The attitude of this early Celtic Church towards the original oral traditions and compositions of the people was perfectly consistent, and can be easily understood. It simply ignored them as far as that was possible, offering in their stead a substitute infinitely better fitted, as it thought, to elevate the life and character of these pagan peoples. With a zeal that is entirely praiseworthy, it set itself to the multiplication of copies of the Psalter, of the Gospels, and other parts of Scripture. It is really marvellous, when we consider that these had to be patiently and laboriously and beautifully handwritten, how much was accomplished in this way by the early missionaries. St. Columba alone was credited with having written “three hundred gifted, lasting, illuminated, noble books,” all of them transcriptions of some portions of the Bible, no doubt. It is this which accounts for the fact that almost all the existing literary monuments of the early Celtic Church are copies of the Gospels or of the Psalter, with or without Gaelic or Latin glosses. Thus the “Domhnach Airgid,” the “Cathrach,” the Books of Durrow, Dimna, Kells, Molling, Armagh, Deer, the “Gospel of Maeielbrid Macdurnain,” the “Psalter of Southampton,” with correlative books like the “Irish Canons” and “Missal of Stowe,” in the British Islands, besides those on the Continent. It is significant that the missionaries used the Latin versions of the Scriptures rather than Greek or Hebrew ones, with the reading and writing of which latter they seemed to have been less familiar. They did not attempt, so far as we know, to make a Gaelic translation of the original, but contented themselves, no doubt, with rendering from Latin into the Gaelic in course of their preachings and expositions. One thing is evident, that these scholarly men had no aversion to textual criticism or any fear of it, like so many of their Highland and Irish successors to-day, for they freely indulged in it for their own and the popular benefit. Thus the Celtic Church of Scotland and Ireland had Jerome’s recension of the Vulgate almost as soon as it was issued, and, to judge from the youthful Columba and his master St. Finnian’s avidity for it, welcomed it with great enthusiasm. And more than that, the Celtic Church appears to have collated Jerome’s text with older native texts of their own, to make if possible even a better version, such as they might use in all their monasteries, and such as we find to this day in most of their great books of Gospel, as quoted above.