained ever faithful to Rome, especially in the time of the Reformation. Deny either of these, and the whole aspect of our ecclesiastical history is immediately changed. The supernatural virtues that spring from Catholicism nowhere had a fresher bloom than in Ireland. Faith, and hope, and charity, and love for the evangelical counsels were in a special degree the ornaments of the nation which, Saint Patrick tells us in his _Confessions_, "had been bestowed upon him by the charity of Christ". The schools of Ireland, her art, her literature, her laws, her social customs, all felt the influence of the intense religious feeling that existed throughout the land. The Irish monastic superiors, says a lively French writer, aimed at making their monks saints, and were surprised to find them become poets likewise. Now this rich superabundance of spiritual blessing, as it was the fruit of union with Rome, so also ought it be traced back to Rome as its source under God. And the more marvellous its richness, the more striking the necessity of being able to show that it has come to us through Saint Peter. Besides, all these graces were, if we may use a theological expression, _gratiae gratis datae_, as well as _gratum facientes_. They were given to the Irish Church not only to make her the glad mother of saints, but also, and in a singular manner, for the benefit of others. It is, we think, impossible not to recognize in the history of the Irish Church, both ancient and modern, this missionary character. Her cloisters had the gift of sanctity; but did not the odour of this very sanctity draw to her shores crowds of foreign ecclesiastics--Egyptian, Roman, Italian, French, British, and Saxon? Her schools had the gift of wisdom; but did not this wisdom cry out to the men beyond the seas to come and buy of it without price? Where was the bishop's throne encircled by a more dense crown of Priests and Levites than in Ireland? and was it not that many of them might be spared for those places abroad where the little ones were asking for bread, and there was none to break it to them? The flower of her youth thronged her monasteries; she took them to her bosom as children, that she might make them fathers; and among the monks of the West what fathers were more fruitful of good? And in our own day let England, and Scotland, and Australia, and America, and Africa, and India, tell what part Providence has assigned to the Irish Catholics in that wonderful growth of Catholicism which refreshes the heart in these days of indifference and infidelity. To Ireland may well be applied the words used by Saint Gregory Nazianzen, of the Constantinople of the fourth century, when he calls it "the bond of union between the east and west, to which the