St. Patrick did not do for the Scots what Wulfilas did for the Goths, and the Slavonic apostles for the Slavs; he did not translate the sacred books of his religion into Irish or found a national church literature. It is upon their literary achievements, more than on their successes in converting barbarians, that the fame of Wulfilas rests, and the fame of Cyril. The Gothic Bible of Wulfilas was available for the Vandals and other Germans whose speech was closely akin to Gothic. The importance of the Slavonic apostles, Cyril and his brother Methodius, is due to the fact that the literature which they initiated was available, not for the lands in which they laboured—Moravia and Pannonia, which no longer know them—but for Bulgaria and Russia. What Patrick, on the other hand, and his foreign fellow-workers did was to diffuse a knowledge of Latin in Ireland. To the circumstance that he adopted this line of policy, and did not attempt to create a national ecclesiastical language, must be ascribed the rise of the schools of learning which distinguished Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries. From a national point of view the policy may be criticised; from a theologian’s point of view the advantage may be urged of opening to the native clergy the whole body of patristic literature, and saving the trouble of translation and the chances of error. But the point is that the policy was entirely consonant with the development of western, as contrasted with eastern, Christianity. In the time of Patrick there was within the realm of the Emperor Theodosius II. a Syrian, as well as a Greek, ecclesiastical literature; in Armenia there was an Armenian; even in Egypt there was a Coptic; whereas in the realm of his cousin and colleague Valentinian III. there was only one ecclesiastical language, the speech of Rome itself. The reason was that Latin had become the universal language, not a mere _lingua franca_, in the western provinces, a fact which conditioned the whole growth of western Christendom. In the East, where this unity of tongue did not exist, no policy was adopted of imposing Greek on any new people which might be brought into ecclesiastical connexion with the Church of Constantinople. In the West the ideal of a common church language was formed, just because, within the Empire, there were no rivals to Latin, and so it was a matter of course, and not, at first, the result of a deliberate policy, that the Latin language and literature should accompany the Gospel. And this community of language powerfully conduced to the realisation of the _unitas ecclesiae_. The case of Ireland shows how potent this influence was. If Patrick had called into being for the Scots a sacred literature such as Cyril initiated for the Slavs, we may be sure that the tendencies in the Irish Church to strike out paths of development for itself, which were so strongly marked in the sixth century, would have been more effective and permanent in