I would a lake of hydromel for the King of kings.”
“The fountain indeed rises and rises in thy Ireland,” Marius would say; “it is becoming a lake, a sea, the source of how many fountains who can say?”
And Ethne—“How can we ever foresee where the new fountains will spring up?”
“No more,” he replied, “than I could foresee thee.”
They did not indeed live to see how high the fountains would rise, or how far they would flow. They did not live to hear the great proclamation of freedom go forth from the lips of the great Leo’s successor, the great Gregory, at the manumission of his own slaves, basing the freedom of all men on the creation of man in the image of God, and the Incarnation of the Son in the form of man. They did not indeed live to see the living waters from the two fountains flow forth throughout Western Christendom till they met in our English land, from the great missions of the Benedictines and of the monks of Iona; the era of the great monks and abbots succeeding the era of the great bishops. But they saw their Paul enter the white-robed company of their young kinsman Benedict on Monte Cassino; and they gave their John to join the first-born of Baithene in the great Irish monastery, which nurtured and sent forth Columba. And day by day they and their children pressed onward, in the city, in the solitude, in the home, armed with the breastplate of Patrick’s hymn—
“Christ before us,
Christ behind us;
Christ around us,
Christ within us,”