St. Patrick used consecrated bells in celebrating the Divine Mysteries, and in nearly all other religious ceremonies, and the custom has descended through fifteen centuries to this day. The bells used by the early saints were small handbells, made of iron dipped in melted bronze; but three or four hundred years after St. Patrick’s time people began to make them of a better material--bronze melted and cast in moulds. We are told that St. Patrick left a little iron bell in every church he founded; and, to supply the great number he required for this purpose, he kept in his household three smiths whose sole business from morning till night was to make iron bells. The very bell he himself used in his ministrations--commonly called “The Bell of the Will”--may now be seen in the National Museum in Dublin--the most venerable of all our early Christian relics. Beside it in the same glass-case stands a beautiful and costly shrine, made by an accomplished Irish artist about the year 1100, to cover and protect it, by order and at the expense of Donall O’Loghlin, king of Ireland. It was usual for the founders of churches to plant trees round the buildings. These “Sacred Groves,” as they were called, were subsequently held in great veneration, and it was regarded as a desecration to cut down one of the trees, or even to lop off a branch. CHAPTER VI. HOW IRELAND BECAME THE MOST LEARNED COUNTRY IN EUROPE. In old pagan times, long before the arrival of St. Patrick, there were schools in Ireland taught by druids. And when at last Christianity came, and was spreading rapidly over the land, those old schools were still held on; but they were no longer taught by druids, and they were no longer pagan, for teachers and scholars were now all Christians. But as soon as St. Patrick came, a new class of schools began to spring up; for he and the other early missionaries founded monasteries everywhere through the country, and in connexion with almost every monastery there was a school. These were what are called monastic or ecclesiastical schools, for they were mostly taught by monks; while the older schools, being taught by laymen, were called lay schools. In lay schools was taught what might be called the native learning--the learning that had grown up in the country in the course of ages. It consisted mainly of the following subjects:--To read and write the Irish language; Irish grammar, and rules of poetical composition--a very extensive and complicated subject; geography and history, especially the topography and history of Ireland; and a knowledge of the poetry, and of the historical and romantic tales of the country: while a great many of the schools were for professions--special schools of law, of medicine, of poetry, of history and antiquities, and so forth. In these last the professional men were educated.